Fringe 2023 The Aretha Franklin Story theSpaceUK 7th August Review
The Aretha Franklin Story is at theSpace @ Symposium Hall and, once again, this Night Owl Productions show is selling out seats and the reasons for this are simple – iconic songs and the vocal/performance talents of Cleopatra Higgins.
As always with any Night Owl show, this one is a tribute to the music of an artist/band and not an attempt to be a copy of any particular artist or band. In the case of Aretha Franklin, this is just as well as once Aretha sang a song she had so often a way of making it her own and few singers out there ever come close to the emotion in her voice and her ability to effortlessly interpret a song’s timing and phrasing.
Thankfully here, as soon as Cleopatra opened this show with her own unique take on “Son of a Preacher Man”, everyone in the room knew that here was a very special talent with the ability to not just cover, but re-interpret in her own unique vocal and performance style some of Aretha Franklin’s most well-known hits.
As the name of the show indicates, this is also in part the story of Aretha Franklin, and we follow her journey from her highly productive time with Columbia Records, a period that saw a lot of albums but no specific identity for Aretha, to those golden years and literally golden records with Atlantic Records. It was with a string of hit songs at Atlantic that Aretha quite rightly earned her name “The Queen of Soul”.
Picking a selection of songs from Aretha’s large and diverse recording career is always going to be difficult for the limited time that a Fringe show allows any production company and as always there are songs like “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and “Think” that audiences simply expect to be in the set-list and of course they were, and Cleopatra knew exactly what to do with them and totally engage this audience with her performance of them. These are not easy songs to sing and Cleopatra made them look so effortless and natural, and I suspect to her they were.
This show is running until August 27, so I have no intention of giving the set list away, but some highlights include “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You), “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and of course “Amazing Grace”.
Whatever the song, Cleopatra Higgins does not seem to be able to sing a wrong note (Aretha had the same said about her many times too) and it was a pleasure to hear Cleopatra move when the song required it out of a pure soul sound and into a more blues based vocal range.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
As always with any Night Owl show, this one is a tribute to the music of an artist/band and not an attempt to be a copy of any particular artist or band. In the case of Aretha Franklin, this is just as well as once Aretha sang a song she had so often a way of making it her own and few singers out there ever come close to the emotion in her voice and her ability to effortlessly interpret a song’s timing and phrasing.
Thankfully here, as soon as Cleopatra opened this show with her own unique take on “Son of a Preacher Man”, everyone in the room knew that here was a very special talent with the ability to not just cover, but re-interpret in her own unique vocal and performance style some of Aretha Franklin’s most well-known hits.
As the name of the show indicates, this is also in part the story of Aretha Franklin, and we follow her journey from her highly productive time with Columbia Records, a period that saw a lot of albums but no specific identity for Aretha, to those golden years and literally golden records with Atlantic Records. It was with a string of hit songs at Atlantic that Aretha quite rightly earned her name “The Queen of Soul”.
Picking a selection of songs from Aretha’s large and diverse recording career is always going to be difficult for the limited time that a Fringe show allows any production company and as always there are songs like “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and “Think” that audiences simply expect to be in the set-list and of course they were, and Cleopatra knew exactly what to do with them and totally engage this audience with her performance of them. These are not easy songs to sing and Cleopatra made them look so effortless and natural, and I suspect to her they were.
This show is running until August 27, so I have no intention of giving the set list away, but some highlights include “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You), “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and of course “Amazing Grace”.
Whatever the song, Cleopatra Higgins does not seem to be able to sing a wrong note (Aretha had the same said about her many times too) and it was a pleasure to hear Cleopatra move when the song required it out of a pure soul sound and into a more blues based vocal range.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com