Audra McDonald and the Philadelphia orchestra perform the American Songbook to lush perfection

Your eyes meet across a crowded room. She shares some funny yarns and betrays an inner vulnerability. And in a few minutes, you feel as if she’s let you into her world.

And of course, there’s that voice.

Tuesday night, the crowded room was a sold-out Verizon Hall, yet Audra McDonald was able to instantly place 2,500 listeners in her thrall. It helps that she has the tools of not only a singer, but also a stage and TV actress. And even if the banter in this show sometimes felt a little rehearsed, McDonald delivered the kind of charisma that few others possess these days.

It’s even more impressive that she managed to do all this while not elbowing aside the hall’s full-time resident ensemble. With her music director Andy Einhorn on the podium and her own instrumental trio nearby, the show — also performed by these forces this past summer in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. — succeeded in large part because of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The ensemble wasn’t always 100% tight, but it was unfailingly luxurious.

The show’s material is basically the Great American Songbook set in a series of imaginatively orchestrated arrangements. Saturated strings had an exuberant Hollywood gloss in an candy-sweet version of “The Carousel Waltz” from Richard Rodgers’ Carousel. Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia’s English horn solo voice in Gershwin’s “Summertime” was the soul of sincerity. Guest Matt Gallagher, the iron man of Philadelphia trumpeters, remade the overall sound of the orchestra’s brass section into something brighter with his edgy top voice.

McDonald was no less sensitive to sound and its use as an emotional tool. If there was a through-line to the evening, it was a longing in the material for what the world once was or still could be.

Joe Raposo’s “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” is a dip into childhood for most, but McDonald talked about how she now hears the song as being about anyone who had ever been othered. Here, she brought a simplicity to her sound.

Her voice grew light and trembly — operetta-like — in “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and downright operatic in “Summertime,” leaving aside the microphone and letting her voice fill the hall naturally.

With the recent reshuffling of the pops landscape in Philadelphia, there’s been a lot of talk about what role the orchestra might play in presenting pops repertoire. But McDonald’s occasional visits with this orchestra have been a consistently valuable crossover pairing.

John Kander’s “Cabaret,” in an arrangement by Einhorn and orchestration by David Dabbon, showed the upper end of the possible artistic dividends. With its subtle use of orchestral darkness and light, the music acquired layers of added meaning.

The encore: McDonald and Einhorn belting out the classic show-biz mashup of “Happy Days Are Here Again” (sung by McDonald) and “Get Happy” (Einhorn). It probably doesn’t need saying that McDonald’s was the better voice, though the overall effect was quite moving. It may not have been on par with the old days of Judy and Barbra, but it was damn good, and it felt like something we all needed in the here and now.