This award-winning singer / actress set out to do a nondescript cabaret show with what she thought was the rather generic name of “Sets in the City.” But as so often happens when putting a good cabaret act together, a show name or a group of songs reveal more than you intended. Liz Callaway has ended up with a show that deals with some pretty serious themes of nostalgia, New York, and the changing landscape of urbanism – with some grand belting, emoting and storytelling in the process. Not very nondescript, is it?

Callaway has a muscular Broadway soprano, and she can deliver both hair-raising high notes and detailed, fully-acted song interpretation. She opens with Cole Porter’s heartfelt “I Happen to Like New York” – or at least she reveals how truly heartfelt the song is. Then she launches into Ed Kleban’s masterfully written “Better” and Bacharach and David’s “Always Something There to Remind Me” – for no better reason than they’re great songs, she sounds great singing them, and music director Alex Rybeck has devised glittering, inventive arrangements for them.

Touching on the theme of nostalgia, she sings Irving Berlin’s “I Got the Sun in the Morning,” cuz she sang it in a review at Rainbow and Stars. More personally she sings Ahrens and Flaherty’s “Something Beautiful” because she discovered that the song is about a photograph Lynn Ahrens’s father had taken of a tree – a tree that happened to be in Central Park (back, inevitably, to “the city”). There’s more to the song, and the way Liz sings it, but I can’t give everything away.

But the definitive tear-jerker comes – as it often does with Liz – totally from left field. Callaway embraces the lost masterpiece that is Chuck Mangione’s “Land of Make Believe” with an ebullience, joy and hope that cut to the heart of what makes the song great. I can’t convey to you the way this made the hair stand up on the back of my neck and brought a tear to my I eye; I mean “Oh my god you guys Liz Callaway is totally singing ‘Land of Make Believe’!!!” really isn’t saying it right. It might give a clue to this magic, that this song was an anthem at 1970s multicultural queer club The Loft, one of the touchstones of that ineffable, indescribable something that has made this city special from time immemorial. Recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.