A Defiant Rock Edge: Lina Koutrakos at the Metropolitan Room.

The singer Lina Koutrakos deconstructs the oldest cabaret clich in the book in “Torch," her sagacious new show at the Metropolitan Room. If that loaded title conjures images of a lovelorn diva masochistically wallowing in mistreatment and rejection, Ms. Koutrakos is anything but a self-pitying crybaby.

As she sang “The Man That Got Away" on Friday evening, she didn't beckon you to follow her down a yellow-brick road to a tear-soaked bunker stocked with razor blades and sleeping pills. The song became a resigned, dry-eyed assessment of male inconstancy as an unfortunate fact of life that has existed “ever since the world began." Dry-eyed, I hasten to add, doesn't mean unemotional or un-dramatic. In her heated interpretations of classic torch songs sensitively accompanied on piano by Rick Jensen, Ms. Koutrakos implies that the war between Venus and Mars may have reached a stalemate.

Her emotional strength is embedded in singing that has a defiant rock edge. Ms. Koutrakos resembles Patti LuPone in certain vocal mannerisms and a two-fisted dramatic approach. Both revel in combative sturm und drang; both project unlimited reserves of willpower. For Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh's “You Fascinate Me So," a song that most female singers treat as a coy flirtatious come-on, Ms. Koutrakos delivered the blunt invitation of a sexual aggressor. In her rendition of Leonard Cohen's “Joan of Arc," purity is trumped by desire.

(Lina Koutrakos's “Torch" repeats on Friday and Saturday at the Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, Flatiron district; (212) 206-0440, metropolitanroom.com.)