Marilyn Maye at 54 Below
254 W. 54th St., Manhattan
Through Saturday

At 94, there isn’t much that Marilyn Maye doesn’t know about how to sing a song, not to mention the closely related process of how to enchant an audience through a combination of humor, charm, and finely honed stagecraft. 

Even though her current run at 54 Below is essentially an extensively reworked update of the Johnny Mercer songbook program she presented in 2009 for the songwriter’s centennial, it’s part of her magic that no matter how many times you’ve seen her, you always think the most recent is the absolute greatest. 

I try to keep my critical faculties and better judgment about me, but I too fall under that spell: I could swear Tuesday’s performance was the most exciting of all the roughly 50 I’ve attended during the last 15 years or so. 

To begin with, Tuesday is always a good bet, as Ms. Maye’s chops are guaranteed to be at maximum power after taking off the previous two nights. During some performances she saves her strength by spending more time talking, but on Tuesday she hardly said a word: She just plunged through song after song with no let-up, the livelong night and day.  

She didn’t even tell one of her familiar stories about the time Mercer recommended a song to her that did not happen to be one of his own. It’s not remotely entertaining when I summarize it, but somehow when she recounts it in the middle of her show the crowd fairly collapses in hysterics.

Ms. Maye is the reigning queen of ever-shifting time signatures and ever-surprising modulations. Two more of her favorite gambits are thinking literally and audience participation, and the current show makes full use of both. 

Early in the evening, she sings “Too Marvelous For Words,” and near the end of the main chorus, the line is: “and so I’m borrowing a love song from the birds.” At that point she has pianist Tedd Firth tinkle out a birdlike melody in the treble clef, and she makes a gag out of compelling him to repeat it a few times in an increasingly ornithological fashion.  

“Too Marvelous” is the second of 36 songs (her count, not mine), most of which are presented in a sequence of medleys that serve as shows within shows, sets within sets, and wheels within wheels. The individual songs are generally truncated: The beginnings and endings remain, and thus they feel like scooped out bagels; there are fewer calories but most of the good stuff is still there.

Ten minutes in, she launches into “Have You Got Any Castles, Baby,” a Mercer lyric from “Varsity Show” that few have sung since 1937. Ms. Maye and her hardworking rhythm section, which also includes bassist Tom Hubbard and drummer Mark McLean, transform it into a jazz waltz, and then do the same for “And the Angels Sing,” “Fools Rush In,” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.” It’s especially radical to hear “Angels,” which began life as an old-country Yiddish folk song, as a swinging 3/4.

This leads to “Emily,” which was actually composed by the late Johnny Mandel as a waltz. She makes a joke out about how there are no songs with her name, but proceeds to sing “Marilyn” to the tune of “Emily.” Then she follows with “Laura,” “Tangerine,” and “Satin Doll.” 

From there, the line “speaks Latin — that satin doll” is the cue for Mr. Firth to quote the “Mexican Hat Dance.” This, in turn, leads to a medley of Mercer love songs set in a gentle samba beat: “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Out of This World,” “That Old Black Magic.” At this point, Ms. Maye sings an extended version of “When the World Was Young,” explaining that she attempted this French chanson when she was younger (she was actually about 23 when Mercer wrote his English-language adaptation in 1951) but wasn’t able to get it right until she’d had a little more seasoning, which is exactly what she has today. 

Madame Maye sings “When the World Was Young” as if it were a medley unto itself, alternating between the sections depicting the lost innocence of youth in major and 3/4 — waltz time is ever a signifier of childhood naivete — and those detailing the compromised values of adulthood in a minor key four.  

There’s a time-sensitive segment of “Autumn songs,” “saloon songs,” two “revenge songs” — the latter finds her leading the house in a singalong of “Goody, Goody” — a “lighthearted” medley with “GI Jive,” “I’m an Old Cowhand,” and “Lazy Bones,” and then a dream sequence with “Dream” and “Hit the Road to Dreamland,” and more singing along on “Moon River.” 

Those singalongs are perhaps her foxiest bit of stagecraft; she doesn’t just sing a song, she channels our collective love for it, and the audience participation is a brilliant way of doing that. More than ever, Marilyn Maye is true to her code.