Molly Pope LIKES YOUR STATUS

At Oberon, Friday. Tickets: $25. 617-547-8300, www.cluboberon.com

Molly Pope is a bit of an anachronism. Look at her chosen genre of performance: cabaret, to be sure, but she’s been known to affix both “neo’’ and “retro’’ to the word. Her big, belting voice reminds much more of Ethel Merman than of the pitch-shifting histrionics brought into vogue by “American Idol’’ and “The Voice.’’ Yet she’s a rising star in New York City’s progressive cabaret scene, where the art form of 19th-century Paris and Weimar Republic-era Berlin is given a contemporary update and charged with buzz.

There may be a midcentury feel to her vocal presentation, but Pope, 34, is very much au courant with her latest show, “Molly Pope Likes Your Status,’’ intended as an examination of self-regard and self-expression in the age of social media.

“I’m so obsessed with it,’’ Pope says of social media, speaking by phone from New York. “The show became about the notion of being so self-obsessed and narcissistic but having terrible self-esteem, and how those two things coexist, and being very frank with myself — but trying to do it in, hopefully, intelligent and witty ways.’’

Her show’s thematic content emerges in new arrangements for pop hits and selections from the Great American Songbook, performed with piano accompaniment. She’ll present it on Friday at the American Repertory Theater’s club-theater space Oberon, as the kickoff to Glowberon, a newly minted partnership between the ART and Provincetown’s Afterglow Festival.

The new series, says the ART’s Ariane Barbanell, is designed to showcase “fantastic solo artists who are playing with storytelling and cabaret and music, and they’re all very different but all doing really unique things with stories and song.’’ Future presentations will feature Erin Markey (Feb. 11), Sage Francis (March 24), and Stella Starsky (April 1).

As presented on her Twitter and Instagram feeds, Pope is often hilariously self-deprecating, giddy about her accomplishments but also blunt about the remaining distance between her ambitions and her reality. Two days after Thanksgiving last year, she tweeted that she was “[c]arrying a bottle of ketchup around CVS like a bouquet of roses I did not receive for a performance I did not give in a Broadway show.’’ Earlier that month, she tweeted: “Bourgeois Sadness, party of 1, your stool at the Whole Foods communal table is ready.’’

So who’s doing the tweeting — Pope herself, or a persona of her own making?

“Social media, across all platforms, is like ‘Molly Pope’ in quotation marks,’’ she says. “It’s bumped up a notch, stylized a little more, but it’s definitely me, with an extra high gloss and visual presentation that can allow me to say things that perhaps in real life I wouldn’t say.’’

She’s been handed neither bouquets nor ketchup on Broadway so far — not onstage, at least — but Pope’s trajectory is upward. She made her off-Broadway debut in Atlantic Theater Company’s new musical “Found’’ in the fall of 2014, followed a few months later by her first major theatrical lead, in a show at the famed East Village incubator of experimental work, La MaMa. Her Oberon appearance will come two days after the second and final night of recording for her first live album, at the Public Theater venue Joe’s Pub.

“She’s a star on the rise in a major way — she’s going to do great things,’’ says Afterglow Festival cofounder Quinn Cox. “She also happens to be incredibly smart and funny. The narrative of her shows always catches you unawares, and is side-splitting and poignant and self-deprecating.’’

One favorite technique of the artist is to re-appropriate a pop hit that she can’t stand. For an interpretation of “On the Floor,’’ Jennifer Lopez’s paean to the dance floor and the activities that happen upon it, Pope dons a housekeeper’s uniform and dry-mops the stage. Her arrangement breaks into a waltz as homage to the 1950 film “Cinderella’’ as well as “the movie musicals where Fred Astaire is dancing with a mop,’’ she explains. A number by Katy Perry gets revisionist treatment in the new show.

Pope discovered her voice — as in, her actual vocal instrument — almost by accident, when she auditioned for a high school musical as a freshman and “this giant sound came out,’’ she recalls. “I think about my voice as something that isn’t really mine, but it just lives inside of me. Because suddenly this noise came out of me, and no one knew it was there to begin with.’’

The rawness of her talent came with consequences, though. Two years ago she experienced a “massive vocal hemorrhage,’’ she says, after which she invested in some quality vocal training to better protect her health. (She also developed asthma in her late 20s.)

She may be more practiced now, but her aesthetic is still built around a direct, and sometimes messy, relationship with her audience.

“I have an over-abundance of feelings and emotions, sort of at all times,’’ says Pope, who has tweeted about her own bipolar diagnosis. “There’s that knowledge of what I need to do to not just become a mess of emotions. And performing absolutely is the best place for me to go to those emotional extremes, and keep it out of my life offstage.’’

And what of the “splash zone’’ at her shows that she sometimes references?

“I exorcise these demons, and purge and vomit feelings all over the audience,’’ she says, laughing.

But in a good way.

Jeremy D. Goodwin can be reached at jeremy@jeremydgoodwin.com.