Steppin' Out at 54 Below: JENN COLELLA & MARILYN MAYE

There are two ways to capture a cabaret: Lay back and let it come to you, with your talent a slow burning invitation. Or grab it with both hands and just burn it down. Over the past weeks at 54 Below, I happened to catch a couple of consummate polar opposite approaches. Each one captivated. It was fascinating to observe how.

Jenn Colella is a Broadway stalwart, with the gamine looks of a rodeo sweetheart and the pipes of a Soul Man. I first saw her a million years ago B.C. (2003) in the deservedly brief-lived Broadway musical of the movie Urban Cowboy. She rode a mechanical bull with grit and pizazz and basically has never stopped, or ever fallen off. She grabbed a 2017 Tony nomination as the airline pilot Captain Bass in the forever grounded 9/11 musical Come from Away, a role she became identified with over a two-and-a-half-year run.

The essence of her Pride Month cabaret show, “Jenn Colella: Out and Proud,” was effusive and unrestrained Queer jubilation. She kicked things off out among us in the audience, racing from one end of 54 Below to the other, wailing to the rafters the 60s Stax classic, “Knock on Wood.” With vociferous shout-outs to “Her Lezzies,” and aw-shucks thanks hollers to “our straights” in the crowd because “we really need all the support we can get right now,” she retook the stage, slipping in and out of Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Everybody Says Don’t,” a My Fair Lady-to lady gender re-matched “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and a room embracing sing-along on “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” making it all matter fiercely; deploying her razor wire belt, redolent of Janis and a twist of Merman, to bring the crowd to her feet.

Marilyn Maye, now 95, has been singing in cabarets nearly twice as long as Jenn Colella has been alive. She is without question our greatest living pop singer, and that includes everybody you can possibly be thinking of. Her voice retains astounding luster, and though she works as hard as Ms. Colella, the effort is all but invisible. Rather than traverse the outer reaches of 54 Below, egging her audience on, Ms. Maye simply played to her indomitable strength, in a Pride Month run of 95th Birthday shows that also emphasized pride with a small “p.”

The night I saw her, she struggled a bit with the verse to “Cabaret,” her opener; a song she literally introduced on record in 1966 ahead of that show’s Broadway premiere. This could have been disconcerting (at least for me), but not to Ms. Maye, who made no attempt to hide her lyric scramble, squabbling volubly with the handwritten words on her music stand before re-starting her band from the top and knocking “Cabaret” out of the park, incorporating the entire interlude into her act as naturally as if it had been scripted.

Her set simmered with self-possession. Ms. Maye knows when to turn it up, when to tamp it down, when to play with her audience, and when to wow them. Delivering songs in thematic pairs and trios, as well as the occasional single, she managed to make fresh and unexpected music out of material she has sung inside out and backward throughout her vast career — "Let There Be Love,” “Guess Who I Saw Today,” “Old Friends” and perhaps most sublimely “Too Late Now.” She rang out her theme song, “It’s Today” from Mame, twice, the second time as a finale, though she only launched her death-defying, signature, high leg kick once. Cut her some slack. She’s earned it.

There was no quantitative difference in the reception these two terrific ladies garnered at 54 Below. Each audience ignited. But what lit their respective fuses was a fabulous contrast.