Andrea Marcovicci is one of the reigning queens of the New York cabaret scene and, among other things, a living personification of the Great Indoors. If there were any doubt about this, she changed gowns at least half a dozen times during her performance on Saturday night at the 92nd Street Y — from one elegant, bejeweled frock to another. But when Ms. Marcovicci began to sing “Blue Hawaii,” it was one of those “well-now-I’veheard-everything” moments. One doesn’t expect to find her laying out under the South Sea stars, extolling the glories of fish and poi.

But Saturday’s show was a tribute to the legendary lyricist Leo Robin (1900–84), and Robin wrote, among his vast list of film-score credits, such palm tree-laden musical epics as “Waikiki Wedding,” “Jungle Princess,” “Tropic Holiday,” and “Moon Over Miami.” So Ms. Marcovicci and her cast of three additional singers, two pianists, and a rhythm section were ready to go native.

Most entries in the Y’s long-running “Lyrics & Lyricists” series, including Ms. Marcovicci’s Kurt Weill show a year and a half ago, employ a cast of seven or eight, but Saturday’s show used a more intimate grouping of four, with the three females fitting into the respective roles of ingénue (Jennifer Sheehan), comedian (Klea Blackhurst), and Diva Supreme (Ms. Marcovicci). There also was a baritone, Brian Byers, who had, as Ms. Marcovicci informed the crowd, been brought in at the last minute and, as of Saturday night, was still learning his lyrics on his solo spots. (Doubtlessly he will have them mastered by the final show tonight, but one wonders why he couldn’t have had the words in front of him, Encores style.) Musical director and pianist Shelly Markham supplied an additional shot of vocal testosterone by singing several solos, notably on the bluesinflected “For Every Man There’s a Woman.”

Ms. Marcovicci served as hostess, but Ms. Blackhurst has such a strong personality as both a singer and comic that by the end of the second act, the two of them were serving as joint narrators. On the whole, this worked very well, the twosome bantering back and forth (at least some of which seemed spontaneous), with Ms. Marcovicci’s high theatrical style leavened by Ms. Blackhurst’s meat-and-potatoes comedy one-liners and body language. The duets grew progressively better as the evening progressed, culminating in “A Rainy Night in Rio,” one of Robin’s funniest pieces of wordplay (and a witty parody of his earlier tropical exotica), in which Ms. Marcovicci and Ms. Blackhurst got a warm-and-witty Lucy-and-Viv vibe going.

The two other vocalists, Mr. Byers and Ms. Sheehan (and Mr. Markham, too), seemed mainly to support Ms. Marcovicci and Ms. Blackhurst, although both enjoyed fine moments. Ms. Sheehan’s nicest ballad was “Lost in Loveliness,” from Robin’s semi-classical collaboration with operetta king Sigmund Romberg’s “The Girl in Pink Tights”; she was also effective on “I Wanna Go Places and Do Things,” a heavily syncopated early talking picture tune on which she looked for all the world like the very young Joan Crawford doing the Charleston. Mr. Byers’s finest moment was his duet with Ms. Sheehan, “Zing a Little Zong,” a charming wooden-shoes novelty that the two cooked into a real Dutch treat.

One key issue was that Robin wrote so many of his best songs for Bing Crosby, who got surprisingly short shrift in Ms. Marcovicci’s comprehensive narration. Perhaps she just didn’t want her cast to be compared with him, and who could blame her — Crosby had more chops, more swing, and more interpretative skill than any singer until his successor, Frank Sinatra. Many Robin tunes, especially those with his great collaborator, the composer Ralph Rainger, were also part and parcel of the big-band era, and the show could have surely used someone who could really swing.

Ms. Marcovicci and company generally worked around this problem by continually appealing to the song buffs in the house. They sang many a rare tune that hadn’t been performed in 70 years, like the aforementioned “What Have You Got That Gets Me,” a zippy duet by Ms. Blackhurst and Mr. Byers. “Night in Manhattan,” sung by the whole company, is an ode to nocturnal New York that was rare even in 1937. Ms. Sheehan’s “Up With the Lark,” from Robin’s somewhat aborted collaboration in 1946 with Jerome Kern, “Centennial Summer,” found the lyricist in a highly Hammerstein-y mode.

It was Ms. Blackhurst who repeatedly stole the show, keeping up with Ms. Marcovicci when it came to quips, factoids, and even costume changes. It’s her wont to channel the great funny ladies of song, most famously Ethel Merman, but here Ms. Blackhurst sang two songs associated with Billie Holiday (who could be as funny as she was tragic), “Easy Living” and “Havin’ Myself a Time,” as well as “Okolehao,” a comic minimasterpiece about getting plastered all over the world that was written for Martha Raye and set in the frame of an ersatz Hawaiian song.

The latter song was especially interesting in light of the extensive research that Ms. Marcovicci always does. Here, she had been in touch with Robin’s niece and uncovered some facts that weren’t part of the general record; most pertinent, Robin’s wife struggled for years with a drinking problem. For a finale, the company staged six choruses of what might be Robin’s finest and best-known song, “Thanks for the Memory,” including several sets of lyrics that have barely been heard since 1938. Originally written for master comic Bob Hope, who used it as his theme for the rest of the 20th century, it is an amazingly poignant song. Yet I never noticed before how many of the verses — particularly the “suppressed” ones — are about alcohol abuse: beer, rum, wine, cocktails not just by the glass, and Pilsner by the case.

Ms. Marcovicci and company make the point that “Thanks for the Memory” is the “Lush Life” or “Days of Wine and Roses” of its day. It is generally assumed that when the protagonists of this song spent a “weekend in Niagra” but “hardly saw the falls” it is because they were too busy making love. But now it seems clear that they were, in fact, too wasted to see anything. When you’ve had as much to drink as they have, any kind of a memory is something to be thankful for. Finding a new meaning in an old song is like seeing new depth in an old friend, and that’s what “Lyrics & Lyricists” is all about.

wfriedwald@nysun.com