Kristin Chenoweth marks Smith Center return New Year’s Eve

Kristen Chenoweth isn’t much for New Year’s Eve partying.

“I’ve never not worked on New Year’s Eve, so I don’t know what that’s like,” she giggles with a Champagne-worthy bubble. “Which is fine by me, because I like to work — and especially New Year’s Eve.”

This New Year’s Eve finds Chenoweth back at The Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall for the second time since she headlined the center’s very first Dec. 31 concert in 2013.

“I was struck immediately by how great the acoustics were,” she says of that performance. “And I was wondering when I was going to be back.” Cue: another giggle.

“We weren’t even thinking we would ever be doing New Year’s Eve,” Smith Center president Myron Martin recalls, but Chenoweth “said she wanted to play Las Vegas. So we said OK.”

Thus began a Smith Center tradition that has featured, among others, vintage pop maven Michael Feinstein (who’ll be back at The Smith Center, with Liza Minnelli, in March) and such Broadway fixtures as Norm Lewis, Capathia Jenkins and Erich Bergen.

Chenoweth made her first showbiz mark on Broadway, winning a Tony for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” — and creating a signature character, “Wicked’s” Galinda, alias the future Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”

For all her stage renown, however, Chenoweth also has staked a claim to the Great American Songbook with her recent album “The Art of Elegance,” which includes such standards as Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

The latter has “been the surprise hit for me,” Chenoweth notes, citing another melodious tune — Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “A House Is Not a Home” — as “just a different, cool sound for me, and I’m just enjoying singing those.” Naturally, “I’ll do songs that people want from me too.” (Prediction No. 1: Sunday night, you’re going to hear “Popular,” Galinda’s signature “Wicked” tune.)

“But I’ve got to keep continuing to stretch myself,” she adds, noting that she and “Art of Elegance” producer Steve Tyrell (who also sings a bit, as multiple gigs at The Smith Center’s Cabaret Jazz attest) are starting to work on a follow-up. New Year’s Eve audiences will hear “a couple of new songs I’m thinking about putting on my next record,” Chenoweth promises.

Before starting “The Art of Elegance,” Chenoweth met with several producers and “I knew that this was the guy,” she says of Tyrell. “I really trust him and he seems to pull from me a place that not a lot of people know exists — and (he) even surprises me sometimes. So that’s the sign of a good producer, or a match for an artist. And that we are.”

Of course, singing time-tested material also helps.

“Yeah, the melodies are beautiful,” Chenoweth says of such standards as George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

But “it’s the lyric that always stands out to me,” she explains. “I think, in 50 years, they’ll be doing Adele. But now, I’m doing Cole Porter and Gershwin and Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer because they deserve it and I’m trying my best to put my stamp on ’em.”

Because “New Year’s Eve is a time for everybody to look back and then look ahead,” Sunday’s concert will, inevitably, include some painful recollections of the Oct. 1 massacre at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.

Chenoweth sighs as she ponders the tragedy and its impact on Las Vegas.

“You know, music brings people together. It brings people together who wouldn’t necessarily agree on food, or a brand, or a beverage, or even politics,” she says. “But music brings people together. And music is what brought people together to hear Jason Aldean in Las Vegas (on Oct. 1). What’s healing about that is they were there for a common purpose, for music.”

Back to Broadway … eventually

TV audiences have seen Kristin Chenoweth in everything from “American Gods” and “Glee” to “GCB,” “The West Wing” and “Pushing Daisies.” (Her portrayal of Olive Snook in the latter earned her an Emmy Award.) Her next small-screen role: the ABC pilot “The Real Fairy Godmother.”

Moviegoers have seen — or, more precisely, heard — her distinctive voice in the animated features “The Star” and “My Little Pony: The Movie.”

But, at heart, she’s a Broadway baby. Think “Popular,” her signature song from the mega-hit “Wicked.” Think the Tony Award she won for playing Sally in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” Or recall her leading roles in musical revivals of “Promises, Promises” and “On the Twentieth Century.”

Her most recent Broadway turn, in 2016: her solo concert “My Love Letter to Broadway.”

But Chenoweth will be returning to the Great White Way — eventually — in a musical adaptation of “Death Becomes Her,” based on the 1992 comedy starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn that won an Oscar for its visual effects.

There’s no creative team yet (no composer, librettist or director) attached to the show, which is from University Theatrical Group, which also produced Chenoweth’s “Wicked.”

In “Death Becomes Her,” Chenoweth will play Madeline Ashton, a Broadway star whose quest for eternal youth (and against a longtime rival) takes on comically nightmarish proportions thanks to an immortality potion. Appropriately, the movie found Streep starring in “Songbird!” — a musical take on Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth.”

One can only hope the stage version preserves the movie’s amusingly ludicrous opening number, “I See Me.”

Contact Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.