The Lerner and Loewe Suite is what they call in the language of song “a cozy nook,” situated in the far east corner of the Algonquin Hotel and undesignated beyond a Dorothy Parkerism on the door (“A liberal is a man who leaves the room when the fight begins”).

Here is where “the boys” wrote “some of ‘My Fair Lady,'” it is said cautiously, and that spot is well-marked on the four walls inside with photos and posters from the show, plus other visual backup from “Brigadoon” and “Camelot.” For some time now, this is where the hotel has housed its pricier hired help, hoping that the creative fumes will pump them up. There’s no longer a piano on the premises, but scattered about the living room on tables and desks is an exotic assortment of health-food knickknacks, snacks, pills, and beverages of the sort a knowing chanteuse might use to coddle her sensitive throat.

The current help-in-residence is that tall drink of mineral water Karen Akers, who until May 28 is coming downstairs to perform in the Oak Room seven nights a week. Despite the Lerner-and-Loewe osmosis she’s coming from, there’s no L&L in her program; there’s tarter stuff.

If she had her way, in fact, as she tells her audience, she would have labeled this new bill of fare “Love Songs – Get Over It.” But cooler heads have prevailed – those of her director (Richard Niles) and her musical director/pianist (Don Rebic) – and have persuaded her to accentuate the positive and call her 16-song program “When a Lady Loves.”

The selections cover relatively virgin turf, as cabaret offerings usually go, running from Warren Beatty’s 1990 “Dick Tracy” (albeit, Stephen Sondheim’s “Back in Business”) to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 “Stage Fright” (albeit, Cole Porter’s “The Laziest Gal in Town”), with more legitimate (that is, theatrical) signs of love’s derailment in between.

“I think that this particular show” – her sixth at the Oak Room, by the way – “was colored by the fact that we were putting it together for the Algonquin,” Ms. Akers admitted. “I knew that they would be happy with a certain degree of familiarity, and I would be happy if I could have a few things that were off the beaten path, like that Sondheim from ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ [‘Like It Was’] that I do toward the close of the show.

“In my past singing, I have really neglected some of our treasure trove of music in the Great American Songbook. I have sung a lot in French and had contemporary people whom I loved like Craig Carnelia. I just decided it was time last year when we did ‘Time and Again’ – that was the beginning for me of this exploration of the Great American Songbook. I suppose I could have taken the easy route and decided on a composer and said, ‘This year, I’m doing nothing but Rodgers and Hart.’ But that’s almost too easy.”

What was not easy was playing the hand that she had dealt herself. “It took me almost the entire first two weeks to really make friends with the show. I’ve been having fun, but I’ve made changes. The most significant one – to me – may not mean anything to anyone else: I really love the song ‘Stormy Weather,’ but I felt that I wasn’t singing it as me. Part of the problem was the language. Harold Arlen wrote very often in a black voice, so it was full of ain’ts and dropped g’s, which I don’t do in my own natural talking. But the song could easily be seen as a reflection of tough times starting, and if I took everything a couple of steps further, that’s exactly what it would be. I wanted to do it more authentically, so I decided, ‘Okay, it’s going to become my song.’ And it did! I’m glad I made the changes.”

Ms. Akers has fashioned a whole career out of “owning the song,” connecting with the words and music the way an actress does, conveying to her faithful following around the campfire an intimate knowledge of the feelings she evokes without strain song after song.

Only in recent years – since moving with husband Kevin Power to the south of France, where she rests up and rejuvenates between stateside gigs – has she earned the Continental airs she has always had. Otherwise, she’s New York City-born – “Doctors Hospital,” she amplifies with some genuine pride – and grew up in a variety of locales around town, most notably “across the street from Bill’s Gay 90s on East 54th Street, where my mother said I hung out the window and listened to the music at night.” Such a formative experience could brand a girl for life – and, in this case, did. When she started to make her mark in cabaret, she merely went west to do it – three or four blocks west on 54th Street, to Mickey’s. She was in her third year of performing there when Tommy Tune tapped her for his Broadway production “Nine.”

Hers was the Rube Goldberg route to stardom: Tune happened to attend a party where a hairdresser named Luchino came up and asked him what he was doing. “Tommy said, ‘Well, I’m casting a musical with 21 women,’ and Luchino, who just happened to be a fan of mine, said, ‘Oh, one of the women has to be Karen Akers.’ Tommy said, ‘Who’s that?’ Luchino left the party, tore home, got a little mailing card with my picture on it, and ran back to the party. Fortunately, Tommy was still there, and he gave him the card. The next day, Tommy brought it to Barry Moss, his casting director, who knew exactly who I was. Tommy said, ‘Well, could you bring her in? I’d like to see her.’ And that was that.”

Her helmet hair helped, being a close facsimile to what Anouk Aimee affected as the long-suffering, much-cuckolded wife of the filmmaker in Fellini’s “8 1/2” – the role she wound up with – and that hair no doubt led him to cast her a second time on Broadway as Liliane Montevecchi’s lesbian lady-in-waiting in “Grand Hotel.” It’s her signature do, and it even predates “Nine.”

“Let me see now.” Ms. Akers paused to do the math. “Well, Jeremy now is 31, and I was seeing Norbert before I was pregnant. He claims to have known me since I was a virgin. That’s a very long time. It’s a long, long time. Long, long.” Jeremy is her first-born – a second, Christopher, followed a year later – and Norbert is the other hairdresser who has profoundly affected her career, having cut her hair for longer than she can (or cares to) recall.

“He’s here in New York and German and has a very dry sense of humor. He’s wonderfully cranky and very strict. When I suggest a change, he’ll say no. If I say, ‘What if I want to have curls for a while?’ he’ll say, ‘They will age you.’ He has these dictums.”

When in Milan a few years ago, however, she broke ranks and got a new do from an unknown (but recommended) hairdresser. “He cut my hair all different lengths. It was short, and I just flew around the room. I was liberated. It was heaven. That lasted about four days. It grew a quarter of an inch, and then all of a sudden it was this eternal chorus: ‘I can’t do anything with it.’ I looked like a little boy with a bowl cut or something, and I thought that it looked just awful. End of experiment. I sure haven’t done that again.”

She paused thoughtfully, and a mischievous glint formed. “But, you know, I might.”