Karen Akers in Feels Like Home

Grandel Theatre Cabaret Series

You can tell a lot about a cabaret performer by how he or she makes an entrance at the Grandel. For example: Jeff Harnar, who opened the season, has a small combo play what amounts to an overture to his act, after which he enters singing and immediately begins working the house, playing directly to audience members. It’s very show-biz glossy and his act follows suit.

Karen Akers couldn’t be more different. Her musical director Don Rebic plays a few bars on the piano and on she comes, dark-haired and Audrey Hepburn elegant in a black evening gown, with a somewhat shy welcome to the audience and an explanation that her first song is about how it feels to be a touring cabaret artist – after which she launches into an unassuming but highly engaging rendition of “But Alive” from the 1970 Lauren Bacall vehicle Applause. The overall effect is one of modesty, emotional frankness and even vulnerability that carries through the entire evening.

You can hear it especially in her voice. Karen Akers is an accomplished vocalist but she’s not a “Broadway belter” – although she can certainly produce volume when she needs it. Her overall approach, though, is more intimate and her choice of material is in the same vein: less well-known songs, mostly from the musical stage, that deal with unusual material or with the usual in unexpected ways. Here are a few examples: “The Shelf Life of Love”, a witty number comparing ex-lovers to the food they left behind; Jason Robert Brown’s “Moon and the Stars” (from Songs for a New World), about how making the right life choices might turn out wrong; Stephen Schwartz’s “Chanson” from The Baker’s Wife, which celebrates looking at life from a different angle; and “I’m Not Afraid”, which combines a Gerard Jouannest tune (originally paired with a Jacques Brel lyric and titled “Sons Of”) with a Rod McKuen lyric about the parallels between love and dancing.

As you might have gathered from that last paragraph, Karen Akers is fond of songs from musicals that were something other than blockbusters on Broadway. She feels that often those shows have the most interesting songs, and I tend to agree. She certainly makes a strong case for it with compelling performances of numbers from Maury Yeston’s Nine (in which she created the role of Luisa Contini in 1982, when it ran for 732 performances), Maltby and Shire’s Closer Than Ever (which never even made it to Broadway), and “I Never Do Anything Twice”, a droll Sondheim double entendre number written for and then cut from the film The Seven Per Cent Solution.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a few old favorites in the show – “Send in the Clowns” and “La Vie en Rose”, for example – but even with the more familiar material, Akers’ approach is idiosyncratic enough to make the old seem new again. A good example of that is her encore number. Sung in both English and French, it’s a West Side Story medley that combines “Somewhere” and “I Have a Love” so seamlessly that the result is a brand-new song that Bernstein might have written himself. Rebic deserves credit for the ingenious arrangement, but I doubt that anyone other than Akers could pull it off.

There is, in fact, a fair amount of French song in the show, which is a somewhat courageous decision given the prevalence of knee-jerk Francophobia among the population these days. It’s even possible to discern something rarely seen in cabaret: a political subtext. Her closing song – “Anthem” from the cult favorite Chess – concludes with these lines: “Let man's petty nations tear themselves apart / My land's only borders lie around my heart”.

The bottom line is that Feels Like Home feels like great cabaret: emotionally powerful and musically accomplished. Karen Akers and Don Rebic will be weaving their magic spell through this Sunday at the Grandel Theatre; call 314-533-8825 for ticket information.

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