We chatted to Melissa about her show Deux Grandes Dames with Isabelle Georges, taking place on the 10th and 13th July.
How does it feel to be back performing at Crazy Coqs again? Crazy Coqs is one of my favourite singing spaces – I mean, I sing in the space, but also the space sings for me! It’s intimate, elegant, welcoming, and the audiences have a special British flavour that I love. I’ve now been there so many times that I feel very comfortable with the tiny dressing room (where you may end up sharing it with a full swing jazz band, a philosopher magician, or a brilliant drag artist), and the dynamic, somehow sexy, atmosphere of the round intimate nightclub with two swinging portal hole windowed doors, and bright-red seats and walls covered in art deco details. Tres chic!
People sometimes come for several nights in a row, introduce themselves, make it feel like home. It’s become part of my life. (It neatly overlaps with my husband, Patrick McEnroe’s television residence at Wimbledon, so we have tennis and music in tandem.)
What can audiences expect from Deux Grandes Dames that is different from your other work we know you for, especially the songs of Stephen Sondheim? This is a duet show, of course, with the great Isabelle Georges joining me direct from Paris. My Sondheim shows are more like concerts – recitals, almost, of his great songs. This show is more classic vaudeville-music-hall – almost burlesque, in the old fashioned sense. Two divas joking and playing and singing in English and French and sharing their delight with each other with an audience. Sexy gowns, clowning in suits & berets, dizzy dialogue, wild singing… it’s, well, fun.
How did the idea for the show first come about? Isabelle and I were introduced in Paris a couple of years ago, because we both had been muses of Michel Legrand. She sang the part of Isabelle in his musical “Le Passe Muraille” and I sang the same part when it came to New York as “Amour”. (They changed the name because the producers insisted that the only three words Americans know in French are: croissant, bonjour, and amour!). So, we were already spiritual sisters, daughters of Michel, and we fell on each other like long-lost twins. (I have twins of my own, now aged 15, so I recognise the emotion of likeness – and difference.)
How has it been working with Isabelle on the show? Did you create it together?Yes – we each chose favourite songs and shared ideas. Isabelle loves Broadway – she wanted to do “Happy Days Are Here Again” – and I love classic French chanson – so I’m the one who’s singing Piaf. And we had some new numbers written, including a hilarious one about Americans speaking French, by Marc Shaiman, who just won the Grammy for best Broadway score for “Some Like It Hot” and my pet lyricist, the usually serious essayist Adam Gopnik. Huge fun.
Can you choose a favourite song to sing or is that an impossible question? I do love so many songs… but if I were forced to choose, three come to mind. I love to sing “ Not While I’m Around”— the Sondheim song from Sweeney Todd about protecting a serial murderer! But in my arrangement it’s a song about protecting children. Truly. Then “Move On” often ends my shows and offers my favourite wisdom: “Anything you do, let it come from you/then it will be new.” And finally I’ve been encoring shows with “How are Things in Glocca Morra?” from “Finian’s Rainbow” for decades. It’s my anthem. A song of peace, especially important these days…
What is next the next project for you? I’m going back into the studio to record with my pianist, Tedd Firth, shortly. I’ll keep the contents a secret for now, but we hope to make a shimmering ‘single.’ And I’m playing the part of Eleanor of Aquitaine, believe it or not, in a new musical by David Shire. She divided her time between London and Paris, just like me. (I don’t think New York had been invented yet!)
By Emma Clarendon