STAGE REVIEW : A Rushed Portrait of a Cafe Society Queen

Gammy Singer is no spring chicken, as they used to say. But when she puts on a bowler and kicks into gear as the real-life Prohibition jazz baby Ada Smith in “Bricktop,” you can imagine the fizz in the champagne--as well as sip it yourself from the cabaret tables in the third-floor musical dive at the Inner City Cultural Center.

Onstage pianist Marvin Evans bangs out numbers from ragtime to the blues to Cole Porter in this one-woman show. The title is the nickname of the auburn-haired Ada (1895-1984), a devilish black queen of cafe society and later Gay Paree who hobnobbed with heavyweight champ Jack Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and was Josephine Baker’s Paris mentor.

Smith was no Baker but a trouper who, in Singer’s re-creation, ripped like a comet through the night clubs of the Western world.

Singer’s eyes twinkle, her nostrils flare, her eyebrows arch. In fact, you wish she’d slow down, for the show’s sake. She tries to cram too much--too many names, too much biography, too much hustle--into the two acts. Given the room’s bad acoustics, it becomes exhausting to follow all the trails.

Qulture S. Jarrett designed the show and Candy Brown choreographed the period routines. But Singer needs a director to modulate the pace and tighten “Bricktop” into a one-act.--R. L.

At 1308 S. New Hampshire Ave., Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 3 p.m., through Aug. 12. $15. Information: (213) 384-0980 or (213) 387-1161.