Lady in the Light

The voice is smiling and seductive: "We'll go away together . . . Come away love, come away." The voice is big and bold: "Hey, you fool you! Why so cool you!" The voice is sad and soft behind real tears as the lights go down: "Only yesterday, when the world was young . . ." Whatever the tempo, Tin-Pan or torchy, the songs of Felicia Sanders throb with a strange, sinewy vitality in the basement's air-cooled dark. The mikes and the speakers and the slow-changing spotlights are superfluous. When Felicia sings, the silence beyond the stage is the silence of rapt attention. The clink of glasses stops, the convivial chatter dies and, for a little while, Greenwich Village's Bon Soir nightclub belongs to her.

Just as if she cannot believe her success, Felicia sweats out each entrance with nail-gnawing tension. But once in the spotlight, the lady is a cool and practiced performer. The nervous novice who got her first big break six years ago as the unknown vocalist on Percy Faith's recorded sleeper, Song from Moulin Rouge, has since given herself the polish of a pro. No longer does she settle for the stiff, tight-backed stance, the black, high-necked dresses and Peter Pan collars with which she turned her earliest act into a vague imitation of French Songstress Edith Piaf. Now she has a style very much her own. It is as versatile and varied as her songs.

"A song," she says, "deals with a person. I have to get an image of that person and convey that image to everyone else. I have to find the highlight in the song and work up to it--to find the motive for the song and personalize it for each listener." The fool's gold from the songwriters' mines may seldom merit such meticulous attention, but the measure of Felicia's talent is the astonished pleasure of her fans. When dedicated Method Actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward caught her at the Bon Soir this summer, they delivered what was for them an accolade: "Why, you're a method singer."

For the dark, curly-cropped singer, that was the ultimate compliment. Yet the veteran of the small-time hotel and clubroom circuit has been around too long to toy with complacency. Edging into her late 30s, she wants desperately to move her career uptown to the Broadway stage. "I'd like dramatic singing parts," says she. "I'd like to do a show that has just one great song."

For her growing supply of fans, just one song would be enough. Last week, when Felicia ended her run and went home to Brewster, N.Y. for a vacation, the Bon Soir's owners could think of no better time to shut up shop and take a vacation themselves. Where would they find a summer substitute for Sanders? Worse yet, where will they find a substitute in the fall? By then, Felicia will probably be in Los Angeles with her son Jeff, 13, and her husband-accompanist, Irv Joseph. "Milton Berle wants to present me at the Crescendo," she says, and adds with a wry smile, "I'm still being discovered all the time."

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