Exposing Edith

The term ’cabaret’ means room in French. In performance, cabaret loosely means singing, storytelling and/or performance art that need an audience (usually audience participation) to see it through.  Although cabaret is constantly changing and overlapping in form, there are few rules, but two are very clear; 1) it needs an audience/audience participation or the show will fail. 2) It should be transgressive: provoke and challenge our ideas of performance/art/politics/or the subject matter. When a self-professed cabaret show is titled Exposing Edith, we expect just that, for something to be exposed, something raw, which challenges us.

Michaela Berger as la Piaf certainly has physical similarities’-similar height, same mournful, soulful eyes and a beautiful voice to rival Piaf’s.  She also has a strong stage presence, as Piaf was well known for her onstage alchemy. This is where the similarities between Berger and Piaf end.  Under Shona Benson’s direction and musical accompaniment by guitarist Greg Wain, Exposing Edith sees Berger recounting stories of Piaf’s life and playing several of the key characters. These include Piaf’s half-sister, several of her lovers, and Piaf herself. The set is minimal - a chair, a feather boa, and a microphone.  It runs for one hour with 14 songs and newer, fresher arrangements of Piaf’s songs by a musically superior Berger and Wain. But it feels like a tight, prim and proper account of a life that anyone who has interest in Piaf’s story has heard before, and Piaf herself was anything but prim and proper. There was searing darkness to her life and personality, an unhinged quality to both her personality and her need to keep performing despite terrible illness and loss.  The difficulty with biographical tales about famous creative people is that they so rarely move and challenge audiences in the same way the artist did. The immediate challenge is to rise above what went before, and give the audience a perspective they haven’t seen. Perhaps a joyous irreverence with Piaf’s life that the singer herself would’ve revelled in would be a good tribute to a French cultural icon. So if a show promises to expose and tell things in a unique way, it has to live up to that promise.

Musically, this show comes close, but storytelling or cabaret wise - it still has a long way to go.

April Albert

Photographer: Mark Wojt