Songs of Bernadette: Bernadette Robinson at The Pheasantry

Songs of Bernadette: Bernadette Robinson at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

You got 11 divas for the price of one when Bernadette Robinson, an Australian actress-singer-songwriter with a massive talent for impersonation, made a striking debut at The Pheasantry.

Little known in this country until garnering excellent reviews for her one-woman musical play Songs For Nobodies at The Ambassadors at the start of this year (and earlier at Wilton’s Music Hall), Robinson’s two nights at The Pheasantry were being recorded for a live album.

In Song For Nobodies, specially written for her by Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, Robinson plays five ordinary folk, the “nobodies”, whose paths briefly cross five famous singers, Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, Maria Callas, Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday.

The show gives full rein to Robinson’s special gifts and her Pheasantry cabaret (first seen last month at the Crazy Coqs) expanded on that quintette, bringing in five more, Eartha Kitt, Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey and Aretha Franklin.

The 11th diva was herself. She has a powerful, warm, pleasing voice of her own, honed by the coaching of legendary Australian soprano Dame Joan Hammond.

Her own-voice versions of ballads by fellow Aussie Roger Hart (‘One Perfect Day’), Canadian Jane Siberry (‘Love Is Everything’), Irish songsmith Damien Rice (‘The Blower’s Daughter’) and the self-penned ‘Playing Games’ are excellent.

But it is her impersonations that dominate proceedings, the kittenish purr of Eartha Kitt on Jacques Brel’s ‘If You Go Away’ eerily accurate and five Piaf classics in immaculate French right down to the rolling Rs uncanny and mesmerising.

Holiday’s gravelly, unique voice is hard to get right but Robinson gets pretty close in the infamous ‘Strange Fruit’, about the horrors of lynchings – “black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze” – which was banned by many radio stations at the time (1939) for fear of upsetting their white audiences

‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ from My Fair Lady was the vehicle for Robinson to demonstrate how Streisand, Callas, Bassey and Garland might have done it, the Callas startlingly good.

Bassey has a song on her own with ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, booming and dramatic, which kicked off the second set.

Patsy Cline hits ‘I Fall to Pieces’ and ‘Leavin’ On Your Mind’ catch the American’s country twang to perfection and Robinson has fun with Streisand’s eccentricities and Andrews’ posh Englishness, accompanied by the accomplished Greg Arrowsmith on piano.

Like many actors, it is only when Robinson inhabits another persona that she truly comes to life. Her rather awkwardly delivered linking material, some of it interesting, like meeting Audrey Hepburn when the Hollywood icon visited Sydney in her role as a UNICEF ambassador in 1989, takes her out of her comfort zone.

She is inclined to rush her stories and is often indistinct. The chat needs a polish. But give her a voice to copy and this likeable performer is transformed into a superstar herself, deserving of a bigger audience than this.

Jeremy Chapman