Theatre in Review: The Girl I Left Behind Me (59E59)In The Girl I Left Behind Me, a kind of high-concept cabaret act, the opera singer Jessica Walker focuses on the phenomenon of cross-dressing women who once thrived in the British music hall and on the American vaudeville stage. As she notes at the beginning of the proceedings, even though these ladies dressed as men, "they always sang in their own voices -- which meant that no one was ever fooled, or ever meant to fooled, by their act, which meant that it was all right, because at the end of the evening, everything could go back to being just how it was meant to be, both on stage and off." These confounding creatures included Vesta Tilley, who by 1903 was earning 1,000 pounds a week for singing such ditties as "I'm the Idol of the Girls;" the sister act Tempest and Sunshine, with Miss Sunshine as the lady and Miss Tempest as the gent; and Hetty King, said by a contemporary observer to be "so real-looking a girl-chap that she might saunter down Fifth Avenue by broad daylight without raising any suspicion of sexual fraud." Gifted with impeccable diction and lovely phrasing, Walker is a delight as she disinters such lost popular classics as "Following in Father's Footsteps," "I'm Sowing All My Wild Oats," and the irresistible "Burlington Bertie from Bow" ("I'm Burlington Bertie/I rise at ten thirty/And Buckingham Palace I view/I stand in the yard while they're changing the guard/And the king shouts across 'Toodle-oo!'"). She finds just the right character for each song, striking pathetic poses for "Down by the Old Mill Stream" and staring down her nose at the audience as Burlington Bertie. (She's on less solid ground impersonating Harlem's own Gladys Bentley, but you can't have everything.) Walker's narration, written with Neil Bartlett, is more than a little frustrating, however. She is all arched eyebrows and innuendo as she implies that things weren't quite proper with these ladies. After about ten minutes of this, you start to wish she would just say the obvious, that most of them were lesbians. She teases us with bits of information; talking about Annie Hindle, "The Apollo Belvedere of the vaudeville stage." Walker says she "got through three husbands, the last one of whom was a wife," and that's it; you have to go to the Internet to discover that Hindle, posing as a man, married her female dresser, with a female impersonator in mufti serving as best man. Although Walker notes the parallel success of Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, with the "pants" role of Octavian, the love-struck adolescent boy, written for a mezzo-soprano, she largely presents her mannish ladies as existing in a vacuum, having little or nothing to say about such famous female impersonators of the same era as Julian Eltinge, whose success in shows like The Fascinating Widow led him to a Broadway theatre adorned with his name. It might also be interesting to look at the associated phenomenon by which even European stars such as Anna Held had to make room in their shows for a number about life down on the old plantation. The popular music of the era both reinforced and undermined sexual and ethnic stereotypes, a rich subject only hinted at here. Running only about 75 minutes, The Girl I Left Behind Me might profitably be expanded to further explore the strange popularity enjoyed by these unabashedly transgressive performers. Still, under Bartlett's direction, the songs are a pleasure, Walker's singing is impeccable, and Joe Atkins' piano accompaniment is first-rate. Interestingly, after an evening of such vintage fare, Walker encores with "Take Me Home," by Tom Waits. Her fresh, supple take on the song recalls Barb Jungr's revelatory investigations of the Bob Dylan catalog; it would be very interesting to hear Walker take on more contemporary material.--David Barbour 
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