A Modern Troubadour

On Monday, Andrea Marcovicci sat in a Chicago hotel room listening to a blizzard rattle the windows and wondering if anyone would brave the storm to attend her concert that night at the city’s historic Orchestra Hall.

Now back home in sunny Los Angeles, the cabaret singer and actress, who brings the same show with nine-piece orchestra to the Irvine Barclay Theatre tonight, says a big crowd turned out to the majestic 1904 concert hall. “It’s a smaller Carnegie Hall,” she said, “with just wonderful sound.” Then, in a whisper, Marcovicci added: “I scared some people. I was so close to them when I came into the audience. To have a performer communicate at such a close level thrills and scares some people.”

Getting close to the audience is a Marcovicci trademark. “So much entertainment these days is impersonal. [Performers say,] ‘Watch me do my thing, but don’t get too close, let’s not connect.’ I’m there to make the connection. I sing songs about love and loss and the inner workings of the soul. I expect and need eye contact.”

Marcovicci, whose mother was a sometime torch singer, began as a folk singer in the ‘60s, then moved on to movies and musical theater. She became a serious cabaret artist in the ‘80s and has recorded collections devoted to Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and the love songs of World War II. She performs frequently across the country in rooms large and small.

Clubs such as the Gardenia Room in Los Angeles, the Plush Room in San Francisco and the new Firebird in New York still provide the intimacy many music fans love, she said. “People crave the closeness of it,” said Marcovicci, now in her 40s and the mother of a 2-year-old. “It’s an extension of the wandering troubadour tradition, with an entertainer coming to town and singing his songs and telling his stories and moving on to the next town. Cabaret is very much like that.”

The show this troubadour will bring to Irvine divides its time between the classics of the Great American Songbook and new material written by emerging composers in the cabaret tradition.

“This [new] music is not on the radio, not on the television and by and large not in the movies,” she said. “It’s not the kind of thing Whitney Houston would record. It exists in the repertoire of cabaret singers. In our venue, all these beautiful composers have a chance to be heard. These are some of the most touching expressions of the soul you will hear.”

Marcovicci features these new composers of cabaret on her latest CD, “New Words” (Cabaret Records). The songs--from such writers as Stephen Schwartz, Maury Yeston and the singer’s musical director, Glenn Mehrbach (who also arranged all the tunes)--spring from the tradition of Kern and Berlin, but often deal with modern subject matter, such as Schwartz’s “Life Goes On,” about the toll of AIDS.

“If we don’t give a chance to new songwriters,” Marcovicci said, “there will be nothing left to continue the legacy of popular song. These songs have exquisite lyrics, melodies; they’re art songs, folk songs, some are almost like pop songs. It’s theatrical, gorgeous music but contemporary. [Mehrbach’s] “Mirror” is about a person visiting a psychiatrist. You’re not going to find that in a song by Irving Berlin.”

In telling these little stories, Marcovicci calls on broad acting experience as well singing talent. She has appeared in a dozen movies, including “The Front” with Woody Allen, in Broadway and off-Broadway productions, and on such television shows as “Hill Street Blues.”

“Everything I’ve done as an actress makes me who I am today,” she said. “I have an actress’ tools of communication.

“Still,” she admitted, “and this kills me, if I could have acted as emotionally and truthfully in plays the way I do with music, I would really have achieved more. There’s something about the addition of words and music that brings out unvarnished emotion in me.”

Though she loves the intimacy of tiny cabaret rooms, she actually prefers larger halls.

“I can be bigger in a concert hall than in a cabaret, stretch out my arms right and left, something that might look funny in a [smaller space]. Whether you’re performing in front of 50 people or 5,000 people, you find the eyes of whomever you can, even in the back row, and sing to those eyes.”

* Andrea Marcovicci performs today at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $27-$35. (714) 854-4646.