Alex Ryer looks no more like France’s tragic “Little Sparrow” than Big Bird. Edith Piaf was 4-foot-8, and by the time her death at 47 stopped Paris traffic in 1963, she was further withered by drugs, alcohol, disease and life’s vagaries. One reason it took four decades for anyone to develop a theatrical piece on Piaf’s life, Ryer theorizes, is, “Who could possibly play her?”
But Ryer has something more intrinsic going for her. She understands Piaf – now a largely forgotten superstar whose rise from street urchin to world’s highest-paid entertainer borders on mythic. She understands how a woman who started with nothing and ended with little could die empty of regret yet filled with a caustic joy.
“She sang,” Ryer said, “up until the last minute that she could sing.”
Ryer understands how Piaf’s voice ran in complete opposition to her music. While her songs were often sad and dramatic, her face was filled with exuberance when singing them.
“I think your voice is the voice of your inner child,” said Ryer, a veteran actress and vocal instructor. “It’s the voice of everything you have been through, and everything that is inside of you. I think all the pain, the joy, the drugs, the alcohol is in that voice. But the sound in that voice, and the look in her eyes, were all about living and love.”
Ryer, known for area appearances in “I Love a Piano,” “Painted Bread” and “Menopause the Musical,” debuts her intimate new musical creation, “Pure Piaf,” on Thursday at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret.
Set in 1947 at New York’s Versailles Club, where Piaf first performed in English, Ryer relives an astounding life story: Piaf was born in 1915 to a teen street singer who named her after an executed British nurse who helped Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium in World War I.
Piaf was abandoned and later taken in by a grandmother who ran a brothel. The girl was blind until age 7, but legend has it Piaf regained her sight when her grandmother’s prostitutes made a religious pilgrimage.
She later joined her father, a circus acrobat, in singing for street change. But, Ryer said, “He was gone by the time she was 12, and she was on her own again.” Piaf had a child, an infant girl who died of meningitis.
All that before turning 17.
“There are some who think her life was so dark that no one would want to see it on a stage, but hers was a life that was made for the stage,” Ryer said.
During World War II, Piaf entertained high- ranking Germans, who in turn indulged her requests to pose for photos with French prisoners of war. It was all part of Piaf’s bold scheme to help the prisoners forge papers and escape.
Her rise to international stardom was nearly torpedoed on her first U.S. tour, which was greeted with indifference because she knew no English. Piaf was devastated. “I want to make people cry even when they don’t understand my words,” she said. It was a single positive review that inspired her to take English lessons and try again.
“It’s really true,” said Ryer’s husband and collaborator, Gary Schnell. “If not for that one positive review, she would have gotten on a ship to France, and I don’t know if we would have seen her in this country again.”
Piaf had one great love, a boxer named Marcel Cerdan, but she never recovered from his death in 1949. “I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears,” she said. A car accident two years later led to a morphine habit, and she later developed rheumatism and cancer.
“I remember this picture of hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets of Paris just standing silent with these bouquets of flowers in their hands, looking like it’s the end of the world,” Ryer said.
Ryer first cobbled a revue of Piaf songs in 1997 for wintering snowbirds in Puerto Vallarta. She since has developed “Pure Piaf” into a full theatrical piece with director Melissa Lucero McCarl. The result, performed with a five-piece orchestra, is mostly in English, and anything in French is quickly translated.
“The thing Edith Piaf did was to own up to her life and what happened to her and who she was, and she was not afraid to let people see that,” Ryer said. “Everybody has stuff. And most people are working all the time really hard to try to cover it up and not let your flaws be seen. But if you can allow yourself to do that, you reach everybody.”
Piaf is best known for the song, “La Vie en Rose,” but Ryer said the tune that most embodies her life is “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” – loosely translated, “No, I Regret Nothing.”
“The words say, ‘No. I am going to take all my memories, the good and the bad, and just throw them into the fire,”‘ Ryer said. “I am letting go of love and all of the heartache, and I regret none of what I have been through.
“That kind of courage is very attractive to me.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
| “Pure Piaf”
MUSICAL|Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret,1601 Arapahoe St.|Directed by Melissa Lucero McCarl| Written by and starring Alex Ryer| THROUGH JULY 8|Opens June 22, then 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays|$25-$30|303-293-0075
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RYER SINGS PIAF: LISTEN TO AN EXCLUSIVE SAMPLE OF ALEX RYER SINGING EDITH PIAF’S “IF YOU LOVE ME, REALLY LOVE ME.” denverpost.com/theater
