Chicago cabaret audiences in the mid-1970s knew Karen Mason as a young show-tune singer with a lot of bravura (and sometimes bathos). But she’s matured into an artist of depth and subtlety during the last decade, which she’s spent in New York performing on Broadway (Jerome Robbins’s Broadway) and off Broadway as well as in nightclubs. (On the new cast album of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s hit revue And the World Goes Round, she sings a caressing and mercurial “Colored Lights” and belts out a dramatically powerful “How Lucky Can You Get,” among other tunes.) Still possessed of a voice of extraordinary range, expressiveness, and dynamic control, Mason has developed the skill of making a song a deeply personal, slightly secretive act of self-revelation. She’s joined at this concert (a benefit for the Center Theater and Training Center for the Working Actor) by pianist and songwriter Brian Lasser, her longtime musical associate, and by baritone John Herrera. Monday, 8 PM, Wellington Theatre, 750 W. Wellington; 508-5422.
