Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

The cast of the national tour of The Drowsy Chaperone will raise money for the Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation Monday, Aug. 11 at Club Fugazi, the home of Beach Blanket Babylon. Photo by Joan Marcus

For one night only, and to raise money for a good cause, the cast of The Drowsy Chaperone, along with special guests Susan Anton and “American Idol” contestants Constantine Maroulis and Vonzell Solomon, will come together for an evening of vivacious entertainment.

The evening, dubbed One Night Only Cabaret, benefits the Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation, an organization started by two mothers who lost their sons to AIDS and that now distributes money to AIDS service organizations around the Bay Area. To date, the REAF has distributed more than $2 million.

The cabaret evening at Club Fugazi (home of Beach Blanket Babylon) will feature the performers singing songs of their own choice, and audiences can expect an evening of upbeat, high-energy music, dance and comedy.

Tickets are $20 to $100. Call 415-421-4222.

The Drowsy Chaperone continues through Aug. 17 at the Orpheum Theatre. Visit www.shnsf.com for information.

The Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation’s annual gala fundraiser, Help Is on the Way 14: Blame It on the Movies, is this Sunday, Aug. 3, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

As usual, the roster of performers is impressive. Among the locals you’ll find singing songs from movies (both great movie musicals and pop songs from contemporary blockbusters) are Rita Moreno, Paula West and the Barbary Coast Cloggers (they’ll be clogging a movie song, presumably).

Among the out-of-towners are a slew of “American Idol” alumni including Frenchie Davis, Vonzell Solomon, RJ Helton (above), Constantine Maroulis and Kimberly Locke — all the AI kids happen to be in town because they’ve been performing at the Rrazz Room.

And then there are the Hollywood celebs winging north to lend a hand and raise money that will be distributed to local AIDS/HIV organizations. Here are the stars:
- Marilu Henner - Probably best remembered for her stint on “Taxi,” she also performed in Chicago on Broadway.
- Ricki Lake (right)- Got her start in John Waters’ original movie Hairspray, went on to have her own headline-grabbing talk show.
- Maureen McGovern - One of the cabaret scene’s great talents, McGovern was, for a brief moment, the queen of disaster movie themes having recorded hit tunes from The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
- Jai Rodriguez - An Emmy winner for “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” Rodriguez has performed on stage in Rent, The Producers and Zanna Don’t.
- Lauren Wood - A singer-songwriter known for her song “Fallen” on the Pretty Woman soundtrack.
- Vicki Lewis - Lewis arrives fresh from her stint as Mama Rose at Sacramento’s Music Circus. She’s probably best known as the fiery redhead on NBC’s “Newsradio.”
- Carole Cook - The inimitable diva of Help Is on the Way, Cook’s comedy is always an evening highlight.
- Bruce Vilanch - What would an evening be without the comic stylings of the man who has made Bette Midler and the Academy Awards funny for years?

Tickets for Sunday’s event are $50-$175. Call 415-931-0317 or visit www.richmondermet.org

San Francisco’s Rrazz Room has announced its fall schedule, and it’s pretty amazing, especially for theater aficionados.

The season opens in September with Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth, one of the most celebrated jazz duos on the circuit. Although restricting them to one label is chintzy. Laine’s album of Sondheim songs is one of her best, and her album of Shakespeare verse set to Dankworth’s music is stunning. They play the Rraz Sept. 2-14.

Two words: Chita. Rivera. The Broadway legend is apparently going to be high stepping her way through the cabaret circuit. A two-time Tony Award winner (The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman), Rivera was recently in Kander and Ebb’s The Visit and the Tony Award-winning revival of Nine. Her autobiographical show, Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, was supposed to hit the Bay Area but never did. This will make up for it. Rivera does the Rrazz Sept. 23-Oct. 5.

When is drag never a drag? When it’s done by Miss Coco Peru aka Clinton Leupp. She brings her Ugly Coco show to the Rrazz Room Oct. 15-Nov. 2.

Local award goddess (recite the mantra with me: TonyEmmyOscarGrammy) Rita Moreno makes her Rrazz Room debut with a new musical revue of classic favorites, forgotten chestnuts and new work in a show called Little Tributes Nov. 4-23.

The gorgeous Rrazz Room is in the Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St., San Francisco. Tickets range from $30-$65 plus a two-drink minimum (and there’s a full of menu of excellent Hotel Nikko food). Call 888-468-3399 or visit www.therrazzroom.com.

Andrea McArdle, famous for being a Broadway belter at age 12, swears she’s going to write a book. “But I need to wait for a few people to go to a happier place,” she says.

I, for one, can’t wait to read the book. If McArdle’s opening-night at the Rrazz Room on Thursday is any indication, that is going to be one entertaining autobiography. But somehow she’s got to make that story sing. Without that voice, we’d only be getting part of the story.

McArdle’s short run (she concludes on Saturday) offers a little slice of heaven for the show tune enthusiast. Oh, hell, it’s pride week so let’s be frank – she’s making the show queens squeal with delight. Squeal, squeal.

Gorgeous at 44, McArdle took the stage in a tailored white pant suit and black tee. If she’s been through the wars – and she really has – she sure doesn’t look it. And her voice, which was compared to Merman in her pre-teens, still has that clarion ring, with a belt to keep the sun coming out for many tomorrows yet to come.

She gave a pretty good indication what this show would be like with her first song, a little tribute to Judy Garland with “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” She dipped into her own Broadway songbook next with “NYC,” a song from her star-making show, Annie. It’s a song she didn’t get to sing in the show, though she can be seen singing a bit of it in the made-for-TV movie version.

One thing that’s immediately apparent about McArdle: she’s an extraordinarily energetic performer, at ease with the crowd and herself. She’s also far from a has-been former kid star. She’s got vitality to spare with a unique voice that can find a smooth ’70s groove on “Superstar” or blast the Broadway drama on “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables.

She revs up Sondheim’s “Everybody Says Don’t” and then cools down for a sexy solo take on another Sondheim tune, “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” Yes, she sings “Tomorrow,” a song she’s been rattling the rafters with for 28 years now, and on Thursday, she wasn’t going to go for the money notes until her pianist, the one-and-only Seth Rudetsky, intervened and said you can’t just leave the audience hanging. So they backed up and McArdle, who claimed earlier in the show to be suffering from a lengthy afternoon rehearsal, showed us why Annie, one of the last Broadway shows not to use body microphones, didn’t need no stinking amplification.

Having Rudetsky on piano guarantees several things: expert musicianship and an even more expert sense of humor. He added harmony vocals here and there (most notably on “Beauty and the Beast” from the Disney show of the same name, which McArdle starred in), but he also teases stories out of her and adds his own inimitable flair, usually in the form of hilarious facial expressions. In addition, Rudetsky provides back-up when McArdle forgets the words, as she did on “Some People.”

Even when she’s not singing, McArdle is a delight. She tells stories on herself, like spilling M&Ms all over the stage at Les Miserables and getting reported to the union for her carelessness (but the death scene was tremendous!). Some young performer challenges her and she retorts: “Hello, ever been on Broadway before you could vote? I didn’t think so.”

Comparing the experience of being in a happy-perky show like Annie to a depressing show like Les Miz, McArdle swears the death and angst is easier: “Sing, die. Sing, die. Trust me.”

Speaking of Les Miz, McArdle brought her nearly 20-year-old daughter, Alexis Kalehoff, to the stage to sing “On My Own.” Now, it might be cringe-worthy to indulge a mother’s need to share her daughter’s talents with the world. But Kalehoff is a Broadway veteran and, in fact, was in Les Miz as young Cosette at age 7, which beats her mother’s arrival on Broadway by five years. Alexis is, like her mother, a powerhouse singer and even sounds, in certain parts of her voice, like a young McArdle. I wanted the mother-daughter duo to sing together, but alas, we’ll have to wait for that number.

Leaving her audience with “Over the Rainbow,” McArdle could have performed all night and still not quite satisfied the hungry opening-night audience. They lapped up stories about Carol Channing chiding a 20something McArdle for dissing “Tomorrow” (”Poor Leslie[Uggams] is still waiting for a signature song,” Channing said) and little dropped details like the youngest orphan in the London production of Annie happened to be Catherine Zeta-Jones.

It’s all good stuff. As for the rest of it, we’ll just have to read the book.

Andrea McArdle in concert through Saturday, June 28 at the Rrazz Room in the Nikko Hotel, 222 Mason St., San Francisco. Tickets are $40 (Friday) and $42.50 (Saturday). Call 866-468-3399 or visit www.TheRrazzRoom.com for information.

Here’s McArdle performing “Maybe” from Annie on an R Family cruise.

And how here’s Rudetsky deconstructing McArdle’s voice circa Jerry’s Girls in 1984.

Why Spencer Day isn’t a big star is beyond me.

The 29-year-old crooner, who splits his time between San Francisco, New York and the road, has been plying his trade for almost 10 years now. He had a stint on “Star Search” and got all the requisite press when he started playing major venues such as the now-defunct Plush Room in San Francisco. I remember going to his first Plush Room gig and it lasted about 2 ½ hours – about an hour longer than your average cabaret act.

It’s been a while since I saw Day perform, so I made my inaugural visit to the Plush room’s successor, the Rrazz Room in the Hotel Nikko (a beautiful, comfortable room that would look good in a televised PBS concert or some such), to catch up with him.

I’m happy to report that Day just improves with age. He’s still handsome and goofy, which is a potent combination, and his musicianship is growing in wonderful ways.

He performed some old songs (”The Last Train to New Jersey,” “The Movie of Your Life,” “Arizona Blue”), a few covers (”Happy Together,” Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” “All I Do Is Dream of You” from Singing in the Rain, Elvis Presley’s “Love Me”) and made them very much his own.

But mostly he sang new songs because he’s in the midst of writing and recording for his third album.

The new work has a muscular maturity to it both lyrically and musically.

In “Someday,” he sings to a loved in hope that “you’ll learn to love yourself like I do.” And in a suite of four great songs, he explores the notion of running away to find a sense of home. In “Skeleton in the Closet,” his young protagonist is hiding a deep, dark secret: “We’ll never talk about it, but baby everybody knows.” In “The Little Soldier,” the battleground is love, and “Joe” is an intriguing tune about running away from the point of view of the people who get left behind. And “The Vagabond” is a jaunty escape number – running to run, never knowing what you’re running to or from.

The snappiest of the new songs is a clever response to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette called “Poor Marie.” It’s Day’s funniest new song, a nice contrast to the wistful “The Weeping Willow.”

As ever, Day often accompanied himself on piano and received sterling support from bassist Geoff Brennan and Day’s longtime collaborator, cellist/guitarist Yair Evnine. Any song could benefit from the stirring emotion Evnine brings with his sensitive playing.

Relaxed and mellow – think a cross between Norah Jones and Harry Connick Jr. – Day is the real deal. For a while there, with a major label development deal, it looked like Day was going to be the next hot young thing along the lines of Peter Cincotti, Jamie Cullum or Michael Bublé. But the Utah-born Day, who calls himself the love child of Judy Garland and Johnny Cash, is too good for that kind of hype and nonsense. While the music industry wallows in the death throes of reinvention, Day will forge his own way and be all the better for it.

Spencer Day continues through Saturday, June 21 at the Rrazz Room in the Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 18 and 10 p.m. Thursday, June 19 –Saturday, June 21.Tickets are $27.50-$32.50 plus a two-drink minimum. Call 866-468-3399 or visit www.TheRrazzRoom.com.

Here’s a great video of Day performing his song “The Movie of Your Life.”

Visit Day’s Web site: www.spencerday.com.

With the new year come changes. On New Year’s Eve, Bay Area cabaret veteran Wesla Whitfield wil ring in 2008 with fans and revelers at San Francisco’s Empire Plush Room.

She’s in the midst of her record-breaking 27th gig at the venerable cabaret — a wonderfully intimate boite with a gorgeous mariner’s compass stained-glass ceiling — and it will also be her last.

The Empire Plush Room in the York Hotel, which began life as an honest-to-goodness speakeasy, will close Feb. 2. The folks at Rrazz Productions, who book the room, are opening a new space, the Rrazz Room, in San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko. That space opens later in February with another Bay Area cabaret stalwart, Paula West.

Whitfield’s farewell to the Plush actually has two titles — the result of an administrative mix-up. One is poignant: “The Last Dance.” The other is more hopeful: “The Best Is Yet to Come.”

Either way, the good news is that Whitfield, accompanied as ever by her husband/pianist/arranger Mike Greensill, bassist John Wiitala and drummer Vince Lateano, sings both of the songs that inspired the show’s titles.

It’s always good news when Whitfield sings. That’s just the simple truth. Her voice is supple and sweet, sharp and expressive, crystalline and glorious.

In fact, the supply of superlatives sputters when it comes to Whitfield, whose collaboration with Greensill has to be one of the music world’s greatest pairings.

He gives her flawless musical support and the kind of arrangements that allow her to be the absolute best interpreter of melody and lyric she can be.

The new show, which opened last week and feels painfully short at only 70 minutes, finds the 60-year-old Whitfield in a playful mood.

Those rip-your-heart-out ballads she’s so fond of are banished in favor of songs like the show opener, “Look for the Silver Lining” (slowed down to a ballad tempo, which somehow makes it even more hopeful), and chipper love songs like “Thou Swell,” “It’s Fate, Baby” and “Nobody Else But Me.”

She’s also spending time singing about the moon — probably because her new CD (her 18th with Greensill) is just out, and it contains three songs involving the Earth’s most romantic satellite.

“Message from the Man in the Moon,” the new CD’s title track, is a background number from the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, and it’s charming, as is “Moonlight Saving Time.”

Jimmy Webb’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” one of the show’s few contemporary tunes, turns out to be the darkest song of the evening. It’s about reaching a moment of maturity when certain hopes and dreams, never realized, are relinquished. Whitfield’s full-bodied vocals, and Greensill’s delicate arrangement, make the song shimmer.

Also on the darker side, but imbued with hope, is “You Must Believe in Spring” by Michel Legrand and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, a song about life’s cycle of renewal.

Rounding out the set are lovestruck gems such as “The Way You Look Tonight,” “My Ideal” and “Photographs.” Whitfield also throws the spotlight to Greensill mid-show for one of his own compositions: “Waltz for Wesla,” a beautiful tribute to his wife.

Whitfield and her musicians bring a glorious sense of play to their work, and it matches their impeccable artistry. They actually seem to be listening to and enjoying one another, and their affection for the music and each other is infectious.

The Empire Plush Room may be ending its reign as the Bay Area’s premiere cabaret, but as long as there are performers of Whitfield’s caliber — and they’re out there — the local scene will survive, and with any luck, thrive in years to come.

Wesla Whitfield’s “The Last Dance” continues through Jan. 20 at The Empire Plush Room in the York Hotel, 940 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $40-$42.50, plus two-drink minimum
Call 866-468-3369 or visit www.theempireplushroom.com.

Ask most singers and they’ll tell you: New Year’s Eve is not their favorite night for a gig.

Audience members are overexcited, demanding and, most often, drunk off their gourds.

“If your goal is to try and re-create the New Year’s Eve scene from When Harry Met Sally, that’s not going to happen,” says jazz cabaret singer Wesla Whitfield, something of a Bay Area legend.

This New Year’s Eve, Whitfield, along with her husband/musical director Mike Greensill, will be performing, as she has many times, at the Empire Plush Room in San Francisco’s York Hotel. But this year’s gig, dubbed somewhat ironically The Best Is Yet to Come, is a little sentimental. Whitfield and Greensill are among the final acts in the Plush Room, whose future is unknown.

“I’m sorry to see it go,” says Whitfield, who, after decades in San Francisco, has moved with her husband, cat and stuffed bears up to St. Helena. “It is such a fabulous room. We have so many memories there. I know everything changes. That’s the one thing you can depend on.”

Nearly 30 years ago, Whitfield’s first-ever solo gig was on New Year’s Eve.

It was 1979, and Whitfield was slated to headline the room during the first week of January.

The Plush Room, with its gorgeous stained-glass ceiling, had just reopened, having fallen into some disrepair as a mess hall and card room.

Pam Brooks was the New Year’s Eve headliner, but the room’s manager, Gary Menger, suggested that Whitfield give audiences a taste of her upcoming show by doing a short set between Brooks’ sets.

“Gary was a sweet man but not the sharpest pencil in the box,” Whitfield recalls. “He suggested I do this two days before New Year’s Eve, and by then, every pianist on the planet had a gig. I had to play for myself.”

Whitfield, who uses a wheelchair, jokes: “My pedal technique had fallen off by then. There were not lights, no microphone. I wheeled myself to the piano, flailed away and tried to sing. No one paid the slightest bit of attention. I was so relieved.”

Whitfield’s audiences will be pleased to know she’s still singing some of the same songs she sang that night, but back then, “they were an octave higher.”

“I’ve fallen into Kern again,” Whitfield says, referring to composer Jerome Kern. “That first night at the Plush Room I remember getting out my book of Kern music. He was my favorite in the ’70s and early ’80s. Then I put him aside. Last fall I was teaching a class at Napa Valley College, Great American Popular Song, and I learned more about Kern than I had known. My respect for him was renewed.”

Also in the new show’s song list is a tune given to Whitfield and Greensill by Neil Sedaka called “I Found My World in You.”The song also appears on the new Whitfield/Greensill CD, “Message from the Man in the Moon,” the couple’s 18th recording, which, not so coincidentally, will be available for purchase after the show.

The 60-year-old Whitfield notes that in addition to nearly 30 years gone by since her Plush debut, she has passed through a few different hair colors and, she hastens to add, 40 pounds that weren’t there in 1979.

In addition to Kern and Sedaka, Whitfield will be singing her fair share of romantic tunes — we are heading into a new year, after all.

Expect to hear “Isn’t It Romantic,” which Whitfield says is fun to do because “it’s not a plodding ballad. In my mind when I sing, I’m out there waltzing.”

New Year’s Eve at the Plush Room is a pretty civilized affair, according to Whitfield, who should know. “The audience tends not to be so overexcited, like kids off their meds,” she says. “And we’ll sing some songs we haven’t sung in a hundred years.”

Whitfield bristles a little at the notion of doing a sort of “greatest hits” evening.

“People love to hear the same old songs,” she says. “It’s hard to introduce new material. People get upset about it. They want to hear songs they know. I think that’s wrong, myself. I mean, listen, there was a time you didn’t know `New York, New York,’ and the only reason you learned it was by taking a chance and hearing something new.”

But this final Plush Room gig will be about memories, so Whitfield will sing some of the songs her fans want to hear.

“Everybody coming to the show has their own set of memories, so when we were planning the set list, we decided to wallow in it a little. I want to celebrate the times we’ve had. There’s no other way to get through life.”

Although animated and cheerful in conversation, Whitfield gets really excited at the mention of a project she was involved with earlier this year: a concert production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at Notre Dame de Namur University, a production that included students, community folks and pros such as Whitfield.

“Oh, my God!” Whitfield enthuses. “You go from project to project and get a certain sense of satisfaction. Then, every five or six years, you get a project that turns out to be absolutely magical. You come away feeling so renewed. I came away from Follies feeling good about life and thet world and myself — and that’s pretty darn hard.”

Sondheim music is not usually part of Whitfield’s repertoire because, she says, the songs usually need to be heard in the context of the show, surrounded by plot and character. That makes the songs difficult for Whitfield and Greensill to interpret.

But in the show — with only one rehearsal no less — Whitfield, who played aging Follies girl Sally, came alive. “I was born to play Sally!” she says. “Sally is an aging girl. She doesn’t know she’s a woman. She is one but doesn’t act like one, and that’s a good description of me.”

Whitfield got to sing without a microphone, which she hasn’t done in years. “And I hit notes I haven’t hit in public for years,” she says. “I’m proud to have pulled this one off.”

Wesla Whitfield’s The Best Is Yet to Come runs from Dec. 27 through Jan. 6 at the Empire Plush Room in the York Hotel, 940 Sutter St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Dec. 27-29 and Jan 4 and 5; 5 p.m. Dec. 30 and Jan. 6; 7 and 10:30 p.m. Dec. 31. Tickets are $35 to $55 and $100 for New Year’s Eve (includes a buffet and a champagne toast). Call 866-468-3399 or visit www.theempireplushroom.com for information.

To keep up with Whitfield, visit her Web site at www.weslawhitfield.com.

With the future of the Empire Plush Room, the Bay Area’s most distinctive cabaret, in some doubt – Will it shut down? Will it relocate to another hotel? – there’s a certain pleasure in sitting under the gorgeous, intimate room’s stained-glass ceiling and enjoying some good music.

The “good music” part was a little difficult during my last Plush Room experience (with Miss Tammy Grimes), but it was much easier Tuesday night with the return of Mary Wilson and her Up Close show.

Wilson, one of the original Supremes, debuted the show two years ago at the Plush Room, and it has improved significantly since then. The set list remains largely the same, and the high points two years ago remain high points today.

The 63-year-old Wilson is gorgeous, and with her regal bearing and status as pop-rock royalty (she is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you know), she set sets her audience all a-twitter.

Vocally, Wilson sounds great. Her voice is husky and warm, with enticing glints of humor and emotion. She doesn’t, however, always pick songs that mesh well with her voice, and some of her choices — “Smile,’’ “Spring Is Here,’’ Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why’’ — come across as pleasant but disconnected.

She says this show is all about ballads, and it is ballad heavy, but she really comes to life during a three-song samba set (“I Remember You,’’ “The Girl from Ipanema’’ and “Mas Que Nada’’). Wilson, the grandmother of eight, can still turn on the sexual heat.

Her take on Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me’’ started out well but turned into a train wreck by the end. Credit that to lack of rehearsal time with her five-piece band led by pianist/musical director Tammy Hall.

Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,’’ another of the pleasant but forgettable tune, was interrupted by an unfortunate monologue in which Wilson talked about going back to college at NYU and about her fabulous view apartment in Manhattan and about how she could see the smoke on 9/11 and how she had to give up the apartment because it got too expensive. From personal information to tragedy to real estate – not a good mix in the middle of a song.

Wilson makes it abundantly clear in concert that she would love to not sing any Supremes songs, but in the current incarnation of the show, she sings “My World Is Empty Without You.’’ (Last time around she sang three Supremes songs). The irony is that as much as she doesn’t want to sing the same songs she’s been doing for 40-plus years, she sings the hell out of this material. It would be great is she included more Motown material – she does include the Four Tops’ “I Believe in You and Me” – not necessarily Supremes songs, but great Motown songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s because she’s such an expert at performing them.

As she did last time around, Wilson includes “I Am Changing” from Dreamgirls, the musical/movie loosely based on the rise of the Supremes.

“I know it’s not about me because I didn’t get paid,” Wilson quipped. “Diana and I don’t talk, so I don’t know if she got paid. She probably got paid. But I sleep at night.”

Wilson’s emotionally charged “I Am Changing,” dedicated to original Supreme Florence Ballard, who died in 1976, was another highlight of the 85-minute show.

Mary Wilson’s Up Close continues at through Dec. 16 at the Empire Plush Room in the York Hotel, 940 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $52.50 or $57.50. Call or visit www.theempireplushroom.com for information.

I’m happy not to be a drunk 20something, stumbling through life in oblivion.

I fully realize not all 20somethings are suffering from inebriated idiocy, but when I went to see Tammy Grimes at San Francisco’s Empire Plush Room, I had the displeasure of sitting near a dude and his lady — maybe they were 25 — who had been enjoying a few drinks before arriving at the cabaret.

Just what were they doing at a Tammy Grimes show? I’m certain they had no idea who she was or what kind of show they were in for. Chances are, they had no clue she was a two-time Tony Award winner (best actress, Private Lives, 1970, and best featured actress, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, 1961). They were likely ignorant of the fact that she was once married to Christopher Plummer or that she turned down the role of Samantha Stevens in the TV show “Bewtiched.”

What they saw, when the show began, was a 73-year-old woman, dressed all in black, emerge from the wings and begin singing the very old-fashioned “The Rose of Washington Square,” which then turned into a sprightly “Ring Them Bells.”

Grimes’ voice has always been more about character than about purity, which is why it was good for the theater. To the uninitiated it may sound like something akin to warbling and catterwauling.

Dude and Lady whispered and giggled — and drank — all through the first half of the show, which included a Tom Waits tune (”Martha”), some corny country (”Could I Have This Dance?”) and even a Jimmy Buffet tune (the sweet “He Went to Paris”).

Before Grimes could get to her signature tune, “You Better Love Me While You May” (from High Spirits), Dude and Lady up and left. Oh, thank heavens.

Grimes wasn’t for them, and I can’t say as I blame them. If you didn’t come into the Empire Plush Room already a fan, Grimes’ impersonal stage presence and her heavily scripted banter probably wouldn’t win any converts.

But in terms of watching a Broadway veteran whose friends numbered Roddy McDowall, Noel Coward and Kitty Carlisle Hart (who gave Grimes the turquoise butterfly pin she was wearing), the show was interesting, especially during numbers like Brecht-Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” and Coward’s “Someday I’ll Find You.”

It was a little bit of Broadway history as Grimes launched into a few songs from Molly Brown (never a favorite score of mine) and even ncluded a little dialogue. She sang Harve Presenell’s song (”I’ll Never Say No”) and boasted that she could now sing it in his key.

Grimes never quite connected with her audience and remained seated — a la Mabel Mercer — for most of the 70-minute show. After her encore, “It Never Was You,” she didn’t stick around for the applause. She bolted back into the wings, and that was the last we saw of her.

It was a peculiar show — featuring the sterling arrangements and beautiful accompaniment of Dennis Buck — played out at a brisk pace. It seemed, in the end, like Grimes didn’t really want to be there, and if she had known that young Dude and Lady didn’t care for the act, Grimes likely would have shrugged it off in her uniquely unsinkable fashion.

Tammy Grimes’ show continues through Nov. 11 at the Empire Plush Room in the York Hotel, 940 Sutter St., San Francisco. For informationo visit www.theempireplushroom.com.

Dean Martin can be heard crooning in the background as Christine Andreas scurries around her kitchen, the phone tucked between shoulder and ear, as she conducts an interview and prepares for a party she’s throwing her son in a few hours.

“My son turns 20 in a few days, and when you’re special, you get lots of birthday parties,” Andreas says, referring to her son, Mac, who has Down syndrome. “He moved into a group home last year, and all the families are having an `around the world’ tour, with each family doing a country. We’re doing Italy, so I’m downloading Dean Martin, warming up lasagna and making bruschetta.”

Mac moved into the group home just before his mother embarked on a national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical The Light in the Piazza, which opened in San Francisco in July 2006.

“That show is such a very layered piece,” Andreas says. “It took a while for it to get into my bones. I found it very gratifying. It’s so spare. I want to say it’s like haiku theater, but it isn’t really. You do use few words to convey a lot. It did require me to be a better actor because you take out more, do less and convey more.”

Andreas says she would love to do the role again.

“I would surrender more,” she says about the role of a mother whose brain-damaged daughter is falling in love for the first time. “It’s like good music — the more you sing it, the less you do, the more you let it sing you, work on you. When you get out of the way, interesting stuff happens.”

Piazza, Andreas says, is more lifelike than other shows she has done, from the Broadway revival of My Fair Lady in 1976 to The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1997.

“Even though Piazza is a fable, it’s so distilled down and does so much with so little that the less you do, the more you let the grace run through you and the more honest it is,” she says. “It’s a show that is so full of love. If you do it simply, even if people don’t love every aspect of it, pieces of love come through.”

The 55-week tour ended in Chicago in July, and since returning to her home in New York’s Hudson River Valley, Andreas has been relaxing and working in cabaret.

She brings her cabaret show, Love Is Good, to San Francisco’s Empire Plush Room Tuesday for a two-week run, and her accompanist, pianist Martin Silvestri, also happens to be her new husband.

“We got married during the Piazza tour,” Andreas says. “We had some time off in Arizona, so Marty and I went and got married in Sedona. I had been courting him for 16 years.”

The newlyweds’ set list will likely include everything from “They Say It’s Wonderful” to a country-western Clint Black tune, with some Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Billy Joel thrown in as well.

“Cabaret, like everything else, can be so full of ego,” Andreas says. “At the end of the night, along with all the high notes, big notes, loud notes and pretty notes, you want to feel you’ve experienced something personal. You want to walk away with the performer’s music and something of that person. When I go see Barbara Cook, I leave thinking, `I have a little Barbara Cook in me now.’ That’s why I like the cabaret form. It scared me initially because it’s so intensely personal. Now I like it.”

Christine Andreas’ Love Is Good opensOct.2 and continues through Oct. 14 at the Empire Plush Room in the York Hotel, 940 Sutter St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $35-$40 plus a two-drink minimum. Call 866-468-3399 or visit www.theempireplushroom.com.

Visit Christine Andreas’ official Web site at www.christineandreas.com.