After hearing her dismal performance at the Shaw Theatre last year, I found myself wondering if Ute Lemper had simply been having a bad night. Not so, it seems. The German singer has always been an acquired taste. Now that she is attempting to turn herself into a jazz diva as well, the self-indulgence has reached painful levels.

After that dazzling performance alongside Ruthie Henshall in Chicago in the Nineties, Lemper — who is now based in New York — had proved that she could handle conventional show tunes. But this evening, hearing her try to keep pace with Vana Gierig’s accomplished piano trio as she gave vintage songs a facelift was an excruciating experience. Her phrasing never took flight over Todd Turkisher’s heavy-handed drumming, and her thin timbre was soon reduced to mere caterwauling.

A director with a firm hand could still salvage this show. How many singers, after all, have the vision to combine the music of Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Weill, Léo Ferré and Philip Glass? Unfortunately Lemper is content to waste time on self-regarding and interminable monologues. Embarking on a meandering routine about the imaginary history of her red boa, she threw sour barbs in the direction of Maggie Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Carla Bruni, to name but a few.

The audience responded with its usual enthusiasm to her familiar climactic romp through Moritat, her slender frame hidden inside a sinister overcoat, a hat perched rakishly on her blonde tresses. Earlier, her dominatrix persona broke loose as two men in the front row became the target for her somewhat heavy-handed teasing.

Hollaender’s song Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin was given a relatively unadorned reading, and was all the more haunting for that. But the extracts from The Threepenny Opera slipped too readily into the grotesque, and Lemper also trampled all over the romantic strains of L’Accordéoniste. Although the bandoneón player Hector Castro joined the trio, his fragile contribution was often drowned out. At the close, Lemper’s fans rewarded her with an ovation, which suggests that masochism is now very much part of the mainstream.

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