Interview: From Kansas Sunflower Patch to Speakeasy Queen: Eddy Hackett on Belle Livingstone, the Inspiration for The Lost Estate's 58TH STREET

With their considered combination of fine dining and live performance, immersive theatre specialists The Lost Estate have infused their latest show 58th Street with speakeasy vibes, a six-part tasting menu and a six-piece jazz band fronted by Ayesha Pike.

As London is now a global hub for immersive shows of all kinds, we speak to The Lost Estate's co-founder Eddy Hackett about what makes 58th Street stand out.

How did 58th Street come together as a show?

So 58th Street has had a fairly extensive history! This is kind of its third iteration.  It started off back in 2019 when we did a pop-up version of a brand new jazz musical set in Prohibition-era New York which we called The Lost Love Speakeasy. It was more of a piece of theatre with music in it. 

We came round to it again in 2023 to do a new version of that show. We wanted to take it to the next level and one of the key inspirations was that, when we were doing some research around about the period after having done The Lost Love Speakeasy, we came across this amazing book about entrepreneur, socialite and speakeasy queen called Belle Livingstone. 

“Belle Out of Time” was one of three autobiographies that she wrote in her lifetime and told this incredible story of an orphan who was found in a sunflower patch in Kansas. She went on to tread the boards on Broadway before moving to London then travelled all the way around the world. She spent a lot of time in postwar Paris in the 20s, and then was asked to come back and, when she came back to New York, she was asked to write a whole bunch of articles about being there for Vanity Fair comparing the French capital’s nightlife to that in the Big Apple.

One thing led to another and Belle ended up running her own speakeasies. She took inspiration from her time in Paris to create a bohemian paradise and that became the basis for our 2023 show The Greatest Night Of The Jazz Age.

How is this show different from what you’ve done before?

We really stripped back the show and and focused it on on two things. The first is making the music the real star of the show through the six-piece band that plays during the evening. That is absolutely front and centre of what our audience experiences.

And then obviously the hospitality experience which has grown quite a lot since the Lost Love Speakeasy days. It's a six course tasting menu and we've really upped the production values there. Overall, we think it’s a very opulent and frankly incredible space with literally the best band in London fronted by the singer Ayesha Pike with performances from a burlesque dancer.

Rather than having a narrative, 58th Street is more about theatricalised stage numbers that have a mix of social commentary plus a little bit of Belle’s backstory.

How did you come to choose which songs to include in 58th Street?

One of the key numbers in the production is this mash up between the jazz standard “Summertime” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”. There's this very kind of poignant moment in the show where it allows Ayesha (who sings in the style of Holiday) to look back at the story of of how black singers were revered in the Prohibition era, the first time that they had the spotlight on them instead of being marginalised performers.

I think really the first thing is that we set ourselves some creative constraints. The first creative constraint was that the music had to be written and performed in or around 1930. All three of the Lost Estate cofounders are musicians. I myself spent 20 years as a percussionist and jazz is something I’m really passionate about. I know that music well and we worked with musical director Rory Simmons who has been a long-term collaborator in various iterations of this show. 

Together we picked some of the burning classics of the day like “Sing Sing Sing” and fused them with numbers that really help elevate the audience experience. When the main course comes out, there’s a fantastic Cab Calloway classic called “Everyone Eats When They Come To My House” and we ramp it up at the start of Act 3 with something which is more of a dance party number. The aim is to choreograph food and music so they come together as one.

Is the food and drink authentic to the time period of 58th Street?

I guess another kind of hallmark of how we create our productions at The Lost Estate is that usually everything is both grounded in a real time and place or a real story. So, for example, as 58th Street is grounded in the real life story of Belle Livingston, the hospitality is also not only like the kind of food you would find in restaurants serve up in the 1930s but also what people back then would cook for themselves.

A core inspiration for the hospitality at 58th Street was the Waldorf Astoria. For those in New York, it was the iconic place where you went to enjoy amazing Park Avenue dining. So we spent a lot of time researching the menus, You can actually find a lot of these menus online and some of the dishes are taken directly from them while others are our modern take. The very first dish is an amuse bouche that is our version of a Waldorf salad that takes all the flavour profiles and many of the ingredients and then places them in a new context,

Our mixologists have also worked on a range of cocktails based on period-specific recipes which reflect those that you could imagine being found in a New York speakeasy. We’ve added some incredibly fun twists: one of the cocktails that comes out of a popcorn tin and is served with a side of popcorn.  For those partial to bubbles, we have Piper-Heidsieck champagne on the menu.

58th Street continues at The Lost Estate until 18 May