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Stage The song of an extraordinary life
The Gorilla Theatre creates a song-driven show about French chanteuse Edith Piaf's story of tragedy and success.
By ROBERT HICKS
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 6, 2003
[Photo: Gorilla Theater]
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Andrei Cheine plays the Accompanist to Judy London’s Edith Piaf.
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TAMPA -- Edith Piaf is legendary as the first lady of French chanson, but she is almost as well known for her hard life.
Rising from a Parisian street life filled with urchins, prostitutes and criminals, she traveled the circus trail with her father, who earned his living as a street acrobat. At age 15, she left her father and began singing in the streets of Paris.
One day, famous Parisian cabaret impresario Louis Leplee discovered her singing and immediately made her his resident singer at Le Gerny's, one of the most elegant cabarets on the Champs Elysees. Leplee culled her stage name from French street slang, billing her as Le Mome Piaf (The Little Sparrow).
Gorilla Theatre founder Aubrey Hampton and singer Judy London have teamed up to write Piaf: Flight of the Little Sparrow, running tonight through Feb. 23 at the theater in Tampa.
"I want to portray Piaf's strength as a person rising above adversity," Hampton said. "Hunger, mistreatment, alcoholism, drug addiction -- rising above all that and becoming really an icon for many people. She had such a big following in America as well as in France. We're talking about someone as big as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the '50s."
"Her life is extraordinary, and it's a great story," London said. "What we're trying to show here is the human level, the struggle of the artist and then, of course, give the audience her songs, so they can see the contrast between the struggle, the terror, the pain of her life and the beautiful gift that she gave the world with these songs."
Co-directed by Hampton and Crystal Solana Bryan and starring London as Piaf, with Carl Donovan as the Heckler and Andrei Cheine as the Accompanist, the play places Piaf in contemporary times looking back on her life.
"That was more my idea," London said. "I felt that it gave her perspective. She could talk to a contemporary audience, and we could have some comic takes on what life was then and what she knows now. . . . We can talk about the whole arc of her life."
Hampton remembers hearing Piaf sing at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1956. Piaf's triumphs as a singer, though, could not save her from the debilitating effects of alcohol and drug abuse throughout much of her life. A year after her final engagement, at Paris' legendary L'Olympia, she went into a coma and died quietly in her home in the south of France on Oct. 11, 1963.
Hampton traveled to Paris and searched through used record bins to find her French recordings and bring them back to the United States. What sealed his devotion to Piaf was his discovery of her autobiography, My Life.
London has performed Piaf's songs for years, in restaurants such as the former Le Bordeaux in Tampa.
"We decided that the show is really song-driven," she said. "We picked the songs that illustrate different facets of her life, and then we thought of a text that would move gracefully into the songs as part of the movement of her life."
Her most famous song is La Vie En Rose, which she wrote in 1945. Her friends and songwriting team balked at her songwriting attempts, so she put it aside for a year, then unveiled it at a Paris concert. It became the biggest hit of her career.
Piaf met a group of young French singers known as Les Compagnons de la Chanson in 1946. Taking charge of the group, she recorded the song Les Trois Cloches with them. That hit paved the way for Piaf's first appearances in New York.
During her stay in New York, she met boxing champion Marcel Cerdan. Their whirlwind romance led to her classic song L'Hymne a l'Amour in tribute to Cerdan, who died in a plane crash in 1949. Distraught by the loss, Piaf spiraled into a deep depression, which led to her morphine addiction and death.
Despite her tragic life -- or perhaps in part because of it -- she still is known as the Queen of French Chanson. "Piaf was a tragic figure," Hampton said, "and she put that in her songs."
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PREVIEW: Piaf: Flight of the Little Sparrow, today through Feb. 23, Gorilla Theatre, 4419 N Hubert Ave., Tampa. 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sun. $20-$25 general, $15-$20 seniors and students. (813) 879-2914.
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