Rosy homecoming

Naomi Emmerson returns to Montreal as
Edith Piaf in the one-woman show,
Piaf: Love Conquers All

ICONIC PERFORMER: Emmerson as Piaf

By NEIL BOYCE

Old timers: cast your memory back. In the late ’80s, alongside Montreal bands like the Nils and the Asexuals, Naomi Emmerson was singing for the alt-rock outfit Sons of the Desert. An audition with multifaceted Montreal producer-playwright Roger Peace launched the next stage of Emmerson’s career in musical theatre. Work in Nunsense, the title role in Jeanne: The Joan of Arc Musical Drama, and a flurry of productions in Toronto followed, all on the heels of Peace’s Piaf: Love Conquers All, where then 20-something Emmerson had the guts to take on a solo show about the iconic chanteuse.

Flash forward to 2006, where Emmerson, now a stage veteran, reprised the show at the Toronto Fringe (winning a Top 10 pick), then the 2007 New York Fringe—followed by packed houses in a two-week run Off Broadway—just after Olivier Dahan’s film La Vie en Rose broke the Piaf revival in 2007.

Over a rehearsal break, Emmerson spoke about the work (now playing at Centaur Theatre) and the road that led her to the Little Sparrow.

Mirror: You have a long history with this show.

Naomi Emmerson: Yeah, from ’93, and then I didn’t really think about it for 12 years. Patsy (Gallant) had done it first in dinner theatre in Montreal, and then Roger (Peace) wanted to take it to Toronto. I was already doing a show with Roger, a “Tribute to Broadway” kind of thing. He asked if I’d be interested in doing the Piaf show—I’d seen Patsy do it and really liked it. And I was so young! I can’t believe I actually said yes to tackling a two-hour show. That led to work in Toronto and then moving there—one thing led to another.

M: Hadn’t you been doing musicals for a while by that point?

NE: Not really. I was mainly doing Sons of the Desert and getting into musical theatre through an amateur company called Spontaneous Combustion. And I did a couple of shows with Montreal West Operatic Society, but I’d always thought of myself as a musician and a frontman—or frontwoman, I guess—until the acting happened.

M: When the show was revived, what made you want to go back to a Fringe setting?

NE: Nobody has ever asked me that. For a first-time producer, the Fringe is a great place to get your chops together. We did all the press ourselves, I had to find the money, cast it... It’s a good starting off point because the Fringe has a great marketing campaign—you ride on their budget, they run the ticketing—it allowed me to get some skills.

M: How are you at the end of a performance?

NE: Pretty exhausted, I have to say. Even at the rehearsal. There’s a huge physical change that happens in the second act. Piaf was crippled with arthritis, so I have to hold my body in a certain way and still relax—you can’t sing in a tense position. So it’s almost like a Bikram Yoga class: I’m breathing deeply throughout the entire show.

M: What is it like being Piaf from night to night?

NE: The thing is, with a one-woman show, the other character is the audience. Crowds that are more bilingual catch the jokes a little better. You can tell a crowd that knows Piaf well from one that’s just discovering her. But I try not to actually look at the audience (laughing). It really works sometimes, other times it’s like, “Can you get your feet off the stage, please?”

PIAF: LOVE CONQUERS ALL CONTINUES
TO FEB. 8 AT CENTAUR THEATRE
(453 ST-FRANÇOIS-XAVIER),
(514) 288-3161