By , Broadwayworld.com | May 10, 2013
“Yanna Avis makes her Café Carlyle debut with a new show, titled In Love with Love which will feature her usual sophisticated, European cabaret. The program will be multi-lingual from a variety of influences including Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, Friedrich Hollander and other classics. In Love with Love plays through May 16, Thursdays and Fridays at 10:45 p.m. with musical director David Shenton at the piano…”
By Taylor Harris, Women’s Wear Daily | May 8, 2013
“Well, I’ve been told it’s husky,” Yanna Avis says, settling into her persimmon wraparound sofa, the centerpiece of the drawing room of her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that overlooks Central Park. “I don’t know how I feel about it, but I guess it’s a good thing?” Avis’ voice is husky. It’s textured and smoky, harkening back to the quality of lounge singers of yore who sucked down cigarettes between sets.
“I love the music of the Thirties and Forties, the glamour of it,” she says. “I try to get that glamour into my act.”
Avis has been doing cabaret since 1992, when she made her debut at Eighty-Eight’s in Greenwich Village, and she’s kept things local since then. “I’ve covered almost every spot in New York, from downtown to all the way uptown,” she says. “And now I’ll be performing on the next block.”
BY TOM DWORETZKY , NEW YORK DAILY NEWS — Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Known for her chic and sultry cabaret performances and her “smoky” voice, her sophistication comes from a worldly life. She sings in French, English, Spanish, Italian and German and has toured widely, including performances at Maxim’s in Paris, the Spoleto Festival in Italy, The Jermyn Street Theatre in London, as well as in New York’s Feinstein’s at the Regency, The Metropolitan Room, The Supper Club’s King Kong Room and The Firebird among other venues.
via Yanna Avis, Cabaret Singer, On Fateful Connections (VIDEO) | Eddie Parsons.
“In my line of work I come across many women who enchant me with what they look like, where they’ve come from and the stories they can tell. What is sometimes rare and exciting, however, is wondering, “Where is she going? What will she achieve? What makes her shine?”
I had the pleasure many years ago of meeting cabaret singer Yanna Avis and although there have been many opportunities to lose communication, I just couldn’t let her go. She is strikingly beautiful, well-traveled and a most gracious hostess. So why would a woman with all of this continue to work so hard on her cabaret career? What drives this woman to open new doors and invite people into her world with a song and a moment? …”
By Richmond Shepard, Performing Arts Insider | June 14, 2011
YANNA AVIS is a beautiful woman with a pleasant voice and loads of appeal in her performance of songs in French and English (with a touch of German). She exudes a lovely sensuality, and is more of an entertainer than a singer. Sure, she stays on key, but it’s HER that’s important rather than the voice. Some of the performance is in shprichtzimmer, and it works in the context of her musical vocabulary. This show at The Metropolitan Room on W. 34th St. seems to try to create the intimacy of a dimly-lighted room, but I wanted to see more of her— I wanted lighting that reveals and enhances rather than obscures her. Her acting is top-notch, and it infuses her songs, as do her warmth and charm in this very enjoyable trip to the continent.
By Peter Haas, Cabaret Scenes | June 13, 2011
An accordion begins. Yanna Avis—slim, blonde, sultry—enters in a clinging black dress. Parisian by birth, actress by training and career, she reinvented herself several years ago as a cabaret singer, and in that role made her Metropolitan Room debut in June, in a multilingual program of French, German and American songs.
Familiar numbers included a cheery “C’est si bon,” the lament “Mon homme” (sung in French, known in English as the Fanny Brice hit, “My Man”) and a pairing of Cole Porter’s “You Don’t Know Paree” paired with French composer/singer Léo Ferré’s peppy “Paris Canaille.” Another combination, “My Old Flame” and “I Remember You,” both sung in English, formed a lovely, straightforward change of pace, and her “Charleston” (English lyrics by Fred Ebb), with Avis sporting a top hat, was a delight. However, it was her attempt at other American numbers that missed the mark. With “Bye Bye Blackbird” and the too-cute “I Refuse to Rock and Roll” (the latter by Sammy Cahn and Nicholas Brodsky), she may have wanted to appeal to “local taste,” but, instead, may simply have underestimated the international sophistication of the audience who came to see her.
At moments, pseudo-sexy mannerisms took center stage, as if she were playing at the role of chanteuse. Not necessary: she has international flair, and can relax and rely on it. Excellent musical direction and piano accompaniment were contributed by David Shenton, with fine backup by David Finck on bass and Patrick Farrell on accordion.
By Stephen Holden, The New York Times | June 8, 2011
Ah, Paree! As the statuesque French chanteuse Yanna Avis sang Cole Porter’s great ode to the City of Light, “You Don’t Know Paree,” on a recent evening, a composite view of the city as imagined by Balzac, Zola and of course, Porter himself, flickered in my imagination. “Until you’ve lived a lot, and loved a lot, and lost a lot, you don’t know Paree,” go lyrics that Ms. Avis, a soigné international beauty, sang with a wry understanding.
Both Ms. Avis and her show at the Metropolitan Room are throwbacks to a cabaret style that flourished in New York in the 1950s and early ’60s in which traditional glamour and high style were the thing. Nothing must disturb the playfully naughty Folies Bergère spirits in which bittersweet moments are thrown in for contrast. The songs concentrate on appearances and the competitive erotic games indulged in by courtiers in a world of unbounded leisure; the only enemy is boredom.
By Lynn Dimenna, Cabaret Scenes | October 12, 2009
Yanna Avis has been called a cross between Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich and that is certainly a flattering comparison. On the contemporary scene she might remind one of “Uma” or “Ute,” as in Thurman or Lemper, given the equally alluring and mysterious quality they share with the international chanteuse. On stage at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency for the second time this fall, in a magnificent skintight black pants suit with a soft white, flouncy collar and cuffs, she definitely enhanced the beauty and elegance of the room
Sultry and sexy, singing a multi-lingual repertoire that has become her forte, she had the strong support of some very fine sidemen: on accordion Patrick Farrell, bass David Finck and violin/viola Eddie Malave. Her Musical Director, David Shenton, and director, Daniel Isengart, musically and artistically shaped a program that enabled her to work her unique and appealing magic to the delight of her savvy, sophisticated audience.
To be sure, very few “chantoosies” in fishnet stockings covering legs that go on forever can stretch out and caress the top of a Steinway and make it look so natural and effortless. One can sense that Ms. Avis is as comfortable there as she is at a café in Paris or dining at the Ritz! All the songs on her song list, whether in French, Italian, Spanish or German, serve to heighten the “mystique!”
Negotiating off the stage and in and around tightly cramped chairs, however, proved to be a challenge that she might not have anticipated. On the other hand, her foray into the audience provided an opportunity to get a sense of who the real Yanna Avis truly is. Seeing her vulnerable made her a bit less mysterious and that much more likeable.
By David Patrick Columbia, New York Social Diary | September 30, 2009
“Meanwhile, yesterday in New York. At eight o’clock I went down to Feinstein’s at the Regency to hear my friend Yanna Avis in her debut in that room. Yanna is a chanteuse, “an exotic international chanteuse,” as she’s been described elsewhere.
She’s Parisienne by birth. A number of years ago she married the Rent-a-Car tycoon and industrialist Warren Avis. They cut a wide swath in the international high life here, in Europe and Acapulco where Warren had been a long time resident. Yanna put aside her career in the early part of her marriage. Although encouraged by Warren, she eventually began to pursue and develop it.
I’d seen her perform several times in cabaret, but last night was the first time I’d seen a complete finished act with a set of songs and a theme. And it was like the words Mr. Porter had written, “the bubbles in a glass of champagne ….” A very good time.
La chantouze is how she sometimes signs her notes to me. It also is the theme. The songs are a mixture of some familiar melodies with French lyrics, some familiar old American tunes – not so much the Broadway standards — and a very intimately delivered monologue of the chantouze.
Yanna’s delivery is almost tongue in cheek. She moves. She gets up on the piano, she reclines; she’s back on her to feet and looking right at that spot, that audience of one whom she’s addressing and singing too (when she’s not singing to the rest of us). Her sense of humor is playfully sultry and sometimes self-parodying. Yanna in life has a very sunny disposish. She is very much the femme fatale, but she is also serious, the actress.
People who know her love her for this. Her show was like that. It’s authentic, and last night there were a lot of her friends in the opening audience. They loved her for it.”
Backstage | January 7, 2004
Joie de vivre! On the subject of refinement, international chanteuse and stunning socialite Yanna Avis brought her new show to the King Kong Room for three SRO performances in December. With musical director Dick Gallagher and direction by Thommie Walsh, the carefully crafted set allowed Avis to be the intimate, sexy illusion that she is—à la Dietrich in her prime. In fact, the Dietrich mainstay “Illusions” (Hollander) is a trademark number that defines her brand of flirtatious sex appeal fused with smoky haute-parlor cabaret. She has a soft, quicksilver vibrato that does justice to her ballads and makes them better than they might have been in lesser hands. Whether slithering on top of the piano, seductively teasing a gentleman in the audience, emoting Cole Porter, or vamping in French, Spanish, or German, Yanna Avis recalls an era when bubbly champagne and bubbly people filled nightclubs with elegance and a devil-may-care lifestyle that was once de rigueur in café society.
Her songs of romance and lost love fitted perfectly into her sullen alto as she caressed every lyric with the purr of a cat about to strike. What makes her such a success at her craft is that she never goes beyond her strengths—that, and her commitment to the message of the composer. Avis is classy and elegant, with a playful mystique that is rare. The prominent glitterati crowd of celebrities, intellectuals, and A-list friends cheering on one of their own was evidence that this lovely lady, who wears her music and mystery like a Blackglama, is one of our most beguiling chanteuses to embrace any stage, whether it be at the Spoleto Festival, on the Riviera, or in a gaudy Manhattan nightspot.
YANNA AVIS 
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