COHEN, BERNSTEIN, JONI & ME is a searingly honest, bitingly funny musical quest through the 60’s 70’s and 80’s that reminds us how important it is to remember where one comes from to discover where one is going.
Review by Stephen Gilchrist
You don’t have to be Jewish but- no! Scrap that! You definitely don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy and be drawn into Deb Filler’s ninety minute deep dive memoir into her life as a Jewish, New Zealand born daughter of a holocaust survivor, and her resilience over most of her lifetime trying to realise her ambitions as an entertainer despite innumerable slap downs by the fickle finger of fate.
Reading her comprehensive Wikipedia entry it seems that an hour and half merely touches the sides of her career.
She is now (proudly) seventy one and a master non-stop story teller. Turning up on stage with just a stool and two guitars and looking like she’s just walked in off the street and no glitz, she is at once, funny -very funny actually- touching and sometimes dramatic. In this presentation she explains her life from its youthful, indeed childhood, aspirations, and its sometimes chaotic intersection with her iconic heroes, Leonard Bernstein, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, among others.
In this chronicling of her life, sometimes accompanied by visuals and interpolated with snatches of music from her mother’s favourite artiste Judy Garland, and Yiddish, folk, and popular music, she impersonates her eastern European Jewish parents, celebrities, lovers and employers, with affection. love and humour.
Her story of how she met Bernstein is particularly moving. Deb hears about her father’s life-changing musical experience in a refugee camp, and she tracks down the famous conductor years later. Bernstein was so delighted her father had attended a concert he had played for Holocaust survivors at the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp near Munich in 1948, that he closed the Auckland Town Hall and played Rhapsody in Blue (which he performed at the camp) for her in the closed concert hall. He asks her to ask her father, a baker, to bake him a challah.
Her unlikely pursuit of Joni Mitchell up the West coast of North America and Canada in attempts to deliver her own demo (which apparently was a not very good version of a hip hop number recorded by Louis Jordan forty years before), to the singer and to be recruited as a background singer, is funny as well as disheartening. Her story of how she drove Leonard Cohen to the airport as an executive chauffeur, telling him dirty Jewish jokes on the way and almost destroying the sole cassette demo copy of ‘Hallelujah, is both funny and, decades later, has an unexpected and jubilant consequence. In fact she concludes her show with a Hebrew and English rendition of Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’.
I said at the outset that you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy this wonderful evening of this character driven depiction of a fascinating life, but I cannot imagine anyone not being moved by Filler’s dizzying performance. Her experiences,, and her rather off centre view of life, are coloured and drawn from her Jewish background and Holocaust surviving parents, resolved latterly with a visit to the eastern European death camps with her father and where he was imprisoned, and which he survived. She has eventually found herself and her music.
Deb Filler has also written and co-produced this piece which is directed expertly by Mitchell Cushman and lit by Tim Mascall. But everything is in the performance, which is extraordinary, thoughtful and ultimately joyful. Personally, I should have liked more music, but that aside this was truly a memorable evening from a hugely talented performer. I loved it!
Written and Performed by: Deb Filler
Directed by: Mitchell Cushman
https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173668317/events/428745703
Upstairs at the Gatehouse
The Gatehouse
Highgate Village
London
N6 4BD
JAN 21 to FEB 1 2026
Tuesday to Saturday 7.30pm
Sunday 4pm
TICKETS
£25 Full price
£23 Concession
BOX OFFICE
0208 340 3488