[title]
‘Finding My Voice’ is a sort of An Evening With… affair, wherein Kathleen Turner – the star of ‘Body Heat’, ‘Romancing the Stone’ et al – plots an anecdote-strewn path through her life story while frequently breaking off to knock out numbers from the Great American Songbook.
The famously croaky-voiced Turner is not a technically great singer, but she does have the drama and intelligence of a good cabaret performer, and wisely avoids reaching for ambitiously fancy notes. The song selection is fairly uncompromising, and only real nerds for mid-twentieth-century crooner standards are likely to know the bulk of them, but they’re all the sort of animated, dramatic story-songs that work fine with a good storyteller.
Turner’s screen career may have peaked in the ’80s and ’90s, but she retains a megawatt celebrity charisma that helps her over the bumps in a slightly rambling show. She is – by design – far from polished, but she has a conspiratorial, ‘ah, fuck it’ energy that keeps things fun.
‘Finding My Voice’ proceeds in roughly chronological order, albeit with frequent non-sequitur-ish diversions. It’s a weird mix of the shambolic and the well-honed. Despite the off-the-cuff air, there is something fundamentally polished about Turner’s storytelling. And she never really lets us in too far: her anecdotes are largely observational, rarely telling us how she thinks or feels. We learn more about her – admittedly colourful – years growing up as a diplomat’s daughter than we ever get in the way of Hollywood goss. The closest she gets to opening up is describing the rheumatoid arthritis that blighted her career in the second half of the ’90s, interpolated with Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’. And even that’s a story that ends with a happy punch of triumph.
Yet for all the craft in the stories, the whole feels ill-defined. You wonder how much direction director Andy Gale was allowed to give – the show is crying out to be taken rigorously in hand. It meanders to an end that leaves little sense of where Turner’s life is at now. But of course to the sort of person who is going to buy a ticket to ‘Finding My Voice’, where Turner is at is right here in The Other Palace – and she is undeniably fabulous.
Read Time Out’s 2014 interview with Kathleen Turner here.