Please put your hands together for Maude Maggart

Location  coutesty of: Tainted Blue Productions; Hair: Stephen Ramsey/Artists By Timothy Priano; Make-up: Jason Paulson/Artists By Timothy Priano; Styling: Veronica Williams

In an art form preoccupied with tending to its roots, cabaret chanteuse Maude Maggart, 30, is a rare flower, and her bloom has been unusually quick. She made her New York debut only last year, playing Monday nights at Danny's Skylight Room; by last month, she had  graduated to a hit engagement at the Algonquin Hotel's venerable Oak Room. (She's been invited back for another run in February, just in time for Valentine's Day.) It doesn't hurt that Maggart looks the part of a nightclub singer in a black-and-white film: a lovely lady in a long, elegant dress, breathing love songs into a standing microphone. "Looking glamorous is part of the job in the Oak Room," she says, slightly apologetically. "I always felt funny about it at Danny's." But it is Maggart's gorgeous voice—which ranges from a breathy, melancholic sigh to a high, pure vibrato—that has made her the darling of the cabaret world. It's a voice straight out of the flapper era, and she trains it on songs from the same period. (Her Oak Room set was devoted to the early work of Irving Berlin.) "I feel joy when I sing this kind of music," she says. "It feels good in my soul."—Adam Feldman

Maude Maggart plays the Cabaret Convention on October 20 and joins the 92nd Street Y's Lyrics and Lyricists series November 12–14.