CLOSE-UP OF ANNA RUSSELL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 821, 22 April 1955, Page 26

CLOSE-UP OF ANNA RUSSELL

OT at all, she’d been up for hours, said Anna Russell, when The Listener, calling her a little after nine on a recent Monday morning, hoped it wasn’t too early. Yes, she’d be glad to see us. Mail was scattered over the table of her hotel room when she showed us in, and she explained later, sitting for a photograph with a case full of it on her knees, that it was. fan mail from her English visit. "I did something in the BBC Third Programme," she said. "And the people who wrote to me!" There was even a letter from a small women’s group-the sort she guys on the stageasking her to address one of their meetings, While our photographer was setting up his flash equipment Miss Russell had rung her accompanist, Eugene Rankin, and disappeared into her bedroom to comb her hair, remarking that she didn’t like having her picture taken and that she was "the most unphotogenic person." We suggested that as we had a number of character studies she might this time be "herself." "That is myself," she said, and faced the camera with a see-what-I-mean sort of air and a broad smile which she made only the faintest effort to suppress.

"No, I enjoy myself tremendously," she said when, taking up that remark about being herself, we asked if she found her work on the stage a big effort. New Zealand audiences? "They’re wonderful!" She agreed that her parodies wouldn’t mean much to anyone who didn’t know a bit about the music, but New Zealand audiences seemed to be "very much on the beam" about it all. "T take it that quite a lot of good music goes on here." Anyone who has heard Miss Russell will know that her timing is always just right, and we asked her next whether this was a result of very deliberate thought. Once again she refused to be the painstaking, self-conscious, not-really-half-as-easy-as-it-looks sort of artist, for she said, No, she didn’t think about it that way. "There’s always a time to say something and you know the time and say it." She admitted, too, that she occasionally ad-libbed. "I stick in a few odds and ends, and if they come off I leave them in," When Anna Russell is planning a new show she usually thinks of a theme first. "I advise people how to do something, or I explain something that’s going on," she said in her richest voice. "I think of the whole show at once, or of a subject,

and then of what goes with it. And I don’t take off anyone in particular. " "Not Al Jolson or Johnny Ray in your breakdown of the popular singer?" "Yes, you might think of Al Jolson in the first number, but it’s also in the Eddie Cantor stylethere were lots of people with skip and hop and mammy- and there are lots of sufferers, too."

Listeners know that Miss Russell’s recordings are made at concert performances, and she agreed that she got a great deal from the stimulus of an audience, For her item on the breakdown of the popular singer to be included in her next album, however, musical items were recorded in a studio and cut into the concert recording of the rest of the programme.

"There are very jazzy arrangements of these numbers by Jimmy Carrollthey’re just as goofy as the numbers

themselves. And the manic laughter at the end was done in an echo chamberdouble fortissimo. It was lots of fun

doing it. And while you haven't. the stimulus of an audience in a studio, with a band there you get stimulus from that." Miss Russell is working now on a #umber that will take the place of the "Analysis of The Ring," probably when she opens her next American» concert season in November. "You know that Verdi" made operas from a number of Shakespeare’s plays," she explained. "Well, in this number I ask why he didn’t do Hamlet-Hamletto, you see-and I go on to show that if he had done it it might have turned out thus and so. I think that might*be quite fun." Miss Russell asked us at this point whether we had heard Verdi’s Macbeth | and went on to give such a vivid and hilarious. description of -it-‘"the sleepwalking. scene is absolutely. Aysterical’’that*we thought for a moment she had got on.to-another parody: Why hadn't | she taken gfi something that apparently | was simply asking for it? "Well, it’s | quite a take-off in itself, though terrifically effective as an opera.’ Despite any appearance to the ee trary Miss Russell loves Wagner's music | though she thinks his stories are ridicu- | lous. All opera stories were rather | ridiculous, of course, "but I think Wae-| ner takes the absolute cake." When Miss Russell gets back home to | America from her present trip she go on tour with David Rose as a guest artist with various symphony orchestras. She will sing arias at straight symphony concerts, "but the arias aren't straight, | they're all nonsense." After her tour, with David Rose, Miss Russell will have two months’ holiday before starting her new concert season, to run from November to the end of March. Then she will go to England and to South Africa and | back again to England. Like most practical artists,. Miss | Russell doesn’t wait for inspiration for | new material. "You never get. anywhere that way," she said. "You know that. There are deadlines and all that sort of | thing. No, I simply sit and think till 1 get something." "Does Mr. Rankin help with your numbers?" "He gives me more an idea of what! I shouldn't do than what I should. He'll | say, ‘For heaven’s sake can’t you comb | your hair at the back- it looks terrible!’ " Mr. Rankin ‘remarked here that he | thought "editing’’ was the word. "Yes, | editing," she said, "when it gets too much of a good thing. Then I leave a few bits out." Here the ’phone rang and while Miss | Russell talked into it we had time to find out from Mr. Rankin that his usual job is accompanying concert singers on tour, and that he was looking for someone to tour with when he heard, about 18 months ago, that Miss Russell was also looking for someone. Did he like this better than touring with a straight artist?--‘‘Yes, she’s very good company, and there’s a lot of fun. You know, you have to put up with ea lot of eccentricities from some people touring around." Mr. Rankin has not been to New Zealand before, but he was as far south as Manus when he was a United States Navy officer for two and a half years during the war. Miss Russell came back from the "phone to say: "We're to have another concert in Christchurch on Saturday. That’s show business all over. You work for 1000 years before you get anywhere. and then you're tumbling over yourself to keep up with it." But did she find it exhausting? Not a bit of it.