TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW OF ‘LET THE CANARY SING’ BY PUMA PERL | Full disclosure: I love Cyndi Lauper. I’ve never met her, but she feels like a family member. Her first album, She’s So Unusual, helped my four-year-old daughter recover from a strange virus that seemed to have no cure. For weeks, she rocked back and forth on the couch with her little Walkman, comforted only by listening to Cyndi. Ten years later, in 1993, A Hatful of Stars helped keep me going when so many of my friends were dying of AIDS-related causes. Cyndi was going through the same thing, and was one of the first musicians to talk about the crisis and to engage others in raising consciousness as well as funds.

Of course, I love her! She’s a lifelong New Yorker who not only fought the music industry as she deemed necessary, but, in 2005, triumphed in New York State housing courts, winning a rollback after proving her landlord broke rent stabilization laws, overcharging her for years in her Upper West Side apartment. In fact, the title of the film, Let the Canary Sing, quotes a judge who ruled in her favor after a former manager tried to stop her from signing with Portrait Records, a subsidiary of Epic Records. Her activism in LGBTQ and Human Rights causes is widely known. But, even with all that I know about her, and the great times I’ve had seeing her in concert, there was much to be learned in the film. She tells her own story, sometimes aided by her siblings, her ex-lover and former manager, David Wolff, as well as music and art industry professionals with whom she has worked. We hear a little bit from Boy George, Billy Porter, and Patti Labelle, but interviews with talking heads who were not integrally involved in her development are mercifully brief. Throughout, there is no doubt that this is her story—and Alison Elwood, who also directed The Go-Go’s, knows how to let her tell it. For the better part of this one hour and 38-minute film, it is riveting.

Early in the film, Lauper states “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going,” and from there we are introduced to her early life as well as to the cultural world in which she grew up. Lauper has always been known for her unique style which, in the early days, included layers of thrift shop finds, vibrant hair colors, and, of course, her Brooklyn/Queens voice and humor, which could be flamboyant or deadpan, as required. She explains how, as a child living across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, she viewed the diversity of her surroundings as fashion statements. The soldiers, in their black and white uniforms, the neighborhood women with their jet black or tomato red hair. She describes her parish priest, in their new Queens neighborhood, as wearing a gender bending rocking outfit, with jewelry and accessories—“What a look!” she exclaims. However, when she approached him, he asked if she had sinned and she admitted that she had skipped mass the previous week; pointing his finger in her face, he bellowed, “You’re going to Hell just like your mother!” This is where we learn how unsafe her world had become. Her mother had divorced and gotten remarried to an abusive man. Ironically, to keep them safe, she sent her two daughters to a convent school which generally boarded orphans. After being returned to the household, her older sister left home, and, several months later, took 17-year-old Lauper in with her. Her sister had found the courage to come out by then, and her best friends, a gay male couple, lived in the building. For the first time, Lauper was in a safe and loving environment.

At this point, the film moves into Lauper’s professional development as a singer, performer, and entertainer. As a music lover, I enjoy learning about an artist’s process. She describes an early audition, in which she hit octaves she had no idea she could reach, stunning both herself and the listeners. She recollects singing “big,” while feeling more and more little. Lacking technique and training, she soon blew out her voice, damaging her vocal cords so severely she could not speak and doctors initially concluded that she would never sing again. It took a year of treatment to recover. I can attest to the fact that she has learned to protect her voice at all costs, having sweated through a show at the Beacon one August, and not understanding at the time why the air conditioner was so low. As the film follows her career, we are treated to great segments about the development of her first album. When she heard the song, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, written and recorded by Robert Hazard, her initial reaction was, “I will never do that fucking song!” They spent months in the studio, getting it right, changing tempo, chords, and melody, adding a reggae flavor, and rewriting the lyrics to reflect her idea of what “fun” should mean to women as opposed to the man who had created it. All of the people who have worked with her on any level agree that she brings her ideas and vision to the table, and she is definitely not just a little person with a big voice.

Lauper’s career has had many ups and downs and not all of her reinventions have worked. For example, her attempt at a movie career was abysmal. The film begins to lose energy, becoming a more typical music documentary—and then this happened, and then that happened, without going more deeply into the makeup of this so unusual person, Cyndi Lauper. But the 1985 clip of Lauper and Patti LaBelle going toe to toe on Time After Time makes up for a few minutes of boredom here and there. I could have watched a half hour of that clip on repeat, but this was Lauper’s story and told her way. Her final statement in the film is, “So that’s what I wanted to say. Long and short. Mostly long, as always.”

Directed by Alison Ellwood with an original score by Wendy Blackstone and animation by Nick Gibney. To view the film’s Tribeca Film Festival page, click here. Through July 2, this film can be viewed via Tribeca at Home, the Tribeca Film Festival’s online platform—available on Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV and web browsers on iOS and Android devices. Single tickets sales have been discontinued. To view Let the Canary Sing, purchase a Tribeca at Home Festival Pass ($150), giving you access to all virtual content (features and shorts). Order by clicking here. Questions? Call Customer Service at 646-502-5296 or 866-941-3378 daily from 11am to 6pm.

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