JOSEPHINE
Where: Farquhar Auditorium, University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Rd.
When: Saturday, Oct. 15, 7 p.m.
Tickets: $40 (student/alumni $35) from the UVic Ticket Centre box office (250-721-8480) or tickets.uvic.ca
Solo performances often run about one hour in length — and for very good reason, too. Any longer than that, barring exceptions, and the audience begins to get restless.
But when you’ve created a biographical musical about a performer who, according to the director, “lived 10 lifetimes packed into one,” 60 minutes is not nearly enough. Nor is 70 minutes, for that matter. So when the creative team behind Josephine looked at taking the Fringe Festival hit off the alternative theatre circuit and into larger rooms, 85 minutes felt like a reasonable duration in which to tell the story of performing arts icon and civil rights pioneer Josephine Baker.
“We tried not to lose that intimacy, but it’s going to be a much bigger show,” said director Michael Marinaccio, who co-created Josephine with playwright Tod Kimbro and actress Tymisha Harris, who plays Baker. “We added some things that we felt were missing, which put it at a better length for performing arts centre shows.”
Josephine is slotted into the Farquhar Auditorium tonight, where its mixture of theatre, cabaret and burlesque will make for showstopping entertainment. Victoria Fringe Festival supporters will certainly remember the musical, which won the Pick of the Fringe, Best Performance, and Favourite Solo Show awards in 2019, and was brought back due to overwhelming demand for a livestream during the 2020 edition. Though the production has changed somewhat — two songs and a live band have been added — new scenes expanding upon her early career are a huge bonus.
“We felt like we didn’t spend enough time on the period when she was really getting success,” Marinaccio said of Baker, who renounced her U.S. citizenship in the 1930s and became a French national.
“But we also wanted to touch on her middle-finger-to-America after she was falsely branded a communist. We wanted to be honest and fair about it, and tell as much of the story as we can.”
Following its debut at the 2016 San Diego Fringe, Josephine ran off-Broadway in 2018 and toured Australia in 2020. Buoyed by the international success, Marinaccio and Harris, who are both based in Orlando, are creating a “sequel” of sorts, one that will delve into Baker’s unlikely friendship with actress Grace Kelly. So why spend another cycle of creativity focused almost exclusively on Baker, who died in Paris in 1975, at the age of 68? That’s easy, according to Harris.
Not only was the singer-actress a once-in-a-lifetime talent, with friends and associates ranging from Ernest Hemingway and Picasso to filmmaker Jean Cocteau, she has been largely looked over by subsequent generations, particularly in North America. “In France, she is still held in high regard,” she said. “She’s the first non-French woman to [be reburied inside the Panthéon in Paris] — and that was just last year.”
Baker’s story is one that needs wider acknowledgment, Marinaccio said. “These type of stories got suppressed. It’s an important story for that reason, but also because it has resonance today. People are responding to her fearlessness, her defiance. She was courageous.”
At first, Harris said she found it difficult to nail down Baker’s essence; the titular character’s range of influences, and expansive set of skills, tested every ounce of Harris’s singing and dancing abilities. But she eventually found a way into the performance of her lifetime, and has made it her own. “I wanted to show the grace and excellence and style of Josephine. I’m not trying to do an impression at all. This is my vision of who she was. My homage to her.”
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