A forgotten corner of Sydney’s entertainment history is being celebrated at this year’s Sydney Festival, as the late Black queer cabaret sensation Nellie Small is brought back to the stage though Send For Nellie. The performer began her career in the 1920s before developing her vaudeville act as a drag king. She became so adored, that if another show was bombing, the audience would cry “Send for Nellie”, knowing that she was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
Ahead of the show’s Sydney Festival run beginning this Wednesday, January 10th and an upcoming tour, playwright Alana Valentine spoke exclusively with The Queer Review’s Chad Armstrong, offering a fascinating queer history lesson about this often-overlooked figure.
Chad Armstrong, The Queer Review: Send for Nellie puts the spotlight back on singer and cross-dressing cabaret artist Nellie Small. What can you tell us about her?
Alana Valentine: “She was born in 1900 and died in 1968. During her life, both on stage and off, she dressed in men’s clothes. There are various stories about who suggested Nellie begin to dress as a man. Some point to Edith Meggitt, who she lived with for twenty years, but in an interview given in Adelaide in 1954 Nellie is on record as saying:
“I started in the business when I won an amateur trial in a little theatre in Oxford Street, we used to call it ‘Clays Variety’. In December 1931 I was told that they put on novelty attractions as part of the Christmas shows. I couldn’t see that I was a novelty, but it was pointed out to me that my colour was a novelty. Then when I was on stage for Connors and Paul in 1932 in Melbourne, I’d go out on stage in my male attire and I’d be in my own clothes in the street and people couldn’t reconcile the two. So Queenie Paul suggested I wear male attire on the street. And I was a bit nervous about it, because of laws and all, but I thought I would try it for a week and every time I stopped at a corner, or went into a shop to buy something, people would say ‘there’s Nellie Small’. So then I never looked back.”
“There is a strong tradition of women dressing as men and men dressing as women in vaudeville, in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, America, and elsewhere. One of the best known is Ella Shields. Nellie started wearing male clothes in 1931 and by the time she was headlining at Sammy Lee’s in the 1950s she was way beyond “male impersonation”. Harry Foy, with whom Nellie would have shared the stage at Ziegfeld’s nightclub in King Street was a pioneer drag performer, part of his act was to flirt with men in the audience. When he kissed an American serviceman during a wartime performance, the homophobe assaulted Foy and killed him. Tragically, he was never convicted for this criminal over-reaction. And your queer readers will likely know about Lea Sonia and the incident where they were run down by a tram on Oxford Street. Vesta Tilley, Nellie Kolle, and Elsie Morris were all pioneer drag kings, but Nellie had a long, sustained career and her popularity and star power went undiminished for nearly thirty years.”
How was your show, Send for Nellie, devised?
“I started researching Nellie’s life in the 1990s and interviewed entertainers who were her contemporaries such as Bobby Limb, Jimmy Sommerville, and June Neary. My priority has been to use Nellie’s own words, drawn from the archives, newspaper reports, and recorded interviews. One interviewer described Nellie as “one of the pillars of Australian show business”, and numerous articles insist that she was a really big star, especially by the 1950s. Again from Nellie’s own mouth:
“I concentrated on nightclubs because they do provide continuity. Recently I spent three years at Sammy Lee’s nightclub in Sydney as the featured performer and that’s a bit of a record. With nightclubs they more or less build the show around the central performer and they’re the cornerstone.”
“Nellie was an Australian citizen and her heritage was West Indian on her father’s side of her family. Nellie again:
“My great-grandmother settled here in Australia way back and my mother, my grandmother, and myself were all born in Sydney. My father and grandfather were from Barbados and my great-grandfather came from Antigua.”
“Nellie faced racism in her life and told the Daily Telegraph in 1953:”
“I’m proud of my Australian birth. But I’d be much happier if more of my fellow countrymen would forget my skin color is different from theirs and sit down to hear my views on life and people.”
“In many ways Nellie was one of a kind, in other ways she faced the same discrimination that so many still face today. When I interviewed Jimmy Sommerville, with whom Nellie toured in the Port Jackson Jazz Band in 1953, he told me that she could not pick up her mail at the GPO in Brisbane; that many hotels would not allow her to stay; that people would spit at her and stare at her because they were racist. Later I read that customs officials would not let her back into her country of birth when she came back from an ice follies tour in New Zealand. They forced her to fill out a visitor’s permit, even though she was a third generation Australian. So it taught me that Australian culture was ready to accept Nellie in a spotlight on a stage, but off-stage the story was often painfully different.”
“Kween G, an African Australian community leader and hip-hop performer, who is the co-curator of this work and is managing cultural governance of the project, has spoken to me about that experience being very familiar; the idea of being accepted as an artistic or creatively talented person, but finding it more difficult outside of the moment in the spotlight.”
Can you give a flavour of what we can expect from the show?
“It’s a cabaret that will be featuring snippets and facets of Nellie’s life. It’s not a biography, but it will be a brilliant introduction to the incredible life of Nellie Small. It’ll feature songs that Nellie sang, including “Stormy Weather”, “At Last”, “Darktown Strutters Ball”, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, “St Louis Blues”, “Dinah”, and “Sunny Side of the Street”. Some patrons will be seated at cabaret tables and there is also raked seating. Alongside the MC there are two lead performers: Elanoa Rokobaro, who plays Nellie, and Eleanor Stankiewicz, who plays Edith Meggitt who Nellie lived with for twenty years along with with Edith’s husband.”
“It’s exciting to see more queer stories, gender diverse stories and stories of people of colour on our stages in 2024. Australian audiences want more stories of Australian queer and Black excellence, so I’m grateful to the cultural gatekeepers who are supporting us queers who are writing them! I tried to get this work up nearly 30 years ago, but Nellie’s time has come at last and this team is made up of the right people to finally bring Nellie’s story to the stage.”
Send For Nellie is playing at the Sydney Festival 2024 from January 10th – 14th, then touring to the Art House Wyong (January 19th – 20th) and Merrigong Theatre Company in Wollongong ( February 14th – 17th).
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