Finding My Voice continues at The Other Palace, London until 8 May 2018.
Star rating: four stars ★★★★☆
Audiences in the UK will know actress Kathleen Turner from her first film Body Heat in 1981, a film that was notable for its steamy sex scenes and for Turner’s husky-voiced performance as a woman planning to dispose of her husband, much like the heroine of Double Indemnity, by getting her lover to do the dirty deed.
After that more films came her way including The Man With Two Brains, Romancing the Stone, Crimes of Passion, The Jewel of the Nile, Prizzi’s Honour, Peggy Sue Got Married (earning her an Oscar nomination), The War of the Roses, The Accidental Tourist, V. I. Warshawski and Serial Mom, among others. She was famously uncredited as the voice of Jessica Rabbit in the animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
On television Turner has worked on The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Law & Order, Californication and Family Guy. An even more unusual role was playing Chandler Bing’s cross-dressing dad in Friends in which she was a woman playing a man playing a woman. On stage she was Maggie in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and she came to London to play Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, which then transferred to Broadway. She was Texas journalist Molly Ivins in Red Hot Patriot, took the lead in Mother Courage and played Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking.
In Finding My Voice, subtitled ‘singing songs and sharing stories’, Turner talks about her life and career and intersperses the anecdotes with an eclectic selection of songs. It seems from her monologues that our Kathleen has not led a quiet life. In fact she appears to have led several up-and-down lives as actress, director, teacher, voiceover artist, political activist, and supporter of many worthy causes such as Planned Parenthood of America, with whom she has worked since she was 19 years old, People for the American Way, Amnesty International and Citymeals-on-Wheels. She has also supported the US Democratic Party.
Last but not least, as a sufferer from rheumatoid arthritis for many years, she has worked to raise public awareness of the disease. Happily, with some special treatment for her condition the disease has been in remission for many years. Turner talks about this and the other lows and highs of her life with both humour and great candour and is particularly moving when describing the at times unbearable pain of her illness.
Between the tales from a well-lived life the evening fields some great musical interludes, with her songs encompassing a mixture of Great American Songbook material and more personal items that relate to aspects of her life. This, the first work she considers that she has actually created herself (with the aid of musical director Mark Janas and director Andy Gale), is the one thing that really makes her feel alive.
Not a natural-born singer – she’s a bass-baritone – she nevertheless has the great art of putting over a number with that something extra, her own personal touch. Her voice reminded me of that other husky-toned actress Tallulah Bankhead and, indeed, in the course of the evening Turner reveals that she once toured in a show about the great Tallulah, dahling!
Opening with a couple of classic songs, Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Where or When?’ and Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s ‘Let’s Fall in Love’, the evening begins on a high note and then never lets up. Among the repertoire are Buddy Johnson’s ‘Since I Fell for You’, Kern and Fields’ ‘Pick Yourself Up’ and Arlen and Harburg’s ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’. It’s good to hear these standards given a new twist and Turner obviously enjoys performing them.
She seems particularly at home with the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer song ‘Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home’ and Dave Frishberg’s ‘Sweet Kentucky Ham’. Then there’s bit of a jolt when she essays the Lerner and Loewe My Fair Lady ballad ‘On the Street Where You Live’, which here becomes the street where WE live! Act I concludes with Michel Legrand and the Bergmans’ ‘On My Way to You’, Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Nobody’s Heart’, Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Live Alone and Like It’ and William Finn’s ‘I’d Rather Be Sailing’, a generous assortment of musical treats.
If our heroine has succeeded in ‘finding my voice’, she has had inestimable help from her band members, Jonathan Preiss on guitar, Jonny Gee and Jerome Davies on bass, and musical director Mark Janas on piano, who has created some brilliant jazz arrangements of the songs.
Act II continues with more treasures from the American archives including ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’ from South Pacific, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s ‘Ev’rybody Has the Right to be Wrong’, and a very Sondheim-sounding song from the musical Skyscraper.
Talking of Sondheim, Turner gives us the epitome of songs written for actors, ‘Send in the Clowns’ and delivers the goods immaculately. The Gershwins’ ‘A Foggy Day’ and Abbey Lincoln’s ‘Throw It Away’ take us to the finale, a terrific medley of Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’ and Irving Berlin’s ‘What’ll I Do?’, so good that it’s hard to keep the tears at bay. Kathleen Turner has certainly found her voice.
Michael Darvell
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