Pitre’s Piaf soars
The Angel and the Sparrow brings together legendary singers
Feathers fly when the Little Sparrow meets the Blue Angel in a story of the relationship between two legendary chanteuses. At the risk of being ungallant to one, there’s a clear winner by the end.
In Broadway director Gordon Greenberg ’s enjoyable production of the German musical biopic The Angel and the Sparrow, playing at the Segal Centre through May 6, Louise Pitre caps her many stage incarnations of Édith Piaf with a remarkable, heart-rending portrayal of a scraggy, diminutive goddess in self-destructive free fall. It is, rightly, hellish to watch — and heavenly to listen to, as Pitre, with incredible technical expertise, burns her way through more than 10 iconic numbers.
Carly Street, who plays Marlene Dietrich, the ice maiden who may have melted just a little before Piaf ’s raw incandescence, deferentially gives the supercharged Pitre most of the stage glory. But Street has her moments, too, and if she doesn’t quite pull off Dietrich’s sly, languid sexiness, she does deliver the many one-liners
with sharp precision, from her teasing coaxing of Piaf into her bed, to snippy put-downs in Las Vegas once their relationship has gone from erotic to platonic to a sour mutual disapproval of each other’s flaws.
Although it’s mostly the Piaf and Dietrich show, there are also solid performances from Lucinda Davis, playing various nurses, fans and celebs (including Lena Horne), and from Joe Matheson, who plays all the men. Most crucially, he plays boxing champ Marcel Cerdan, Piaf ’s true love, who died in a plane crash in 1949.
This last incident gives Pitre one of the most monumentally impassioned renditions of the night in Mon Dieu. And yet every song she sings is so electrifyingly aquiver, I sometimes wondered if she couldn’t perhaps nudge
down the intense-o-meter every now and then, if only to give us a chance to draw our breath. Actually, one song does take a different tack, and to great effect, when Piaf, high on booze and opiates, hectors the audience into a contagious yet grotesquely disturbing singalong to the jolly Bravo pour le clown.
Working from Sam Madwar’s translation of Daniel Grosse Boymann and Thomas Kahry’s original 2014 script, Erin Shields has clearly expanded the material from its jukebox-musical beginnings to something more substantial. One imagines that the Governor General Awardwinning author of If We Were Birds brought many of the sharper lines to the table.
Drama and smart dialogue aside, this is mostly a musical celebration, and Martin Ferland’s splendidly garish set design, complete with cabaret tables, glittery proscenium and neon name-checks of both stars, is the perfect backdrop. The live band, led by musical director Jonathan Monro, also razzle-dazzles.
Costume designer Louise Bourret of course decks out Dietrich in a glam riot of furry, shimmering, sometimes nattily androgynous numbers. Yet the costuming emphasizes that there’s a spectre at the feast: Piaf herself. It’s a measure of the tough love the production feels for its tragic heroine that the inevitable rendition of Non, je ne regrette rien is performed in a shabby hospital gown and a ragged, balding wig. Pitre, of course, soars above such distressing ugliness on gilded sparrow’s wings.