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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Sometimes the best fringe experiences are the quietest ones, and that’s exactly what Kat Brooks offers here. She opens with Édith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien setting a tone that is confident and authentic. Later, she gives us La Vie en Rose, offered with warmth and restraint rather than bombast. She doesn’t imitate Piaf. She channels the song with affection and clarity.
Kat’s choice to perform “Dance Me to the End of Love” was a quietly striking moment. It’s a Leonard Cohen song, not a French chanson, yet the way she delivered it made it feel completely at home in the set. Her phrasing softened the edges of Cohen’s writing and let the song drift into the same smoky, late‑night emotional space as the Piaf and Trenet numbers. It worked because the show isn’t really about strict national borders in music; it’s about mood, intimacy and the timeless pull of torch songs. In her hands, Cohen’s piece became another thread in that tapestry, surprising but entirely fitting.
The rapport between the three feels easy and unforced, like friends making music rather than clocking in. The Jazz Bar is part of the appeal. That intimate basement space with good seats and a proper bar makes the whole thing feel more like stumbling across a neighbourhood jazz club than being jostled on the Royal Mile. With a glass in hand, it’s hard not to relax into it.
Edith Piaf (1915-63) and Jacques Brel (1929-78), were nearly fifteen years apart in age. Their classbackgrounds were very different. Piaf born in poverty and brought up in a brothel. Brel the son of a bourgeois owner of a cardboard box factory. Both escaped into music in different ways. Brel from a job in his fathers factory and Piaf from the grind of poverty. They never met but here Melanie Gall brings there songs together.