The Song Is Over, but Melodies Linger On

The announcement on Thursday that the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, one of Manhattan’s three major cabaret supper clubs, would close after 32 years sent a shiver through the closely knit world of pop and jazz musicians who perpetuate the American songbook. When the hotel, under renovation since Jan. 1, reopens in early May, the Oak Room will have been turned into a lounge as part of a rewards program for loyal guests.

Where will the Oak Room’s regular performers go? They include Steve Ross, Karen Akers, Andrea Marcovicci, K T Sullivan and Barbara Carroll, who have all attracted devoted audiences and critical acclaim. Could Manhattan’s two remaining high-end supper clubs, the Café Carlyle and Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, make room for them in their future schedules? To some degree, probably yes.

Will a foolhardy entrepreneur with money to burn miraculously appear and open a new club in another hotel? You never know. The cabaret world, in which most performers do it more for love than for money, has always teetered on a financial precipice. But it has also attracted dreamers who imagine that they can buck the financial odds. In June a new nightclub, 54 Below, is rumored to be opening downstairs at Studio 54, but a formal announcement hasn’t yet been made.

The finest cabaret acts, though comparable in quality to classical music concerts and the best Broadway shows (I’m thinking of Stephen Sondheim, whose songs are cabaret staples), lack institutional support or a solid system for production.The closest thing in the field to an organizational leader is Donald Smith, who revived the Oak Room, which had been dark for three decades, in 1980. A few years later Mr. Smith founded the Mabel Mercer Foundation and its offshoot, the annual Cabaret Convention. But financing the convention has been an uphill battle, and Mr. Smith, now 79, is in declining health.

The Oak Room, on West 44th Street, with its dark wood paneling and intimate atmosphere, was a hub for artistic magic. Here is where Mr. Ross, who opened the room, evoked Fred Astaire, Cole Porter and Noël Coward so vividly that he seemed a living composite.

Through the 1980s Julie Wilson, the acknowledged queen of cabaret, performed a riveting series of tributes to Broadway composers with the pianist William Roy. Ms. Wilson, with her trademark gardenia tucked behind one ear, exuded the glamour of a Kabuki goddess and infused songs with a life-and-death dramatic urgency. In the 1990s Mary Cleere Haran, a great wit as well as an excellent singer in the ’40s big-band tradition, triumphed at the club with her loving deconstructions of vintage cultural totems. Ms. Haran died last year.

For 25 years Ms. Marcovicci, the singing actress, wove a spell of charm over a captive audience as she conjured Hollywood dreams and paid tribute to this or that composer or show business legend in finely researched and written musical profiles. Her longevity at the Oak Room established her as an Algonquin institution.

One pleasure of visiting the Oak Room year after year was to watch performers develop and mature. Ms. Sullivan evolved from a zany, modern-day Lorelei Lee into an interpreter of subtlety and substance, and Ms. Akers from a remote, statuesque figure into a singer of great sensitivity and feeling. Ms. Carroll, who for years had been tucked away at the piano in Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle, spread her wings at the Oak Room as a jazz pianist and parlando singer in the Mabel Mercer tradition.

In recent years the appearances of the singer Sandy Stewart and her son, the formidable jazz pianist Bill Charlap, had the air of musical seances, in which Ms. Stewart, a quietly exquisite singer, turned standards into personal oracles. Sylvia Syms, who had a similar relationship with songs, died in 1992 during a performance at the Oak Room, where she collapsed at the feet of the composer Cy Coleman. She was 74. In cabaret, which venerates age and wisdom like no other pop genre, there is no expiration date, until there is.

The loss of the Oak Room marks another expiration date: a sad one.