60 Glorious Years: I’m Still Here! – Stefan Bednarczyk – Crazy Coqs

60 Glorious Years: I’m Still Here! – Stefan Bednarczyk – live-streamed from Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

An hour spent with cabaret maestro Stefan Bednarczyk is always a pleasure and this man of many parts did not let us down, even though the Crazy Coqs show he put together to celebrate his 60th birthday could only be viewed at long range.

Somehow he shoehorned 16 songs into 65 minutes, complete with anecdotes telling us where they figured in his journey through life, and what classics they were, most witty, some nostalgic, all exquisitely played on the piano and performed with passion.

We expected plenty of Noël Coward and Flanders and Swann because they have been the pegs to hang earlier shows on in cabaret rooms all over the world but here he also weaved in the work of Jake Thackray, Tom Lehrer, Jacques Brel (a gorgeous two-language version of ‘Chanson des Vieux Amants’) and Comden and Green.

Thackray is largely forgotten these days but the Yorkshireman’s clever songs got him primetime TV spots on shows like Braden’s Week and That’s Life half a century ago. Some called him the Noël Coward of the North.

The choice of ‘The Remembrance‘ was particularly appropriate on Armistice Day, the other Thackray ‘The Blacksmith and the Toffee-Maker’ coming from a storyline in Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie.

From Lehrer, the scholarly American whose outrageous satires like ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ earned him a cult following, Bednarczyk chose ‘Clementine’, pulled to pieces by Lehrer, who said most folk songs were so “atrocious” for being written by “the people”.

How much better it would have sounded if written by a proper songwriter like Cole Porter, or translated in the style of Italian opera, given a jazz riff or put into the hands of Gilbert and Sullivan – “full of words and music… signifying nothing!”

‘Clementine’ was funny but two of Coward’s, ‘The Bar on the Piccola Marina’ and ‘Nina’, topped that.

Nina from Argentina married a sailor with a wooden leg because she would never have to dance (which she hated doing) and naughty widow Mrs Wentworth-Brewster whose husband “retired then expired” are deservedly comedy classics.

Emboldened by a few G-and-Ts on holiday in Capri, doubles by the sound of it, Wentworth-Brewster’s frolics with three sailors from Messina she met at the bar are priceless. It was the first Coward ditty the young Bednarczyk learned by heart and he clearly loves performing it.

‘Where Are the Songs We Sung’, vintage 1938, and the charming ‘I Wanted to Show You Paris’, written by a more mature Noël, showed off the serious side of Coward. Bednarczyk ended with ‘Bad Times Are Just Around the Corner’, a comic masterpiece even more relevant today than it was in the 1950s. You don’t have to look around corners to run into ‘Bad Times’ today. They are here, there and everywhere and Sir Noël would be turning in his grave.

It must have been tricky for Bednarczyk with no audience to laugh at the funny songs. The odd claps from the few on-site staff were well intentioned but only underlined the enforced absence of a proper audience.

Streaming a show is a wonderful idea and puts money into the performer’s bank account but is no substitute for the real thing. Yet maybe GOOD things will be around the corner sooner than we think. In the meantime, happy 60 to Stefan and may he long continue charming us with these wonderful blasts from the past.

Jeremy Chapman