Kathleen Turner looks inward for wonderfully entertaining cabaret-memoir solo show

This is a side of Turner that we haven’t seen much of in a career that, as she proudly notes, spans 42 years.

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Kathleen Turner performs her one-woman show in London in 2017.

Kathleen Turner performs her one-woman show in London in 2017.

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Kathleen Turner strides on stage at the Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place in “Finding My Voice,” a conversational, charming show that straddles the genres of memoir and cabaret, singing the blues standard “Since I Fell for You.” The song is transposed into a lower key than most versions, to accommodate Turner’s famously husky voice, and she dips very low indeed — as if to show she knows what we’re thinking.

In fact, she does a bit of self-deprecating mind-reading in her first spoken lines after the song’s end. “If you know me for my stage or screen roles,” she says, “you’re probably wondering right now, ‘What the hell is she doing singing?’”

‘Kathleen Turner: Finding My Voice’

kathleen turner

When: 8 p.m. Nov. 16

Where: Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place, 175 E. Chestnut

Tickets: $46.50–$146.50

Info: broadwayinchicago.com

Run time: 1 hour 50 minutes, with one intermission


It’s a fair point. This is a side of Turner that we haven’t seen much of in a career that, as she proudly notes, spans 42 years. (“You can clap for that,” she tells us, though she punctuates it with a mild but still unprintable expletive.) Even in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” for which Turner provided the smoky speaking voice of animated vamp Jessica Rabbit, the character’s singing voice was filled in by another actor.

As the actress explains it, when she arrived in New York City in 1977 with an eye to performing in theater, all the female leading roles in musicals were sopranos. “So that wasn’t gonna fly,” she adds. (She also claims at one point that she doesn’t even like musicals, though her song selections for the evening suggest otherwise.)

But a few years ago, Turner went out to lunch with Molly Smith, the artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, a theater where she first performed (as Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) in 1981, the same year she made her scorching film debut in “Body Heat.” Smith, who was interested in casting Turner in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” asked her, “Can you sing?”

“I don’t sing,” Turner recalls thinking. “But I can.”

She started months ahead of rehearsals for that 2014 production, working with Andy Gale and Mark Janas to master the five or six songs she’d have to warble in Brecht’s anti-war agitprop classic. And, she says, she had so much fun that she continued working with the two men, letting them introduce her to standards and show tunes that complemented stories from her career, until they had this show. (Gale is billed as director, while musical director Janas sits at the piano, leading a three-piece band playing his own arrangements.)

The songs are interspersed among anecdotes about her early life, growing up as the daughter of a Foreign Service Officer, or as Turner says, “a dip kid,” with her father’s diplomatic work taking her family variously to Canada, Cuba, Venezuela, and finally to London, where she spent most of her teenage years and fell in love with theater. But her father’s sudden death when Turner was 18 meant a retreat to her mother’s hometown of Springfield, Missouri, where she entered college at Southwest Missouri State University — a culture shock that she offset by throwing herself into her theater studies.

That snippet about discovering her love for theater is accompanied by a light rendition of “Paper Moon” (“Yes, it’s only a canvas sky / Hanging over a muslin tree”); later, talking about the loneliness of being apart from her family while filming on location or doing theater in London or on the road, she pairs it with a melancholy ditty by jazzman Dave Frishberg titled “Sweet Kentucky Ham” (“So you order up room service on the phone / And you watch the local news and eat alone”).

Elsewhere, Turner sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” and a musical-theater deep cut, “I’d Rather Be Sailing” from William Finn’s “A New Brain,” while offering up morsels from her career: a disagreement with Francis Ford Coppola on the set of “Peggy Sue Got Married;” how a script’s description of a female character as “37, but still attractive” so incensed her that she was inspired to get naked on Broadway as Mrs. Robinson in a stage adaptation of “The Graduate.”

Turner, who has long been active in progressive politics, opens her show’s second act with impassioned talk about her personal causes (she serves on the boards for New York City’s Meals on Wheels program and the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, and has been a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood). She also addresses the near-incapacitating rheumatoid arthritis that threatened to derail her career in the 1990s.

That vulnerable moment, it’s worth noting, is the closest Turner gets to true personal exposure in the show. She mentions her family only in the vaguest of terms, and her showbiz anecdotes tend toward the innocuous. Fans of similar stage memoirs from larger-than-life actresses —“Bea Arthur on Broadway,” Elaine Stritch’s “At Liberty,” Carrie Fisher’s “Wishful Drinking”— may be mildly disappointed by Turner’s dearth of really juicy material. But her patter has an off-the-cuff energy that makes even the least revelatory stories feel like intimate confessions. 

Kris Vire is a local freelance writer.

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