Forty-five years after his death, Cole Porter has never truly left town. His songs are a staple of Manhattan’s cabaret scene: one performer finished a tribute at the Algonquin last month, while two others just opened shows that prominently feature his work.
Stevie Holland in her one-woman musical show, "Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter."
None are as ambitious as Stevie Holland, a jazz singer who has tried to steer into somewhat more daring precincts. Apparently drawing on sources like William McBrien’s fine Porter biography and the 2004 film “De-Lovely,” Ms. Holland and her husband, the composer Gary William Friedman, have written “Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter.”
It’s billed as a one-woman play, directed by Ben West. Really, though, it’s cabaret. Ms. Holland takes the nightclub stage of the Triad Theater as Linda Lee Porter, the dazzling divorced socialite from Kentucky who wed Porter, eight years her junior, in 1919 when both were expatriates in Paris. Despite her husband’s homosexuality — Ms. Holland has Linda saying she “accepted his romantic appetite for men because I had his love” — the couple stayed married for 35 years, until Linda’s death from emphysema in 1954.
With a trio playing smoothly behind her, Ms. Holland runs through truncated versions of some of Porter’s best-known songs — “In the Still of the Night,” “I Love Paris,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” — as well as a handful of comparative rarities. Instead of conventional patter, she ladles out bits of the Porter chronology in a Southern-tinged lilt.
There’s a lot of ground to cover, even for a more polished actress than Ms. Holland: the couple’s time in Europe; the return to the States and Porter’s first great Broadway successes; the move to Hollywood; the horse-riding accident that disabled him; Linda’s failing health. As a result, the piece, which clocks in at just about an hour, feels rushed. Not only does it make great demands of Ms. Holland, who between her singing and narration barely has time to pause, but it also shortchanges the audience, which for the most part gets only bits and pieces of songs that cry out for full, lustrous renditions.
This is a shame because Ms. Holland, tall and stately, has a graceful, silken voice that glides easily through her material. “Love for Sale,” which she sang after discussing the Porters’ growing estrangement in Hollywood, carried emotional weight, and she gave the closing number, “When a Woman’s in Love,” a real sense of triumph.
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