Jessica Walker Selected Reviews

Pat Kirkwood is Angry 59E59 Theaters, New York (June 2014)

“Should Kirkwood be looking down from the showbiz heavens, she would be anything but riled by Ms Walker’s warm, evocative consideration of her career: a loving tribute from one singular talent to another.” – Charles Isherwood, New York Times

“Walker, a powerful soprano with a commanding stage presence and a piercing intelligence, rivets one's attention… If Pat Kirkwood is angry, she is never dull, not even for a minute, and Walker's show casts a fascinating light on an underappreciated talent.” – Lighting & Sound America

“Angry or sunny, Walker knows how to deliver a song with the right emotion… I enjoyed every song she sang – her voice is exquisite… Learning about Kirkwood’s life is interesting, but listening to Walker, who has sung roles across Europe, is even better.” – Life Upon The Sacred Stage

“Jessica Walker’s lovely musical memoir of the star’s life and career…But enough about Miss Kirkwood, — let us turn to the immense talent of Miss Walker as she deftly guides us on this intriguing journey. Not only is her original script a carefully crafted and fascinating exploration of this little-known saga, but also, thanks to her beautiful singing voice, the show comprises a virtual smorgasbord of wonderful songs associated with Kirkwood, and skilfully inserted in this production to gently guide the advancing plot.” – The People’s Critic

“Walker has a stunning voice that she knows exactly how to use… Walker delivers the goods musically speaking… Guess Who I Saw Today by Murray Grand and Elisse Boyd– a song that is over performed and often bludgeoned – is delivered with such simplicity that your heart cracks into a bazillion little pieces on the spot. And her Begin The Beguine is steeped in pathos so deep you can feel it all the way down to your toes. Walker weaves serious magic when she sings.” – Front Row Center

The Importance of Being Earnest NI Opera (October 2013)

“The individual performances are faultlessly precise. Aoife Miskelly as Cecily and Jessica Walker as Gwendoline hurl themselves around the stage with selfless enthusiasm.” – Andrew Clements, The Guardian *****

“McDonald drew similarly sharp, observant performances from the other singers, among whom the mezzo Jessica Walker’s shock-headed, punky Gwendolen Fairfax made a particularly sparky impression.” – Terry Blain, Opera Magazine

“Jessica Walker’s robust fashion-conscious Gwendolen was also extremely memorable.” – Andrew Mellor, Opera Now

An Eye for an Eye Bath International Music Festival (May 2013)

“What they have created is a charming musical nugget, a small, but perfectly formed treat, a delicious cupcake of a production. The two woman cast of Jessica Walker and Harriet Williams, both consummate vocalists and actresses, had to play the parts of the two maids as well as their two murder victims, exchanging personalities at will. It was evident that both women took much delight in playing out their roles – and they sang and danced, harmonised and soloed marvelously – and for such a dark subject matter, delightfully.” – Laura Dunlap, Listomania Bath

Rayfield Allied Member of the International Artist Southbank House, Managers’ Association Black Prince Road, London SE 1 7 SJ , UK Rayfield Allied acts as agent only and can www.rayfieldallied.com accept no responsibility as principal E-mail [email protected] Telephone +44 (0) 20 3176 5500 Facsimile +44 (0) 700 602 4143

Jessica Walker Selected Reviews

The Girl I Left Behind Me 59E59 Theaters, New York (May 2013)

“Ms. Walker herself is certainly a bewitching performer… a pure, bright soprano of such melting beauty I think I could listen to it forever.” – Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“Walker, a gifted chanteuse” – The New Yorker

“Jessica Walker pays tribute to male impersonators in her winning show The Girl I Left Behind Me.” – New York Post

“Possessing a warm and inviting aura as well as talents and abilities as both singer and performer that are indisputable, Ms. Walker is a pleasure.” – Stage and Cinema

“The 59E59 Theater does a great job of bringing unique performers to its occasional Cabaret venue, and they have hit another solid winner with The Girl I Left Behind Me .

It would be tragedy for me not to acknowledge a beautiful encore. Ms. Walker and Mr. Atkins did a fantastic job on Take Me Home – a little heard Tom Waits number from the little seen movie, One From The Heart. It was performed in a manner that left me a little breathless. Bravo”. – Reviews off Broadway

Mercy and Grand: The Tom Waits Project, Spitalfields Music Winter Festival

“Originally presented by Opera North, this unlikely but gripping project merits the wider audience that this live recording will bring. Gavin Bryars and his team take the songs of Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan, and present them incongruously but superbly sung by the pure-voiced English mezzo Jess Walker, accompanied by a wheezy circus-style band that features harmonium, accordion, musical saw and trumpet=violin. Some Kurt Weill/ Bertolt Brecht ditties and Gypsy dances make perfect complements.” – Richard Morrison, The Times

“Walker makes no attempt to replicate Waits's own famously gravelly delivery. She sings, however, with terrific passion, gliding with ease from the sardonic Little Drop of Poison to the knowing bitterness of Weill's Ballad of Sexual Dependency , and doing heartbreaking things with Whistle Down the Wind and Georgia Lee .” - Tim Ashley , The Guardian

“Walker may be primarily an opera singer, but her cabaret instinct is wonderfully sure: she took command of the proceedings from the moment she sauntered up the aisle, and held us riveted from the outset with ‘Little Drop of Poison’. Her warm clean sound may be a million miles from Waits’s growl, but she evoked wintry pathos with ‘Alice’ and ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ just as effectively; Weill’s ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ never sounded more bleak.” – Michael Church, The Independent

“Waits was present merely in spirit, however, and his gravelly seafarer’s bark was replaced in Shoreditch Church by Jessica Walker’s agile and dramatic mezzo-soprano…Walker extracted some rich lyrical colouring from Waits’s sea-shantyish Whistle Down The Wind …Pony , for instance, was a slow country ballad coloured with slide guitar and backwoods fiddle, with Walker squeezing soulfulness from the plaintive lyric.” - Adam Sweeting, The Telegraph

Jessica Walker Selected Reviews

Tete a Tete Opera Festival

“Accompanied by a combo of oboe, cello and percussion, Jessica Walker stylishly incarnated one of the unborn as a slinky cabaret star.” - Rupert Christiansen, Daily Telegraph

The Coronation Of Poppea, OperaUpClose

"Jessica Walker's Nero gleams and suggests a searching mind gone wrong. [Her] final duet is wondrous." - Kieron Quirke, Evening Standard

"...Jessica Walker, a Nero of swaggering charisma." - Hannah Nepil, Financial Times

"[Zoe] Bonner’s refined artistry is matched by that of Rebecca Caine as Ottavia, Jessica Walker as Nero, and Martin Nelson..." - Michael Church, The Independent

"The two leads - Zoe Bonner as Poppea and Jessica Walker as Nero - floated their poisonous relationship with erotic panache, and the unassailable exclusivity of their union gripped from the start. Walker...caught his [Nero's] capricious loopiness well...her singing sustained an impressive intensity throughout." - Peter Reed, Opera Magazine

The Girl I Left Behind Me

“and informed by the lovely pure voice and wittily knowing personality of the mezzo-soprano opera singer and cross-over artist Jessica Walker, this 80-minute piece is a drolly celebratory yet also piercingly poignant one-woman guide to a neglected chapter in showbiz and lesbian history” - Paul Taylor, Independent

“movingly conveys the pathos of these women's lives: their desperate disavowal of "mannish" women, their confusion at receiving love letters from other women. Fans then were as inscrutable as the performers – although, watching Walker, you appreciate what fun they had.” - Maddy Costa, The Guardian

A Quiet Girl

"One really has the impression she is singing to an audience…one can imagine her walking among café tables, holding sway. Authenticity without emulation, the voice is clear, flowing, emotive…her diction throughout is perfect whether English, German, French or even cockney" - Antonia Couling, The Singer

"Jessica Walker is an outstanding exponent of uncovering the inherent drama of this oeuvre…a blissful operatic singer giving meticulous measure to some unusual choices" - Mark Shenton, The Stage

"Jessica Walker is an exciting discovery. Having just seen her touchingly vulnerable Hansel, her cabaret act came as a jolt but firmly established her versatility. The voice has a tonally centred vibrancy, a cutting gleam where necessary, which she can fine down to hushed, pure, soft singing. She moves between throwaway, spoken commentary or asides and the vocal line with the ease of a seasoned cabaret trooper...a wonderful evening" - David Blewitt, The Stage

Jessica Walker Selected Reviews

Hansel and Gretel

"Jessica Walker’s Hansel is the best I’ve ever seen. Her integration of the musical and the dramatic is extraordinary, like watching a real boy caught between the imperatives of fear and bravado" - David Blewitt, The Stage

One Touch of Venus, Opera North

"There are brassy New York cameos from Jessica Walker as the girlfriend...." - Richard Fairman, Financial Times

"Jessica Walker was a game Gloria" - John Allison, The Times

"But it was the British duo of Jessica Walker and Carol Wilson as Gloria and her mother who brought the Broadway razzmatazz, their big number, Way Out West, being the show-stopping number" - David Denton, Yorkshire Post

"Jessica Walker, a ball-breaking Gloria Kramer" - David Blewitt, The Stage

The Girl I Left Behind Me (full articles)

“From the way Jessica Walker sidles on to the stage, you would think the mezzo-soprano was up to something furtive. In a sense, she is: her 70-minute show is a celebration, both tongue-in-cheek and heartfelt, of the male impersonators who were colossi of the British and American music-hall stage. Elegantly weaving biographical snippets with the performers' signature songs, Walker introduces us to the remarkable likes of Miss Vesta Tilley, who swaggered about her "knack of pleasing ladies", and Ella Wesner, who cheerfully declared: "Those who've never made love to a girl don't know what fun they've missed.

What fascinates Walker is the paradoxical nature of these performances, the inherent tension between propriety and impropriety. These women would boast of sexual conquest, or instruct men in the ways of the world, in a manner permissible only because they were in character as men, while singing at such a pitch (most of the original performers were also mezzos or sopranos) that their true gender was unmistakable. To what extent were they emasculating men, or actively subverting social conventions? Walker is quizzical and wry; for her, it is the "possibility" that their performances were transgressive that appeals.

In a trim tuxedo, with hair slicked back, Walker looks strikingly like Marc Almond, bringing her own layer of gender ambiguity to proceedings. She can be ribald, not least in her inspired collation of songs tracing the career of a roué called Johnny, and she sparkles every time she narrates a tale of real-life lesbian love. But she also movingly conveys the pathos of these women's lives: their desperate disavowal of "mannish" women, their confusion at receiving love letters from other women. Fans then were as inscrutable as the performers – although, watching Walker, you appreciate what fun they had.” - Maddy Costa, The Guardian

“Mention the word "drag" and most people will automatically picture a man in a frock. But that's less than half the story, as The Girl I Left Behind Me beguilingly attests. Devised and compiled by Neil Bartlett and informed by the lovely pure voice and wittily knowing personality of the mezzo-soprano opera singer and cross-over artist Jessica Walker, this 80-minute piece is a drolly celebratory yet also piercingly poignant one-woman guide to a neglected chapter in showbiz and lesbian history.

A glamorous, boyish figure with her slickly cropped hair and her white tie and tails, Walker conjures up, through "sixteen-and-a- half songs", such now-forgotten spirits of music-hall "trouser-dom" as Vesta Tilley (1864-1952), Ella Shields (1879-1952) and the American male impersonator Ella Wesner (1841-1917), who learned the tricks of the trade while acting as dresser to Annie

Jessica Walker Selected Reviews

Hindle (born 1847). James Holmes pounds the ivories with panache as Walker resurrects songs from the melodious repertoires of these women.

The careers tended to end in various shades of sadness. Needing money after a divorce, the elderly Ella Shields was reduced to working in holiday camps and died in one in Morecambe in 1952, after collapsing while singing her trademark funny-sad toff's ditty "Burlington Bertie from Bow" (beautifully rendered here by Walker). She was 73.

Annie Hindle eventually married her female dresser, using the name "Charles" at the ceremony, where the best man was a drag queen in mufti. But her fate illustrates the predicament of male impersonators. Suspicious that she was actually a man, her public turned on her (they wanted the authentically inauthentic) and she had to pick up what work she could (on Groucho Marx's TV show, for example) as a novelty act. In a dress. This show is not to be missed.” - Paul Taylor, Independent

“With her naughty skits of girls who loved soldiers, music hall star Vesta Tilley was the most famous of male impersonators.

Evoking Vesta and other bygone ladies who preferred to tread the boards in men's clothing in Opera North's The Girl I Left Behind Me , Jessica Walker proves herself a worthy addition to their trouser-wearing ranks.

Playful and knowing in the best cabaret style, The Girl I Left Behind Me teases with its ideas of illusion and possibility. Deftly blurring the boundaries between opera and music hall, high and low culture and – inevitably – masculine and feminine, it is also a wittily beguiling evening's entertainment.

Directed by the visionary Neil Bartlett, it conveys a thought-provoking wealth of stories and ideas with the lightest of touches as Walker, suited and booted in full gentleman's eveningwear, slipped on the hats, and into the personae, of various male impersonators who have passed, largely forgotten, into theatrical history.

Walker's rich mezzo soprano was equally suited to snippets of Mozart and Strauss as it was to risqué music hall numbers as she evoked cross-dressers from opera to vaudeville. Her singing talent was complemented by the storytelling skills of a true soubrette. She was particularly spiffing as a squiffy toff.

James Holmes, Opera North's outstanding head of music until 2008, provided piano accompaniment, tinkling the ivories with a stylish pizzazz that added to the feel that the Howard Assembly Rooms had been transformed, for the duration of the show, into a slightly shady, late-night, supper club.” - Tina Jackson, Yorkshire Post

“Strange as it may seem in these days of increasingly blurred gender norms, watching a woman dressed as a man singing songs of love for women may actually be a more exotic entertainment today than it was a century ago. In “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” a lovely show that opened on Sunday night at the 59E59 Theaters, the gorgeously gifted singer Jessica Walker and the writer Neil Bartlett conjure a vanished novelty of the theater, the cross-dressing female performers who once fascinated large audiences in England and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Performed in one of the theater’s smaller spaces, arranged to suggest a nightclub, the show is a suite of songs threaded together with stories about the performers who sang them. Ms. Walker and Mr. Bartlett, a theater director as well as a novelist (“Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall”), together with the show’s musical director, Joe Atkins, a stylish pianist, bring ardent affection and a sprinkling of sociology to their engrossing tour through the lives and careers of these pioneering performers.

Jessica Walker Selected Reviews

The names may be mostly remote to our ears. How many can claim knowledge of the British star Vesta Tilley, who at the height of her fame in 1903 was making a staggering £1,000 a week? Or the American sister act of Florence Tempest and Louise Sunshine — on the bill as Tempest and Sunshine, of course — featuring Louise playing the lady and Florence the gentleman. But a few of the songs these women made famous are still beloved today. Everyone who’s ever seen “Show Boat” will recognize “After the Ball,” that bittersweet ode to lost love, but did you know that it was a specialty of Tilley, who began performing in boys’ clothes at age 8? The classic blues lament “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” has been recorded by everyone from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. But it was also a staple in the act of Gladys Bentley, a Harlem nightclub performer in the 1930s who was an “out” lesbian (until, many years and a stalled career later, she wasn’t) as well as the toast of New York, bewitching the likes of Beatrice Lillie and Tallulah Bankhead.

In immaculate white tie and tails, Ms. Walker evokes the style and spirit of these varied performers, while noting that “whatever they wore, whatever they said or did, these women always sang in their own voices — which means that no one was ever fooled, or even meant to be fooled, by their act.” Fooled maybe not, but titillated, bewitched, bothered and maybe a little pleasantly bewildered, certainly. The mild hints of transgression were never spicy enough to frighten the horses. As Ms. Walker notes, most of these women performed not in racy clubs but on popular stages. (Tilley even appeared at several royal command performances, although as Ms. Walker notes, “Queen Mary was said to have politely averted the royal eyes when the trousers came onstage.”)

Ms. Walker herself is certainly a bewitching performer. Looking moderately boyish, with her strongly planed face and strawberry-blond hair in a crisp masculine cut, she has a voice that you’d never mistake for a man’s: a pure, bright soprano of such melting beauty I think I could listen to it forever. (Classically trained, she capably sings selections from the trouser roles in “Der Rosenkavalier” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” in a brief digression noting that cross-dressing women were all the rage on the opera stage well before they became a sensation in the “legit” theater.)

Ms. Walker is a charmer when she’s not singing, too, bringing a breezy conversational style to the anecdotes she and Mr. Bartlett have collected about the curious and varied careers of the women she’s paying tribute to. Their attitudes toward the peculiarities of their fame were often in themselves peculiar. Hetty King married three times — almost as if she had something to prove — and at the end of her long career sniffed in an interview, “There is nothing more objectionable to me — and I don’t care who I offend by saying it — than a mannish woman.” But then there’s Ella Wesner, who swanned off to Paris with a famous actress and lived openly with her in Paris.

Many of these performers’ celebrated numbers were dainty love songs of smitten swains, often with a deep tincture of sentiment, as in the wistful “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” performed by Wesner. Ms. Walker finds the right emotional note for each tune, and is equally at home with the mildly risqué, the jaunty and jovial, and the more sweet and sentimental. The title tune, unknown to me, is one of the most enchanting of this eye-opening, ear-pleasing evening. A tender ballad sung from the perspective of a Civil War soldier recalling his heartbreak at having to leave his love for battle, it was performed by

Annie Hindle, who in 1864 became the first woman to tread the English music-hall boards as a male impersonator, according to Mr. Bartlett and Ms. Walker.

Unlike some of her colleagues in drag, Hindle boldly lived in the manner of a man, to the point of marrying a woman. But, as Ms. Walker notes, the spell that these performers cast over their audiences could have unexpected consequences. When the story broke that Annie Hindle had signed the marriage register as Charles, her audience took umbrage, believing that they’d been fooled all these years, and that Annie was really a man. As Ms. Walker notes with tender ruefulness, “By appearing as her true self, Annie had become a fraud.” Her career was finished.” - Charles Isherwood, The New York Times