Matt Wolf on the unforced bravura of Clare Burt London’s cabaret scene has been comparatively depleted of late, so it’s the best kind of surprising to be reminded of the remarkable talent that exists in a theatre capital that tends to pay more attention to Shakespeare than to who might be the next singing sensation. Certainly, I had little idea of the sheer exhilaration in store when I joined two friends one Sunday evening in July, 2009, for the return to the Pizza on the Park of the musical theatre performer, Clare Burt. 25 or so songs later, we emerged from the Knightsbridge venue enriched, delighted and most pleasurably dazed: a devotee was born, or, in this case, three. What is it about Burt’s artistry that sets her apart? An innate theatricality cannot be too rabidly dissected lest it lose the mysterious “it” factor that makes you rush toward some singers and recoil from others. (By way of the latter, check out the stuff that increasingly clutters YouTube.) I’d of course seen Burt during her Donmar days in the 1990s, as Carla in the David Leveaux revival of the musical Nine and the Witch in a chamber-sized Into the Woods, directed by John Crowley. But perhaps the passage of time – not to mention motherhood, since Burt and her partner Larry Lamb now have two daughters – has simply deepened a talent that was there before. Whatever the reason, I’ve rarely seen an actress-singer who honours so fully both halves of that equation. Which is to say that Burt is fully in control of both the lush, rolling musicality of “Fable,” from The Light In the Piazza, even as she opens us up to the extraordinary shifts in Adam Guettel’s song from exultation to alarm, its wedding day blessing a kind of caution, as well. Indeed, we live in such an age of over-exaggerated vocal pyrotechnics that it comes as something of a shock to hear a singer connecting with the substance of her material, not just its “wow factor” opportunities. The result, happily, goes way beyond conventional roof-raising. Burt can do that, to be sure: have a listen to her “Saga of Jenny,” the song’s famously indecisive namesake alternately coquettish and fierce to a jointly thrilling degree. Or her “Padam Padam,” in which a roiling Edith Piaf standard seems to take visceral possession of a performer whose life in France (Burt has lived there now for six years) means that the song’s Gallicisms are thoroughly felt. Here, though, is a singer who is just as unafraid to draw the audience toward her. Beginning “Everybody’s Talking,” the plaintive Harry Nilsson song forever associated for those of us of a certain vintage with the film Midnight Cowboy, Burt seems to retreat into herself, as if haunted by the barrage of attention that the lyrics describe. “The Best in the World,” one of several delicious Jerry Herman contributions to A Day In Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, starts - in Burt’s canny take on it - with a thoroughgoing innocence that turns into full-throated determination: “No one can stop your ascent to the top,” the song goes on to tell us, and, boy, in this case, do you believe it. That number ends with a reference to “papa,” and fathers take poignant centre-stage more than once in Burt’s repertoire. Her exciting rendition of Funny Girl’s feisty “Cornet Man” leads to a reminiscence about Burt’s own father, who was a jazz trumpeter. (Furthering the artistic bequest, her mother was a dancer.) That, in turn, segues directly into an unforced and unmistakably moving version of “Errol Flynn,” the Amanda McBroom hymn to a now-absent “daddy” who presence continues “up on the screen.” Long associated, and rightly, with Barbara Cook, the song lives on anew in Burt’s deep feeling for it. Burt can rock out with the best of them: tearing into “Blues In the Night,” she becomes a black-clad tornado, abetted every tempestuous note of the way by her ace trio of musicians – Nigel Lilley (piano), Don Richardson (bass), Hugh Davies (trumpet). Elsewhere, inheriting an Irving Berlin song made famous by Fred Astaire, her eyes conjoin with some especially searching vocals on “Change Partners” to convey the full urgency to the title of a number that for a change doesn’t sound all that carefree. Burt’s set is called “Now You Know,” in homage to the Stephen Sondheim song from Merrily We Roll Along with which her act begins. But in fact I didn’t know until that particular summer night just what was so blissfully and musically on offer. Hopefully, with this recording, now you’ll know, too. Matt Wolf is London theatre critic of The International Herald Tribune and a founder member of theartsdesk.com website.