Lainie Kazan back in Vegas to talk and sing

Lainie Kazan remembers when.

She recalls the Vegas days when her photograph adorned the entire side of a Strip casino (the Sahara, now SLS).

To say nothing of the Vegas nights when she performed alongside showbiz greats from Dean Martin to Duke Ellington, Jack Benny to George Burns.

These days, movie audiences know Kazan, 76, as the quintessential ethnic matriarch (comedy division), thanks to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and its sequel, which played theaters earlier this year.

“Some people don’t even know I sing,” she says. “They know me as a movie and TV actress.”

But sing she does, as she’ll demonstrate Friday and Saturday when Kazan returns to The Smith Center’s Cabaret Jazz.

She first played the elegant cabaret room three years ago and loved the intimacy of the room, along with the sound.

And, of course, “I love the people who came to see me,” Kazan says between bites of a bagel — a New York bagel — before a cabaret performance at New York’s Iridium club.

“It’s wonderful,” the Brooklyn native says of being back home in New York, where she made her Broadway breakthrough in a musical starring another Brooklyn native you may recall: Barbra Streisand.

Kazan started as a dancer in “Funny Girl,” playing a Ziegfeld showgirl. Initially, when she was offered the chance to understudy Streisand, in the show’s title role of Fanny Brice, Kazan turned it down. That is, until the producer offered her a $50 raise.

“I just understood what I wanted,” she explains. “I wanted to sing.”

That “Funny Girl” breakthrough led to Las Vegas, where she made her debut with Dean Martin — not on the Strip, but downtown at the Fremont, she recalls. (The Martin connection extended to TV, where Kazan guest-starred on Dino’s variety show more than two dozen times.)

Kazan also shared Vegas stages with fellow singers Frankie Laine and the Mills Brothers — and demonstrated her show-must-go-on determination when she broke her finger while horseback riding, performing with ice packs on her hand, disguised by a fur muff.

After George Burns came to see her, the comedian hired Kazan to join him at the Riviera and on tour; she later worked in Las Vegas with another comedy legend, Benny.

By the time she headlined at the Sahara, “my picture was on the side of the building — the biggest picture you’ve ever seen,” Kazan remembers. “It was very weird,” she says of the promotional pic. “I liked it, but I didn’t.”

Other Las Vegas headliners who’ve shared Strip stages with Kazan: Bill Cosby, Frank Gorshin, Alan King and Helen Reddy.

“An exhausting, fabulous, enervating time,” she says of her Vegas showroom days, “but it was also thrilling.”

Kazan has lots more tales to tell — and Cabaret Jazz audiences will hear some of them, because “I’m telling a lot of stories” throughout the evening, she promises. “I open the floor to questions,” which center on everything from her music to her life. (She even got an inquiry once about the designer of her stage outfit.)

“I love it,” she says of the question-and-answer exchanges. “I’m good at that.” And “it’s a talent of mine I have never really tried.”

This weekend’s shows also will find Kazan trying something new musically: “a lot of Latin stuff.”

She’s loved Latin-flavored music since her childhood, when she first heard it during family vacations to New York’s Catskills resorts.

“It’s in my soul,” Kazan says of the syncopated, conga drum-punctuated treatment she gives to such standards as “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” “Love” and “The Sweetest Sounds.”

She’s also performing a couple of ballads she hasn’t sung previously (“Little Girl Blue” among them), but such standards as “The Man That Got Away” remain staples in her act.

No matter how many times she’s performed a particular song, however, “I always sprinkle it with something new,” Kazan notes.

These days, Kazan spends most of her time at home in Southern California, playing doting grandmother off screen — and madcap mothers on screen. (She received a Golden Globe nomination for one, in 1982’s “My Favorite Year,” opposite the late Peter O’Toole — and a Tony nomination a decade later when she reprised the part in the Broadway musical adaptation.)

There’s a possible “Greek Wedding” threequel, Kazan says. And she recently shot the mafia dramedy “Unorganized Crime,” a television pilot with “A Bronx Tale’s” Chazz Palminteri, in which she plays — what else? — the matriarch of the family.

Although “I minded forever” being typecast, Kazan eventually “gave up to it,” reasoning that “there are so many people who are not working, I should be happy.”

She’s also waiting for the producers of another movie, “The Real Me,” to round up financing so the self-described “nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn” can play another new role: an Arab woman.

For now, however, Kazan’s content to play herself.

“I’m really looking forward to coming to Vegas,” she says of this weekend’s Cabaret Jazz visit. “There’s a part of me that yearns for Vegas.” After all, “that was the first place I worked when I got off Broadway.”

Besides, “I still feel 30,” Kazan says. “I’m so shocked when I realize how old I am.”

But not too old to keep performing, which she intends to do “until I fall off” the stage. “I love what I do. It’s who I am.”

Read more from Carol Cling at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.