Tina Fabrique gives a soaring, scat-singing, ballad-caressing performance as Ella Fitzgerald in "Ella," the not-quite-a-play that opened Geva Theatre Center's 2008-2009 season last Saturday night and filled the not-quite-full auditorium with joyful song. Fabrique has a full voice, an intuitive feel for jazz, and such irrepressible delight in what she is singing that she carries her audience with her in a performance that is - thank goodness - much more song than script. "Ella" is a tour de force for Fabrique, but it isn't much of a play.

Perhaps the greatest of all jazz singers - certainly the most likeable - Fitzgerald had a long career that took off twice: first when drummer-band leader Chick Webb hired the 15-year-old as his singer, and later when jazz impresario Norman Granz freed her to sing the way she wanted before huge audiences all over the world. As you would expect, there were prices to pay in her private life.

Librettist Jeffrey Hatcher sets Fitzgerald's story in Nice in 1966 as she rehearses for her first performance after the death of her beloved sister, and a family-shattering fight with the nephew she raised as her own son. Act one is the rehearsal, act two the performance. As Fitzgerald recites her story, the songs reflect the chronology of her career as well as important emotional moments in her life. But that's what they are and remain: recitations.

It's a lot of talking for any actor who doesn't have at least one other character to react to what she says. That's the bugaboo of many one-character plays, here intensified because Hatcher's book is not especially insightful. Ella is obviously sincere, but that can be a limited virtue without other qualities to deepen and extend it. Fabrique also has a girlishly coy approach to a lot of the material that's supposed to be artless, I guess, but eventually feels merely mannered.

To be fair, the musicians in the outstanding quartet that accompanies her do have snatches of dialogue from time to time (including trumpeter Thad Wilson's appealing turn as Louis Armstrong in Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek"), and Harold Dixon makes a few forgettable appearances as Granz. Fabrique's singing has to carry the show - and that it more than does.

Fortunately, she avoids the trap of slavish imitation. Her voice is less sweet than Fitzgerald's. It has harder edges and more power. The arrangements of early songs (like "Cow-Cow Boogie," which Ella actually sang with The Ink Spots), songs like "How High the Moon" that highlight the career, songs from the famous Songbooks devoted to songwriters like Cole Porter and George and Ira Gershwin, and at least one song from the glorious Fitzgerald-Louis Armstrong recordings, are close enough to authentic to satisfy. She sings with Fitzgerald's abandon and raw drive, but she also sometimes tries to imitate Fitzgerald's phrasing. That's a problem only because she slips in and out of it, and because occasionally she exaggerates it almost to parody. That's probably a quibble, but a good-sized one.

Even though the show is set onstage in 1966, scenic designer Michael Schweikardt has settled for an elegant 1940's performance space of black and white arches with silver and gold highlights, given color by lighting designer John Lasiter's dramatic flourishes of blue, red, and purple. It looks as if somebody had been to Radio City Music Hall, but it is also just about a perfect place to set "Ella" and then get out of the way: Tina Fabrique is here. 

Ella

Through Oct 12

Geva Theatre Center, 75 Woodbury Blvd.

$20-$57 | 232-GEVA | gevatheatrecenter.org