Jazz amuck

>> La Résurrection de Lady Lester fails to capture that swing

by AMY BARRATT

How can a play about the heartrending downfall of a great jazz musician spawn a production with a heart of stone? That's the question I was asking myself as I left the Monument-National last week after seeing La Résurrection de Lady Lester, a French-language version of American playwright OyamO's tribute to tenor sax man Lester Young.

I spoke to OyamO (alias Charles F. Gordon) prior to seeing the production and he expressed excitement at the treatment his work was getting at the hands of the Théâtre de la LNI and director Julie Vincent. There's no question that theirs is a beautiful production. With set and costumes all done in black and white, it is reminiscent of one of those old jazz photos: all shadows and light and gleaming instruments.

But the best photography moves us emotionally as well as aesthetically and good theatre must do the same. I never got the sense from any of the actors in this production that they were incarnating real people who had lived and suffered. Oh, they talk a lot about what a hard time they're having, but we don't see it and we certainly don't feel it.

"I think there's something about [Young's] spirit that all of us need," said the playwright, "not the self-destructive part, but the part that wanted to soar into new spaces."

Young is generally credited with single-handedly inspiring the "cool" jazz of the '50s. OyamO's play tries to cover the musician's whole life, but mainly focuses on the later years when everywhere he turned young players were imitating his sound, yet the alcoholic and ailing Lester couldn't get a job.

Actor Didier Lucien is fine at playing the bitter, dissipated Lester, but the jazz visionary with the other-worldly sound? He is not present on that stage. Lucien's short, stocky build and lumbering movements are just wrong for the part.

Among the remaining cast members, Mireille Naggar stands out for her truly dreadful scene as Billie Holiday. In her defense, it's a difficult challenge for any actress to create a character through a single monologue dropped into the middle of a play. Naggar creates a wiggly, human-feather-boa physicality for Lady Day that is simply annoying. Like Lester much of the time, she comes across merely as whiny.

There is something inexplicably, inexcusably cute about the whole thing, from the modified porkpie hats on every single head to Lucien padding around in bare feet for the whole show like an oversized baby.

OyamO praised the tightness the company had achieved with this production, claiming that they had it down to 90 minutes. "I've seen other productions that ran almost three hours," he said, adding that some directors let the music overtake the play. In one production, "the action stopped and they had a concert in the middle."

Though the opening night performance ran about 100 minutes, the period music, played live on stage by Sayyd Abdul Al-Khabbyr, Jorge Ross, Jeffrey Simons and Adam Over, is generally effective and doesn't slow the action. Music playing underneath dialogue is occasionally used to advantage when the actors' voices are effectively jamming with the instruments. More often, though, music and dialogue get into conflict, with actors yelling their lines without nuance just to be heard.

La Résurrection de Lady Lester in the Salle du Maurier of the Monument-National (1182 St-Laurent) to Dec. 2, 8:30pm, $20-25, 871-2224