Most of the featured acts at the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room are fixtures of the New York cabaret scene.
While West Palm Beach’s Avery Sommers has made some inroads in that world, she is better-known for her musical theater work, on Broadway and across the country on tour.
So it is understandable that her latest act, a one-hour set that opened Friday evening and continues at the newly refurbished Royal Room through next Saturday, sticks closely to a retrospective of her stage work. Much of it will be familiar to her legions of local fans, like a few choice selections from Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’ — she replaced Nell Carter on Broadway — and her rousing, vampy When You’re Good to Mamma from Kander and Ebb’s Chicago.
Other selections were decidedly less well-known, like a number called Sunset City from Platinum, Gary William Friedman’s 33-performance 1978 flop brought back from the dead by the wonders of YouTube. Its video inclusion in her act suggests the self-deprecating humor Sommers can bring to her up-and-down career, including a selection from a show she pointedly never appeared in, the Mother Abbess’s Climb Every Mountain from The Sound of Music.
The charismatic Sommers was in good voice on her opening performance, which was heavy with belting, upbeat tunes, her calling card. Her sound approaches being too large for the room, but her rapport with the audience allows her many oversized choices to work.
Most of her material tends towards the buoyant, but among her new numbers is a dramatic change-of-pace, the steely, dark-toned I Know Where I’ve Been from Hairspray. Sommers recently stopped the show nightly with it in a production in Coral Gables and the song about the struggle for racial equality deserves to be a permanent part of her cabaret repertoire.
At one point, Sommers invoked her initial one-woman show, a 1994 act called But Not for Me at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton. Although she won a Carbonell Award for her powerhouse vocals in that show, in the 17 years since then she has become far more effective in the cabaret format.
Her current set is obviously new, and needs time for Sommers to be fully comfortable with it and for the transitions and patter to feel natural. Still, backed by a three-piece combo led by musical director Rich Schweitzer, she has an act worthy of taking to the key supper clubs around the country.
AVERY SOMMERS, Royal Room at the Colony Hotel, 155 Hammon Ave., Palm Beach. Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 26. Prices: $50 cover charge. Three-course dinner, $55. Call: (561) 659-8100.