Piaf: Love Conquers All

Written by Roger Peace

Directed by Naomi Emmerson

CSV Cultural and Educational Center

107 Suffolk Street

www.fringenyc.org

 

Review by Amy Krivohlavek

 

Nobody turned torture into triumph like Edith Piaf, the pint-sized French chanteuse who attacked her songs with the same ferocity and venom with which she eventually destroyed her body. At this year’s New York International Fringe Festival, Naomi Emmerson channels the troubled singer in Piaf: Love Conquers All, a forceful one-woman show that presents Piaf’s life in a collage of scenes interspersed with 13 of her most celebrated songs.

 

Vocal Cues: Naomi Emmerson channels a troubled singer in Piaf: Love Conquers All.

 

Piaf vaulted to fame after being plucked off the streets, where she had been singing for her supper. Audiences latched onto her gritty humor, bawdy presence, and fearless vocalizations. Tragedy struck Piaf early and often, and she would eventually succumb to the numbing forces of drugs. But while she lived, she sang as though her life depended on it — and it usually did.

 

Piaf has become something of an icon, and in this intimate production, writer Roger Peace chooses to focus on two major forces in Piaf’s life: music and love. An elegant cascade of monologues and music, Piaf moves chronologically through the singer’s life, linking representative songs to significant events. Act I is especially sharp, while Act II, which traces Piaf’s decline, feels more haphazardly patched together.

 

But despite several structural bumps, Emmerson is a revelation in a role she has been playing for nearly 15 years (the show was previously a hit at the 2005 Toronto Fringe Festival). She captures the lustrous nasality of Piaf’s voice, her spirited, crass humor, and her otherworldly gestures, in which her limbs seem to be tugged by outside forces. Emmerson is especially terrific in “Hymne A L’amour,” the hypnotic ballad Piaf sings after the death of a lover — she visibly pours her pain into her performance. 

 

Stephanie Layton provides strong support on piano, accordion, and in a mélange of roles. Pat and Bob Cann’s set is also lovely — a landscape of white punctuated by red and black, the décor is a blank canvas waiting to be colored. Emmerson splashes a rainbow of hues across the stage in this extraordinary performance, which offers us an opportunity to feast on what Piaf herself loved the most: her men and her music.