Everything’s Coming Up Roses: the Jule Styne Songbook – Crazy Coqs

Simon Bailey, Amy Lennox, Anna Francolini and Tim Flavin in Everything’s Coming Up Roses: the Jule Styne Songbook at the Crazy Coqs, London

Everything’s Coming Up Roses: the Jule Styne Songbook continues at the Crazy Coqs, London until 6 September.

What a blast – short but very sweet… two dozen Jule Styne songs rattled off in a bare hour in a gorgeous start to the Crazy Coqs’ autumn season. Truly, everything’s coming up roses for London cabaret if this is the standard of entertainment we’re going to be getting regularly.

As this Bethnal Green-born son of Ukrainian emigrants never wrote a bad one – and he claims to have written more than 2000 – deviser-director Alastair Knights and MD Alex Parker, the young team recently so Sondheimly successful with Putting It Together and GOD, had a wealth of material to choose from.

And they found a tremendously talented team to sing them – two smashing actress-singers in Anna Francolini (Company/Merrily We Roll Along) and Amy Lennox, terrific in Stiles and Drewe’s Soho Cinders, Olivier Award-winner Tim Flavin (Best Newcomer for On Your Toes in 1984) and Simon Bailey, fresh from the two-hander Marry Me a Little sell-out that’s getting a second outing at St James Studio next month.

Knights makes imaginative and amusing use of the entire room, bringing his singers in from either side and using the whole space in several ensemble numbers, while Parker’s arrangements are, as ever, a joy. Do keep an eye out for anything with their stamp on as it is highly likely to be worth seeing.

There are the big hits (or the “hit hits” as Styne called them) from Gypsy (‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’, ‘Gotta Get a Gimmick’, ‘All I Need is the Girl’ and ‘Together Wherever We Go’) to the song that Streisand will forever be associated with, ‘People’ from Funny Girl, here given a lovely treatment by the versatile Lennox.

The range and quality is astonishing: ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’, another Funny Girl classic, ’Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ (from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and the ever-catchy ’It’s Magic’ which Doris Day took to No. 2 on the 1948 hit parade, to name but three that are totally timeless.

But Knights and Parker don’t overlook the lesser-known stuff – Francolini, a brilliant actress of any song who inhabits every line, sits at the bar with a glass of wine to tell us ‘When I’m Drunk I’m Beautiful’, from a late-career flop Prettybelle that bombed in Boston and never made it Broadway, and wows us again with ‘Winter Was Warm’ from Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol that will have been new to many.

Lennox, a deadringer for Amanda Holden and yet another from the amazing Guildford School of Acting production line, deserves to be far better known. Her lively facial expressions and throwaway gestures light up every song she essays.

She is right on the money in the Judy Holliday number ‘It’s a Perfect Relationship’ from Bells Are Ringing as the answering service operator Ella whose relationship with clients is “perfect” because she can’t see them and they can’t see her… until romance with a writer’s-block playwright changes all that.

And her ‘If’ (it rhymes with ‘no signif’ in Two On the Aisle but you can blame Comden and Green for the lyrics!) wins the biggest applause of an evening that is over all too soon.

In fact, the shortness of the show, a revue rather than a cabaret since it does not contain a single spoken word, causes the odd rumble of discontent.

I am not one of those “never mind the quality, feel the width” brigade who measures the success of a night out by its running time, otherwise I’d be alternating between A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Hamlet.

But people coming from way out of town and facing exorbitant rail fares (not counting the cost of admission) are entitled to feel miffed about getting only 58 minutes for their money and a return visit may find a few extra songs added.

The more the merrier.

Me? I’ll happily settle for what we got on opening night… 3480 seconds of Jule jewels in a little gem of a show.

Jeremy Chapman

www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs/jule-styne-group-show

Readers may also be interested in:

Everything’s Coming Up Jule Styne – interview with musical director Alex Parker