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.

First, to clarify a few things: in another era, Marin Mazzie would be the biggest kind of Broadway star (think Ethel Merman or Carol Channing) and composers would be falling all over themselves to write shows for a singing actress who can do everything from broad comedy to heart-wrenching drama, all the while hitting the most glorious notes imaginable..

Another clarification: her first name is not pronounced like the county north of the Golden Gate Bridge. It rhymes with Sharon. And her last name rhymes with hazy.

So why isn’t Marin Mazzie (you said it correctly that time, good job) a monumental star? The simple answer is that Broadway doesn’t create those kinds of stars anymore. In the world of contemporary Broadway, Mazzie is among the best of the best. She sang naked in Sondheim’s Passion, hated men with glorious vehemence in Kiss Me Kate and heralded the dawn of a new age in Ragtime.

Currently, Mazzie is getting big laughs as the Lady of the Lake in Monty Python’s Spamalot on Broadway, but she’s taking a break to do her cabaret act at San Francisco’s Empire Plush Room June 12-17.

She was supposed to share the bill with her husband of nearly 10 years, the singing actor Jason Danieley (The Full Monty, Candide), but he’s in the new Broadway musical Curtains, and what with all the Tony Awards hullabaloo, he couldn’t get away.

So we get Mazzie on her own, and it just so happens she had an already prepared cabaret act waiting in the wings.

“I actually created this show for the Osher Jewish Community Center in Marin,” Mazzie says on the phone from her New York home. “I think that was about three years ago. David Loud, my musical director, and I needed to put something together, and we looked for music we love and can learn quickly.”

So what they did was create Yes, It’s Today, a collection of songs by Hello, Dolly! legend Jerry Herman and Cabaret and Chicago songwriting duo John Kander and Fred Ebb.

“I’ve worked with all three of them, and this is my tribute to them,” Mazzie says. “I’ve loved all of them, and all their music my whole life. It’s a really entertaining evening with lots of hits and stuff you might not know.”

Herman’s lightness is played off of Kander and Ebb’s darkness in intriguing pairings such as “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret with “Before the Parade Passes By” from Dolly or “Time Heals Everything” from`Mack and Mabel with “Isn’t This Better,” a Kander and Ebb song written for the movie Funny Lady.

If you saw the Kander and Ebb revue And the World Goes Round at the Curran Theatre in 1992, you saw Mazzie in the cast along with Karen Ziemba (who’s now partnered with Mazzie’s husband in Curtains).

“That was one of the first times I’d ever really been in San Francisco,” Mazzie recalls. “We were there for a month, and I just fell in love with the city. I remember it being a wonderful experience, with great audiences. On New Year’s Eve, we took over a piano bar, and our pianist, Jim Moore, played, and we sang show tunes until 4 in the morning. Those were the days when I could do that sort of thing.”

Mazzie had such a wild run on Broadway, with show after show after show, that she decided to step away from the eight-show-a-week grind. She was gone for about three years and spent a good deal of time in Los Angeles pursuing television work.

“I relished that time off,” she says. “The whole TV thing was new to me, and I actually enjoyed living in L.A. The business is completely different and the lifestyle is completely different. In New York City alone, whatever you do, it takes energy just to walk outside. In L.A., it’s sunny, you get in the car, and you’re in your own little pod.”

But when Mazzie came back to New York, and especially after taking over Lady of the Lake in Spamalot last September, she realized she missed Broadway.

“I didn’t miss singing every day,” she says. “But when I started in the show, I realized how much I had missed it.”

Unlike meatier roles in Ragtime and Passion, Mazzie says playing a crazy woman in a Monty Python comedy has its challenges and its rewards.

“To be in a show where, literally, people just laugh for two hours, that’s a pretty damn good thing,” she says. “At the end of the show, we sing `Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,’ and we all feel a little hopeful. Then we go home, see the news and read the papers and don’t feel so hopeful. But then we sing it again the next day.”

Next September, Mazzie and her husband are taking an actual vacation — no concert dates, no recording, no show business of any kind — to celebrate their tenth anniversary.

“Being married and being in the same business, we constantly strive to keep our lives about us,” Mazzie says. “We connect, we check in, we don’t sit and talk business all the time. We have a life together, and we constantly remind ourselves that we always need that. Obviously, sometimes it’s easier than others. Right now, it’s really hard to have time together. He has Sunday nights off, I have a show. But we do both have Mondays off.”

Mazzie says she and Danieley joke in their act (which they’ve recorded, “Opposite You,” on PS Classics) that being married 10 years for actors is like anyone else being married for 60.

For information about Mazzie’s cabaret act, visit www.empireplushroom.com.

Lynda Carter and I are bonding over the phone.

I tell her that for my 11th birthday, my parents took me to the Sahara Reno (no longer there) for a big show. The maitre d’, knowing it was a big day, took us to a table right next to the stage, and we settled in for the headliner: Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter.

Though she wore glittery gowns with nary a tiara or red-white-and-blue bustier in sight, I was dazzled, all the more so when the gorgeous brunette leaned down and shook my hand, which I tried not to wash ever again (which lasted about two days).

“Wow. It never ceases to amaze me — the smallest, kindest gesture can end up being a moment in another person’s life that is not even momentous, just a lifting kind of think,” Carter says from her home in Washington, D.C. “That so strengthens my feeling and belief — I know this is trite — that what goes around comes around. It’s also about how we affect each other. I’m sure that evening seeing your sweet little face did something for me. It never just goes one way. It always goes both ways.”

We’re having this conversation because Carter, 54, is about to make her Bay Area debut as a cabaret singer. Actually, it’s more than that. Though she started out as a singer, she’s only just getting back to singing after nearly two decades of dedicating most of her time to her husband, a D.C. lawyer, and her two kids.

“I didn’t really stop singing,” she says. “I just stopped singing publicly. I still worked on music myself.”

We’ll all get to hear Carter Tuesday when she opens her new act at San Francisco’s Empire Plush Room.

Back in her early days Carter, born Linda Jean Cordova Carter (part Irish, part Mexican), performed in a string of bands. First, there was Just Us, then the Relatives and then The Garfin Gathering with Lynda Carter. That last group made its debut at a new Holiday Inn in San Francisco.

“That was the first big city I ever played in,” Carter says.

But that was before her success on “Wonder Woman,” which ran from 1975 to 1979 and firmly etched images of the beautifully built Carter into the pop psyche.

Though she has popped up in a “Law and Order” here or a contact lens commercial there, Carter has kept a fairly low profile.

The offer to create a cabaret act in San Francisco hit her just at the right time. She says the spark to sing was relit when she played Matron “Mama” Morton in the London production of Chicago.

“It’s an exciting time for me to contemplate singing again,” she says. “It was such a big part of my career before I had children. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to get back to it now.”

In selecting songs to sing, she’s been going back through her variety specials from the late’70s and early’80s, as well as her Reno and Vegas nightclub acts.

“I’ll probably do ‘Cry Me a River,’ ‘Blues in the Night’ and a song called ‘Cloudburst’ from one of my specials,” she says. “I may also do ‘Put the Blame on Mame,’ which I sang when I played Rita Hayworth in a TV movie. I’ll bring that out of the mothballs.”

She probably won’t sing her big Chicago number, “When You’re Good to Mama,” nor will she sing the theme song from “Wonder Woman” (though, when challenged, she does indeed know the lyrics).

Obviously, her audiences will want her to address Wonder Woman in some way, but Carter hasn’t quite figured out how she’ll do that.

“I’ll most likely mention her throughout,” Carter says. “I’d like to talk about her in an intimate way, like what I thought of her. I’d like to offer a part of myself I don’t normally give, and that will involve insights into what she was like and how I might relate that to something I’m singing.”

Though she wouldn’t balk at another TV show, Carter says her biggest goal is to be a good parent and “pass as little baggage to my children as possible. They’ll create their own.”

And she’s trying to keep a flexible, tolerant, open-minded, forgiving view of the world and herself.

“I can’t make any plans past right now,” she says. “I love this song by James Taylor, ‘Secret o’ Life,’ and like he says, I’m going to try and keep doing what I’m doing now, enjoying the ride.”

For ticket information visit www.empireplushroom.com.