Natalie Douglas performs at the Crazy Coqs, London
Natalie Douglas sings Four Women: Nina, Lena, Abbey & Billie at the Crazy Coqs, London, until 15 February.
New York jazz and cabaret star Natalie Douglas is one of those performers who fills a room with warmth and sheer loveability just by coming on the stage.
Her second residency at the Crazy Coqs, one of the great success stories of London’s music scene thanks to our hostess, the multi-talented Ruth Leon, bringing over consummate artists we had never seen before and were being deprived off until she and this lovely room came along 15 months ago, is already such a hit that a second, late-night show has been hastily arranged for Valentine’s evening.
Not one but two encores were required before a wildly enthusiastic first-night audience were willing to let her go.
Yet when she came over the same week last year with her Nina Simone tribute, few, other than regular visitors to the New York cabaret scene, had even heard of her.
With a voice big enough to fill the Albert Hall never mind a 66-seater like the Coqs, this is an artist who can do the lot – funny, serious, loud, quiet, slow and fast, soulful and scatty. And she has a quality that all great performers in this intimate genre possess and is impossible to fake, a contagiousness in her storytelling that brings everyone in the audience immediately onside.
Here she gives us the songs of four black icons of the last century, Simone again, Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln and Billie Holiday, and puts her own special spin on every item. Not just an entertainer (with Mark Hartman the perfect foil on piano), she is an educator as well as she relates the stories behind such dark and disturbing songs as ‘Strange Fruit’ and ‘Mississippi Goddam’ which played their part in helping to change the status of black people in the States.
It is not so very long ago that Lena Horne was denied the key part of Julie LaVerne in the 1951 movie Show Boat – a role given to the non-singing Ava Gardner and made all the worse because Gardner was a personal friend – simply because the Production Code banned interracial relationships in films. Little wonder Horne, a civil rights activist who got blacklisted for her political views, got disenchanted with Hollywood and concentrated increasingly on her nightclub work.
Hard to believe now that, apart from the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky in 1943, Horne never had a leading movie role, only stand-alone singing cameos, because that would have involved re-editing for states not allowed to show films with black performers.
Equally hard to believe that while blacks could entertain and be adored by white, segregated audiences, they were not permitted to eat in the same restaurants after shows nor, in some cases, sit in the same part of a bus.
Yet Douglas does not ram these atrocities down our throats because she realises we have come to be entertained, not lectured.
And she does it in such a attractively persuasive way that we go home fully aware of a history lesson we must never be allowed to forget for, while the songs that these four women wrote and performed so brilliantly undoubtedly sped along a greater acceptance of their colour, things are still far from perfect, not in the States, not in the UK, not anywhere.
But race is far from being the only subject. For instance, we learn that the perfectly-sung ‘Say It Isn’t So’ was one of two songs – ‘How Deep is the Ocean’ the other – that Irving Berlin, during a period of depression, threw away in 1932 as not being up to scratch, and it is only thanks to a copyist who rescued them from the trash can that we can hear them now as the immortal standards they turned out to be.
And we discover that Abbey Lincoln was not only originally billed as “the sepia Marilyn Monroe” but even wore Marilyn’s dress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (without needing any padding!).
A personal favourite from this glorious 16-song evening was ‘Mr Bojangles’, an evergreen hit for Simone which country singer Jerry Jeff Walker wrote while serving time in a New Orleans jail for public intoxication. We, too, go home intoxicated because the way the formidable Douglas inhabits them, every one is a cracker.
Jeremy Chapman
Readers may also be interested in:
Frances Ruffelle – Paris Original – Crazy Coqs – Review
Liz Callaway – Crazy Coqs – Review
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