Christine Andreas
‘Paris To Broadway’
54 Below, June 26

‘Piaf: No Regrets’
PS Classics

“There is no tune like a show tune in 2/4,” Jerry Herman famously told us. Christine Andreas doesn’t directly challenge that idea, but for her virtually everything worth singing is in 3/4. Her current show at 54 Below ranges from iconic chansons — mostly but not exclusively from the songbook of Edith Piaf — to no less classic Broadway show tunes, and it’s practically all in waltz time.

Not that there’s only one kind of a waltz: Even during the first half of the show, which is all French numbers from her most recent album, “Piaf: No Regrets,” she demonstrated that Parisians of PIaf’s generation fundamentally sang two kinds of numbers: happy, uptempo, major-key waltzes that tell us to forget our troubles, and slow, sad, minor-key waltzes that force us to confront those troubles, and in doing so hopefully vanquish them.  

“L’Accordeoniste,” for which her musical director and husband, Marty Silvestri, switches to accordion, is a rather deliberate mood-mixer: it’s loud, brash, and uptempo, almost like the singer is trying to conquer death by out-shouting it. 

She started with a tune associated more with Bobby Darin than Piaf, “La Mer,” which went through a complete transformation at the halfway point, shape-shifting into a 1959 American pop hit, “Beyond the Sea.”  

“La Mer”/“Beyond the Sea” showed how much Ms. Andreas modulates her consistently beautiful voice — one of the most stunning I’ve ever heard in a lifetime of listening to great voices — when moving from one idiom to another. It’s not just a change of languages from chanson to show tune, but an adjustment of vibrato and tremolo, a reconfiguration of her phrasing, and an alteration of her fundamental relationship to the beat.  

Later, she sang excerpts from a Neapolitan folk song, in honor of Mr. Silvestri’s Italian heritage, and also brought in vocal effects from the celtic folk song tradition to enhance “How Are Things in Glocca Morra,” from which she detours into a legit Irish folk song, “Red is the Rose.”

Early in the show, Ms. Andreas offers the opinion that French chansons suffer seriously when they are translated into English, and then she offers “Pavre Jean,” the source of “Poor People of Paris,” as example of one such song that is “mortally wounded” in the process.  

After “La Mer,” this is the second classic Francais number rewritten by Jack Lawrence performed by Madame Andreas and Monsieur Silvestri. Mr. Silvestri points out in the introduction that the English words have nothing at all to do with the original text, but are vastly entertaining in their own right. He’s correct about that: It’s a gloriously mock sarcastic narrative that rhymes “France” not only with “romance” and “dance,” as you’d expect, but with “inhabitants” — they pause after that last one so it can sink in. I can’t imagine anyone not smiling when they hear those two go to town on this one.

When she transcends the Atlantic from Montmartre to Broadway, she stays in 3/4 time with two of the most famous — not to mention most wonderful — waltzes in early post-war musical theater, “They Say It’s Wonderful,” from “Annie Get Your Gun,” and “A Wonderful Guy,” from “South Pacific.”

She revisits “Show Me” from her own past — she starred in the 20th anniversary production of “My Fair Lady” — and “Continental Sunday,” a charming duet composed by Mr. Silvestri from his musical “Fields of Ambrosia,” which has played London but not yet Broadway.  

She also rendered “Why Did I Choose You,” very lovingly, as the lyric goes, and a 1996 song by Mary Chapin-Carpenter, “What If We Went to Italy?” She brought us back to France with a mash-up of “La Vie En Rose” and “I Love Paris,” that rare song that’s somehow both American and French, as well as minor as well as major. 

She concluded with “What the World Needs Now,” dedicated to lyricist Hal David. By winding up in waltz time, she makes us all feel as if we’ve come back home.