Karen Akers takes theater songs to cabaret

NEW YORK, May 13 (UPI) -- Karen Akers, the elegant cabaret artist with a voice like a cello and crystal diction, is performing a program of theater songs at the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room as a tribute to "Nine," the 1982 Broadway show that touched off her stellar career as an actress who prefers to be known as a singer.

"Nine" is currently having a Broadway revival, and although Akers was not asked to repeat the role of Luisa, wife of the philandering film director Guido Contini, she still has fond memories of the musical that brought her a Tony Award nomination. Her new cabaret show includes three songs from "Nine" written by Maury Yeston.

"Actress is a title you have to earn, and you need to be working as an actress to stay alive to the possibilities," Akers said in an interview. "But in my singing, I've been acting all along -- telling stories. A song can be pretty and I can love the melody, but it has to go with something. It has to relate to the audience I'm singing to."

After "Nine," Akers went on to appear in another Broadway hit, "Grand Hotel" and in a number of films including Woody Allen's "Purple Rose of Cairo" and Mike Nichols "Heartburn," but she has devoted most of her time to club engagements and recordings, including seven solo albums. Now, at 57 and looking 30 years younger, she is at the top of her profession.

With her chiseled face framed by a pageboy hairdo with bangs, Akers presents a demure appearance in a black sheath with a hint of glitter at the shoulders, but don't be fooled. There's a fire down below in the region that delivers her smooth but intense voice that would probably be considered in the mezzo range, operatically speaking.

It is not surprising to learn that she was once known as a performer with a guitar who sang protest songs for any cause she deemed worthy. She still performs unstintingly for benefits for AIDS and victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and keeps up with world affairs to the extent that she admits to "being depressed a lot of the time."

"At some point early in my career I decided to go with human communication, to sing songs that might touch a chord," she said. "That would allow the people who hear them to say things they haven't said before, to remember things they haven't been able to touch before. Those are things I can affect and make better."

Her show at the Oak Room, to run through May 24, is a carefully selected roster of 13 songs by Charles Strouse, Jacques Brel, Stephen Sondheim, David Shire, Marvin Hamlisch, and Leonard Bernstein performed with Don Rebic at the piano. She overcomes the drawbacks of a long narrow room by using its small stage as a turntable, so she can face all her audience at least some of the time to create a cabaret intimacy.

Akers opens with "But Alive," a song originally sung by Lauren Bacall in Strouse's "Applause," then gets down to the business of creating portraits of women in various emotional situations, taking her cue from "Smart Women," the theme song of the recent Broadway musical, "Imaginary Women."

She recreates the persona of Luisa Contini dismissing her unfaithful husband in "Nine" with the song "Be On Your Way" and the long-suffering heroine of "Chess" who sings resignedly of her lover, "I Know Him So Well."

It speaks of Akers' determination to find obscure songs not to be found in the classic American Songbook selection used by most cabaret performers that she sings two songs from "Chess," the almost forgotten musical by Benny Andresson and Bjorn Ulvaeus with lyrics by Tim Rice. The other is titled "Anthem" and has a nationalistic lilt that adds variety to her show.

Equally unfamiliar are "Patterns," a song about the compulsive patterns of life from Shire's "Baby," with wonderfully expressive lyrics by Richard Maltby, and "If I Sing," a song about the joy of parenting, also by Shire & Maltby, that Akers dedicates to her 80-year-old mother.

Other unusual selections are "How Can I Tell Her," a song Akers sang in George Forrest's "Grand Hotel" about being a messenger of death, and "I Never Do Anything Twice," a waltz-propelled song about sex from Sondheim's score for the 1973 Sherlock Holmes movie, "The Seven Percent Solution."

But the show ends with a beloved showbiz staple. It is that most longing of love songs, Bernstein's "Somewhere" with lyrics by Sondheim from "West Side Story." Akers makes it sound as good in French ("Un pays pour nous ... ") as in English, underscoring the international appeal of American theater songs.