Melody Beck
and John Martin,
Teatro
Vivaldi, 19th February 2016
Reviewed by
Bill Stephens
If you’ve
never heard of Marni Nixon don’t be too hard on yourself. Marni Nixon made a
career out of being anonymous. She was one of a small group of singers, known
as voice ghosts, who worked in Hollywood during the heyday of Hollywood
musicals, providing voices for film stars whose own vocal equipment didn’t make
the grade.
Sydney
based singer, Melody Beck, became so fascinated with Marni Nixon’s story that
she wrote a cabaret about her, which she’s performed at cabaret festivals
around Australia, and even once in New York where she performed it in front of
the real Marni Nixon.
Last Friday
night Melody performed her cabaret at Teatro Vivaldi’s in front of a celebrity
audience which included Simon Gallaher, Michael Cormick, John Wood and Normie
Rowe, all in town for the annual CAT Awards the following night.
Dressed in a
smart black cocktail dress, and without the aid of any props, Melody assumed
the character of Marnie Nixon, and spoke in the first person to tell her story.
If the real Marnie Nixon is anything like the character Beck portrayed then she
is a charming storyteller perfectly capable of keeping her audience totally enthralled
as she shares her extraordinary story.
In telling the
stories about the making of the movies for which she provided her unique
talent, among liberal sprinklings of songs from those movies, Nixon provides
uncannily accurate demonstrations of the voices of her famous clients, not only
as we know them from the films in which they appeared, but their real voices -
Natalie Wood’s for “West Side Story”, Deborah Kerr’s for “The King and I”,
Audrey Hepburn’s for “My Fair Lady”. “I
dubbed their voices but they dubbed my face” she explains.
Nixon even
dubbed the voices of the three cockney geese in “Mary Poppins”. She confides
that she did appear in one film under her own name. She played Sister Sophia in
the Julie Andrews film “The Sound of Music”.
Later in her
career after it was made public that the studios were using voice ghosts to
enhance the voices of their stars, Nixon enjoyed a career on the Las Vegas
circuit, even working with Liberace, whom she described as “a one-man
Disneyland”.
She even includes
samples of the work of other voice ghosts and so the voices of Margaret
O’Brien, Debbie Reynolds, Rita Hayworth, Jeanne Crain and Ida Lupino, both real
and dubbed, are featured in the show.
Nixon shares
the information that during the making of the film of “West Side Story” at one
point she provided the voices of both Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno, and
demonstrated hilariously by singing “Tonight” as a duet using the voices of
both actresses.
As she
demonstrated in her encore, Melody Beck herself possesses a crystal clear,
classically trained soprano voice. She shares with Marni Nixon, a keen ear and
remarkable vocal flexibility which allows her to mimic and reproduce the idiosyncrasies
of particular voices, in this case, very famous voices.
She has
harnessed this talent to create an impressively researched, stylishly performed
and delightfully entertaining cabaret, for which she was masterfully
accompanied at the piano by John Martin.
This review also appears in Australian Arts Review .. www.artsreview.com.au
