Joanne Halev Brings LIKE A PERFUMED WOMAN to Bucks County Playhouse

Singer and storyteller Joanne Halev knows her way around the complex word of flavors and fragrances — and she will tell tales from the mysterious, intoxicating, and passionate world of international fragrance creation in her cabaret, “A Perfumed Woman,” Sunday, February 16 at 7 pm at Bucks County Playhouse. Halev brings her potent mix of storytelling and song as part of a new cabaret series held in the historic Playhouse Barn just across the courtyard from the main theater. 

Until 2019, Halev was a vice president at one of the world’s leading flavor and fragrance companies — helping to steward the creation of some of the world’s most popular fragrances. In “Like a Perfumed Woman,” Halev channels the experience and shares why, though we may speak different languages and live very different lives, the emotional language of scent and scent memory speak to us all.

The show includes music and lyrics by Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Burt Bacharach, John Bucchino, Johnny Mercer, Amanda McBroom and others, while telling Halev’s globetrotting story — which takes audiences from Bangkok to Sao Paolo, Laos to London, Mumbai to Madagascar, and back to Brooklyn.

Halev received the prestigious Bistro Award in 2020 for “Like A Perfumed Woman,” her debut solo cabaret show, when it premiered in 2019 at the Birdland Theatre in New York. Of her debut performance, Broadway World said, “(Joanne) delivers the goods with a smooth, mellow, rich voice reminiscent of a warmed-up brandy with one square of the deepest darkest chocolate from Li-Lac. Her gift with language provided little one-act plays with each new story and every song, some of them romantic, some sad, some sexy and some outright naughty. It was a smile-inducing night, and I went home entirely enchanted by this chanteuse."

In addition to her musical accomplishments, Joanne has had a diverse career. She worked in global fragrance development at Firmenich, and in magazine publishing during the '80s and '90s at prestigious publications like The New Yorker and W. 

Joanne was also a co-founding Actor/Teacher of The Creative Arts Team, an educational theatre company originally in residence at New York University and now at CUNY. There she performed in and helped to develop plays addressing topical and social issues for underserved students in New York City's public schools.

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