EDITH PIAF's TRICK IS TO MAKE NEW YORKERS FEEL
Each season folks trek to the Versailles Cafe to hear Edith Piaf. She's not much to look at; white-faced, dyed reddish hair, figure too thin in some places, too bumpy else where and too short for graceful clothes. She has almost no jewels and her stocking color is wrong for the corrective shoes she wears. No apllied glamor whatsoever, but the unmistakable talent she possesses in her throat, hands and soul. The way she sings makes you feel. If there's one thing New York audiences never get enough of, it is emotional reaction. Most folks are dead pan through a performance; "sit on their hands." But not when La Piaf is singing. The Versailles Cafe is said to pay her $4,000 a week for her twice-a-night warbling, and keeps re-engaging her season after season. So her love agonies put to song prove profitable.
Something rapturous passes from her to you. You feel intense sadness or ecstacy as she chants about love in a gravely voice that is tough yet tender. In her native French or English. Edith reaches you. Her hands flutter is supplication or in caress. Her face distorts and her movements on stage are awkward. But she "sends" audiences as she stands forlorn against a green velvet curtain; no props; no orchestra showing, though playing feverishly behind stage. Also hard-working at flooding this performer's songs with magic is the lighting man who raises the gamin-like Piaf to ecclesiastic brilliance with "religious blue" lights that give her torchy passion a kind of piety.
Alice Hughes
Source fultonhistory.com:
The Evening Leader - Tuesday, October 7, 1952 - Page 4.
