frozen in a bed of chance
by
Douglas Messerli
Julia
Migenes Le Vie en Rose / Directed by Peter Medak, Odyssey Theatre
Ensemble / the performance I saw was on Thursday, November 14, 2019
At
some point in her performances of French chansons last evening, opera singer,
theater performer, and Grammy winner Julia Migenes revealed that if she were to
perform all of her most-loved chansons, we might be in the Odyssey Theatre
space for at least 4 days.
I might actually have loved to do that,
hearing a world that has only been revealed to me previously by a handful of
records. And Migenes’ incredible soprano voice and her French-language
intonations were so perfect that, along with her very deep knowledge of the
genre, it might have been so revelatory that it would have completely altered
concepts in the US of the depth and range of what is now generally perceived a
lovely, almost chanted, but not incredibly important songs of love and loss in
Paris. And I’m particularly sad to hear that this is her final musical tour,
representing her retirement from singing in general.
Consequently, I feel honored to have been able to hear her sing last night works from several of the most noted singers of chansons, including works by Maurice Yvain, Georges Moustaki, Léo Ferré, Francis Lai, Michel Legrand sung by noted singers such as Edith Piaf, Charles Aznovour, Jacques Brel and others.
The red-haired beauty not only interprets
these with great finesse, but provides her audience with a short-course about
who the composers and singers were: the fact that Piaf, for instance, had begun
her career as a street-singer, in a sense a kind of prostitute, which helps us
comprehend why she might, in her song “Milord,” wish to invite it a man, addressing
him with honor in order to lure him to her table:
Come on my Lord
Sit at my table
It’s so cold outside
Here is so comfortable
Let yourself be, Milord
And take your ease
Your sorrows on my heart
And your feet on a
chair
I know you, Milord
Your never saw me
I am only a girl from the
port
A shadow of the street
Or why the popular singer Mistinguett,
drowned in Ostrich feathers she and her male dancers wore, might wish to sing
the sad now well-known English-language version of “Mon Homme,” made popular
her by Billy Holliday and, later, Barbara Streisand:
Oh, my man I love him
so
He’ll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don’t care
When he takes me in
his arms
The world is bright,
all right
What’s the difference
if I say
I’ll go away, When I
know
I’ll come back on my
knees some day?
Migenes not only explains these songs,
singing them with great reverence, but shows us pictures of the composers on the
covers. She even threatened, quite hilariously, to have appeared as did
Mistinguett, in Ostrich feathers, but she might also need ten or more male
dances, lots of feathers, and net stocking up to her waist, along with a
bustier. As lovely as Migenes is, it is hard to imagine her in such a costume.
The great singer even gives us glimpses
of her own operatic career in Austria singing Lulu, a nearly impossible
score with the singers move in different registers and directions from the orchestra,
and, after her on-stage murder by Jack the Ripper, enjoying a kind of
decompression by hearing the The Doobie Brothers, whom she brilliantly compares
to the music of Charles Aznavour, who, she insists, so compacted his lyrics
that he left the rest of the lyrical passages just for the musicians. She sang two
songs by Aznavour—an early supporter of the LBGT community—whose “Hier Encore”
notes:
Yesterday still, I was twenty,
I was wasting time
Believing to stop it
And to hold him back,
even ahead of him
I just ran out of breath
Ignoring the past,
conjugating in the future
I preceded from me any conversation
And gave my opinion that
I wanted the good
To criticize the world
casually
Time, obviously, is a major issue in these
chansons, particularly in the music of Ferrè, whose son “Avec Le Temps” begins
with a lament on how “With time goes everything goes away / We forget the face
and we forget the voice. The heart when it beats more / It’s not worth going further
/ You have to let it go and that’s fine.” It sounds a bit like Alzheimer’s
disease to me.
Oddly, Migenes is particularly brilliant
singing the male-composed love songs such as the endlessly chain-smoking
Jacques Brel’s “Les Paumés du Petit Martin” and “La Chanson des Vieux Amant,”
followed by her excellent pianist Victoria H. Kirsch’s lovely piano rendition,
as Migenes temporarily leaves the stage, of one of his standards.
Her last song, Michel Legrand and
Jacques Demy’s grand paen to love from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,
reiterates just how time is at the center of the French chansons.
If it takes forever I will wait
for you
For a thousand summers I
will wait for you
Till you’re here beside
me, till I’m touching you
And forevermore sharing
your love.
For any of us who has seen the film, however, know, the singer does not
wait for her lover, who’s been sent off into the French military. She marries a
wealthy suitor instead of waiting for her gasoline-station owner-lover. Love in
these songs is always a thing of chance, a fleeting glance as Francis Lai and
Pierre Barouh suggest in “A Man and a Woman.”
In performing these iconic and often
ironic songs, Migenes, with director Peter Medak, has indeed taken a chance
that might help you fall in love with the French chant-songs. I’ll never hear
any of them again in the same way.
Los
Angeles, November 15, 2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2019).
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