“In some things, I’m very average,” German-born chanteuse Ute Lemper insisted. Then again, her standards are very high. Even when it comes to recreation, she displays a curious blend of flamboyance and modesty: “Tennis I enjoy, but then I’m so bad at it. I suck. It sucks to be mediocre at something,” she said, perhaps borrowing a bit of vocabulary from her two young children.

Judging from the 41-year-old cabaret and musical-theater star’s international performance schedule, she rarely has time to swing a racket, even with a weekend home upstate.

On opening night of her seven-week uptown engagement at Cafe Carlyle, Ms. Lemper, who still inhabits the body of the dancer she once was, strode through the audience and onto the stage in a slinky spaghetti-strap gown, fishnet stockings, and a flowing red boa – the latter in deference to her show’s theme, “Blood and Feathers.” With songs ranging from Kander and Ebb to Weill and Tom Waits, Ms. Lemper slid from French to German to English, the way most people slip into a pair of gloves. Opera-length kid, in this case.

Giving each number everything she had, her body was as expressive as her dramatic vocal delivery: Auburn hair caressed a high cheekbone, pendant earrings swung with the beat, and eyebrows, sculpted Marlene Dietrich-style, arched to her interpretation of Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon Street.”

Ms. Lemper has made her mark interpreting Berlin cabaret songs and French chanson, as well as portraying roles on Broadway and London’s West End. She has also taken up songwriting, and when she can, she records her original work at a downtown studio for an upcoming album of original songs. Last September, she test-drove many during a run at Le Jazz Au Bar featuring her own music.

She has lived in New York since 1998, and said it’s “my city now. I love to work at home and take a cab to work.

“My first husband was from New York,” she added. “We knew when we moved here, we would stay. I like it a lot, a lot more than London or Paris. Plus, there’s a great audience here.” By contrast, she called London “uptight, but with a hidden, grittier side underneath.”

Before settling here, Ms. Lemper floated between European capitals. Her professional debut was in the Vienna production of “Cats.” In 1987, she opened “Cabaret” in Paris. In London, she played Velma Kelly in “Chicago” and won the 1998 Olivier Award for best actress in a musical. Afterward, “They asked me to replace Bebe Neuwirth,” she said of her 1998 Broadway debut in “Chicago.”

More recently, she is playing a wide variety of venues, from a December Carnegie Hall gig with the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble – the culmination of a world tour with that group – to an upcoming concert at The Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she will sing Weill’s “Seven Deadly Sins” in March.

“I never did the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ in New York,” she said over orange juice at Cafe Nice Matin on the Upper West Side, where she and her children live.

The Orpheus collaboration resulted in “quite a different program, with very serious German music from the ’20s, Kurt Weill songs and Hebrew and Yiddish songs,” she said. “It was rather dark, very beautifully arranged. It is very special to work without a conductor. There are core leaders all over the place. Each one leads his own section. It’s a very intimate collaboration.”

“I was always in the triangle of Berlin, London, Paris,” she said of her early years, but ending up in New York didn’t surprise her. “Berlin looks a lot more like New York now,” she said. “New York is the image of the future,” she said, emphasizing that she considered it truly “cosmopolitan.”

Always drawn to a new challenge, Ms. Lemper recalled her Munster beginnings. “I took dance class every day,” she said. “I had a band. It was such a tough upbringing. It was far too Catholic there for me. I left that behind me.” She continued, “After high school, I went to Vienna.”

The second of two children born to a banker and a homemaker, Ms. Lemper said her parents were “both very musical. My father played many instruments and introduced me to a broad variety of music. My mother was a singer, a soprano, but I wasn’t attracted to this singing. My music interests were very different from hers.”

She continues the family tradition by introducing her children to the performing arts. “My daughter likes Christine Aguilera and Britney Spears,” she admitted, but she has exposed both of them to, among others, “the Beatles, John Mayer, and Train.” Train? They are a “very great band,” she gushed. And, she said, “I don’t have time to go to the ballet room,” but “my daughter goes to Steps,” she said of the Upper West Side dance center.

“I introduce them to classical music,” she continued. “We listen to everything. They like my stuff, too. I take them with me [on tour] for three weeks. They sing every song. The musicians are like uncles to them.”

Underscoring the point, when she introduced the band on opening night at the Carlyle, including Vana Gierig on piano, Mark Lambert on guitar, Gregory Jones on bass, and Todd Turkisher on drums, she vamped, “These are my boys. I’ll start with the most faithful one.”

In April, Ms. Lemper heads to Europe for 15 days, then in May to South America; Europe follows in June. In between, she’s writing songs for her new CD. When does she find the time? “Basically, when everyone’s asleep, or when they’re at school.” She said, “It’s a more peaceful time late at night or the morning when everyone is out of the house.”

When her children were still small, in 1997, she moved to London to do “Chicago.” She said, “It was very exhausting. I’d take the subway, fall asleep, and miss my stop.”

Those days have ended – to a degree. At her country house, she loves the “complete silence.” What else does she do there? “Just hang, do barbecues, play baseball. It puts everything into perspective. I don’t read the paper. I live my life with the people I love. I used to be a solitary person in my 20s,” she said. “Sometimes you miss your freedom.” Still, she said, “It’s so nice to give. Forget about going to get a manicure and pedicure. I used to paint before I had kids. Now I write songs.”

That said, Ms. Lemper is no homebody. Touring takes her to wonderfully exotic locales such as Istanbul and Tunisia. She described Elat, in Israel, as “super-nice. Right near the Red Sea. You can see Jordan. It’s very hot, though.” She loves playing jazz festivals and called the one at Montreux “such a party – wonderful. All these people you meet there. I always hope I have a few days to hang and hear the other people.

“Sometimes I book concerts around something fun. She recently performed two in Switzerland then “skied in Zermatt. I always wanted to ski in the Alps. There are no cars in Zermatt. No modern civilization, no concrete. You can ski down to Italy and see bizarre shapes sticking out above the clouds.”