Patti Boulaye – Crazy Coqs

Patti Boulaye appears at the Crazy Coqs, London until 8 March

Patti Boulaye performs at the Crazy Coqs, London, until 8 March.

First of all, I have to declare an interest. Along with thousands of red-blooded males, I was totally smitten by Patti Boulaye when she won the 1978 edition of New Faces, the X Factor of its day, and many a good marriage was put at risk when this exotic creature with the beautiful braided hair invaded our living rooms on Saturday nights.

Looks apart, she had an electrifying voice and more charisma than all the other contestants put together. The result was a foregone conclusion and glorious Boulaye made history by becoming the only performer in six series to get the maximum score of 120.

She had already attracted some attention when, under her birth name Patricia Ebigwei, she won a part in Hair when she joined a queue for an audition which she mistakenly thought was for Madame Tussauds, and later played Yum-Yum in The Black Mikado at the Cambridge Theatre.

After the national TV exposure of New Faces, a huge future seemed assured. However, although I saw her in Carmen Jones at the Old Vic in the early 1990s, she retreated from the public eye to devote her energies to doing good deeds for Africa and bringing up a family.

It is only now, after a 14-year break, that she’s back with a cabaret act which has already been a hit at the London Hippodrome and The Pheasantry, and the good news is that she is every bit as glamorous as ever (although the big feather boa was probably a bit OTT for such a small, sophisticated room). The voice is still as potent and at its best in the raunchy blues numbers such as the innuendo-strewn Bessie Smith classic ‘Kitchen Man’ (“That boy sure knows how to handle some meat!”), Etta James’ ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ and, most particularly, ‘Rough and Ready Man’.

The last-named is a terrific Alberta Hunter song with priceless lines like: “When he snores I want the force to blow the bedclothes to the floor/And the breezes from his sneezes to knock the padlock off the door”, and well worth a look on YouTube with Hunter performing it in her eighties.

Early in the evening she introduced her equally stunning daughter Aret Kapetanovic, who once represented Nigeria in the Miss World contest. Listening to her classy version of the Billie Holiday standard ‘God Bless the Child’, it was hard to believe that not one of the four judges on The Voice turned round last year to sign up this massive talent.

Back with Boulaye (assisted by Allan Rogers on piano), there was a mixed bag of blues, pop standards and songs from shows she was associated with, ‘Dat’s Love’ from Carmen Jones, ‘The Sun Whose Rays’ from Black Mikado and a cracking version of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, which is really a man’s song, from South Pacific, in which she once played Bloody Mary.

‘I’ll Be There’, a huge hit for the Jackson Five in the 1970s, was dedicated to the memory of Michael Jackson whom she first met as a skinny 17-year-old, but those Lloyd Webber crowd-pleasers ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ and ‘Memory’, while both technically proficient, failed to move me perhaps as much as they should have done.

It wasn’t a perfect first night by any means. The nerves were showing early on as she hit a few dubious notes and talked too rapidly, but she had them under control for ‘In My Memory’, a lovely tribute to her husband and children.

We could well have done without what seemed like an endless list of minor celebrity friends being introduced, many of them household names only in their own households. Giving a nod to the excellent Lindsey Coulson and Ann Mitchell from EastEnders was fair enough, but a Bond girl from long ago and Anthea Turner?

The art of good cabaret is making everyone feel you are singing just for them, it should almost be a one-to-one experience, and Boulaye only occasionally made that connection for me. By the end of the week, with nerve-ends under control and linking material tidied up, it will surely be a more convincing show.

Jeremy Chapman

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