At Wolf Trap’s 352-seat intimate venue for soloists, chamber groups and cabaret, The Barns, Kristin Chenoweth delivered over two-dozen well chosen, well sequenced and delightfully performed numbers while the crowd ate up every moment. She was backed by a quartet of solid jazz musicians including her music director Joseph Thalken on piano and Jack Cavari whose guitar was pure honey at just the right moments.

Chenoweth won a Tony Award for the role of Sally in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, briefly starred in her own television sitcom, starred in a non-musical comedy (Epic Proportions) on Broadway and scored successes Off Broadway (A New Brain) and in regional musical productions (Strike Up The Band at Goodspeed Opera House.) Her range of material is wide, going from the Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Hammerstein and Kern songs of the 1920s and ‘30s to contemporary material such as Ricky Ian Gordon who wrote "An Ordinary Guy" for her.

With sometimes astonishingly clear enunciation combined with a perky comic timing, she can deliver tongue twisting alliterative lyrics like Comden and Green’s "If You Hadn’t but You Did" so that every ear in the house picks out every word. She even managed to get a laugh from the genuinely funny line about the aroma of performing seals in Rodgers and Hart’s "I Wish I Were In Love Again" that has been heard so often that no one has laughed at it in three decades.

Her excursion into romantic standard resulted in a number of quietly exquisite moments, like the segment early in the evening when she perched on a stool while Cavari’s guitar sounded so like Tony Matola on the old Perry Como show, but this "Sing to me, Miss C" segment brought the full quartet in on "You’ll Never Now." And, Perry could never belt the ending like she did.

Chenoweth’s training is not only in theater, it is in opera. She capped the evening with Leonard Bernstein’s coloratura extravaganza "Glitter and Be Gay" that pulled out all the vocal stops and requires the comic turn as well. It had the audience demanding more so she exited on a lightly comic number, "Taylor the Latté Boy" that was simply pure fun.

Of the eighteen songs he sang, however, it was the five lovely ballads which were the emotional highlights of the evening. These he delivered strait with a purity of tone, allowing their own lyricism and beauty to shine through. Jerry Herman’s "It Only Takes a Moment," and William Finn’s "What More Can I Say?" were lovely. Graae paired "Something I Wanted You to Know" by Sternbach and Robbins with Ann Hampton Calloway’s "Perfect" to cap off the first act. The second act had a marvelously pure and simple rendition of "It Would Have Been Wonderful" from Strouse and Charnin’s Annie Warbucks.

The encore was a short third act featuring both the "indulgence" and the magic. After a gag bit where he solicited requests from the audience only to deny them all, Graae stood front and center and sang Jerome Kern’s "The Way You Look Tonight" in his most self exposed performance of the night. He took it at a key just above his most comfortable range. It was his most intense, heartfelt and musically interesting moment of all.