Floanne

July 23, 2014

FloanneA set of French (or Frenchified) love songs is a nice, if fairly obvious, idea for a one-off on Bastille Day. The Franco-American singer Floanne (full name Flo Ankah) was happy to comply with the concept—if not exactly fully engage with fashioning a tight, full-fledged set. At one point in her loosey-goosey presentation at Joe’s Pub, she announced that she hadn’t had any direction for this obviously “new” show. She meant a person who directs, but the statement works well as a pun, too. Despite frequent peeks at her script, Floanne goofed on several of her spoken setups, offered us too much process, saying that she had called five accordionists to accompany her in this show (her fan base had made online requests for the instrument), but “all of them were out of town.” Near the end of her show, she announced that since she had some time left on the clock, she would take requests, then nudged those requests toward the oeuvres of Edith Piaf, a signature bloc for this performer and very welcome. But then, after a couple of pseudo-encores, she proclaimed that she knew “when to shut up” and promptly left the stage, asking, “I can go home now, can’t I?”

To be fair, her faithful followers in the audience found this casual approach acceptable, even charming, and the venue’s downtown sensibilities might be interpreted by some as license to adopt such a free-wheeling approach. But no one should have encouraged Floanne to provide a screen at the back of the stage on which to display the tweets of audience members on the subject of love, tweeted while she was singing! Her conceit for the narrative portion of the act was pronouncements on love in most of its aspects, a subject on which she seems far too young to be an expert. Despite there being many estimable French-language songs about love (especially if you count the work of the Belgian-born Jacques Brel), Floanne also felt compelled to translate several non-French numbers to fit the bill. Thus, she offered her versions of Irving Berlin’s “Always”; “Sometimes I’m Happy (Vincent Youmans, Irving Caesar); and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (Roy Turk, Lou Handman). Oddly, the most successful song in her entire set was the only one she sang entirely in English, the country classic “You Don’t Know Me” (Eddy Arnold, Cindy Walker).

Oh, there were the expected evergreens, too, such as “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“If You Go Away”—Brel, with English lyrics by Rod McKuen); “I Will Wait for You” (Michel Legrand, Jack Derny, from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg); and the charming “Mon coeur est un violon” (Miarka Laparcerie, J. Richepin). Floanne sings in a strong, pleasant voice, but her modulation is almost uniform for each number, and her arrangements are a bit bouncy for some of the more serious numbers. Her splendid trio (Ian J. MacDonald, piano; Joe Cohn, bass and guitar; Luca Santaniello, drums) played along as if they didn’t notice.

“Love Is French”
Joe’s Pub  –  July 14

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About the Author

Robert Windeler is the author of 18 books, including biographies of Mary Pickford, Julie Andrews, Shirley Temple, and Burt Lancaster. As a West Coast correspondent for The New York Times and Time magazine, he covered movies, television and music, and he was an arts and entertainment critic for National Public Radio. He has contributed to a variety of other publications, including TV Guide, Architectural Digest, The Sondheim Review, and People, for which he wrote 35 cover stories. He is a graduate of Duke University in English literature and holds a masters in journalism from Columbia, where he studied critical writing with Judith Crist. He has been a theatre critic for Back Stage since 1999, writes reviews for BistroAwards.com, and is a member of The Players and the American Theatre Critics Association.