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Yvonne Constant
May 6, 2013
“One of a Kind”
Metropolitan Room – April 30, May 7, 20 28
It takes a certain Gallic chutzpah to call your cabaret show “One of a Kind.” Fortunately, Yvonne Constant, the French-born chanteuse who first came to New York as an ingénue in the 1958 Broadway mounting of La Plume de Ma Tante, is a singular talent who can get away with it. Her mantra is “Love gets in the way of your independence,” and her anthem could well be “Comme d’habitude,” the song that with Paul Anka’s English lyrics became “My Way.” Constant gives this number (music by Claude François and Jacques Revaux) an expansive treatment mid-set. She quickly dismisses the French lyrics (Gilles Thibaut and Claude François) by talk-singing a literal English translation of their banality, and ends with singing the rather more stirring Anka words. On either side of this centerpiece number, she offers a quixotic, eclectic mix of songs that maybe only she could pull off.
Who else would have the nerve to open a nightclub act with an aria? The lovely “Je chante avec toi liberté” from Nabucco, by Giuseppe Verdi, with lyrics by Pierre Delanoë and Claude Lemesle, might well be later slipped into the proceedings by another singer wanting to show off her chops, but Constant proudly makes her entrance walking to the stage with what she calls “my Andrea Bocelli moment.” Like many other performers, she offers two Broadway songs, back to back—but hers, which bear no relation to each other, come from the relatively obscure Tenderloin and Happy Hunting: “How the Money Changes Hands” (Harnick & Bock) and “New Fangled Tango” (Harold Karr, Matt Dubey), respectively. She does sing a Main Stem number that she sang in a hit show, “La La La” from No Strings (Richard Rodgers, who also wrote the lyrics, in French).
Constant’s 12-song set also includes two upbeat music-hall-style numbers: “One of Those Songs” (Gérard Calvi, Will Holt, French lyrics by Grégoire Krettly) and “It Was a Good Time” (Mike Curb, Mack David, Maurice Jarre). The song list suggests a medley of “I Know the Feeling” (Lee Pockriss, Anne Crosswell, from the 1963 Broadway musical Tovarich) and “Feelings” (Morris Albert, Mauricio Kaiserman), but, instead, Constant’s longtime musical director and pianist Russ Kassoff merely appropriates the show tune’s first line, singing “You know the feeling, you know it well” to introduce Constant’s rendition of the 1970s cabaret cliché. She rescues “Feelings” from old-hat status by performing it mostly in French, but I really wish she had sung “I Know the Feeling” in its entirety. Some female singer of a certain age ought to sing this haunting song, which was introduced by Vivien Leigh; it would be perfect for Constant.
Her more downbeat numbers include an Yves Montand signature song, “Au Kabaret de la dernière chance” (Pierre Barouh), and two World War II evocations: “Le Chant des partisans” (Anna Marliy Joseph Kessel, Maurice Druon)—done with the sound of Nazi boots marching in the background; and “Paris en colère” (Maurice Jarre, Maurice Vidalin), a song slightly better remembered as the waltz from the movie Is Paris Burning? Constant delivers all of her choices with passion and intelligence, in a voice that belies her 77 years. If I have a quibble, it’s only with her chat, which can get long and rambling. Her story of coming to America for La Plume de Ma Tante and marrying its conductor is way too extensive, and her over-recounting of a latter-day French financial scandal as an introduction to “How the Money Changes Hands” is intrusive and irrelevant. Cut these two texts and there’d have been room for at least one more of those wonderful songs.
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.
It takes a certain Gallic chutzpah to call your cabaret show “One of a Kind.” Fortunately, Yvonne Constant, the French-born chanteuse who first came to New York as an ingénue in the 1958 Broadway mounting of La Plume de Ma Tante, is a singular talent who can get away with it. Her mantra is “Love gets in the way of your independence,” and her anthem could well be “Comme d’habitude,” the song that with Paul Anka’s English lyrics became “My Way.” Constant gives this number (music by Claude François and Jacques Revaux) an expansive treatment mid-set. She quickly dismisses the French lyrics (Gilles Thibaut and Claude François) by talk-singing a literal English translation of their banality, and ends with singing the rather more stirring Anka words. On either side of this centerpiece number, she offers a quixotic, eclectic mix of songs that maybe only she could pull off.
where is she now? her website is down!
she is sooooooo special, I wanted to wish her a
bon nouvelle annee