Lee Lessack on route from NY to Paris

Lee Lessack performs his show From Manhattan to Paris at The Crazy Coqs, London

Lee Lessack’s From Manhattan to Paris at The Crazy Coqs, London.

First of all I must declare an interest – I have been a fan of American cabaret artist Lee Lessack ever since I first saw him at the late lamented Pizza On the Park plenty of years ago and his light baritone still floats delightfully over a wide variety of likeable material, from Johnny Mercer to Charles Aznavour, from Stephen Schwartz to Paul Simon, his hair still jet-black at 50 (and NOT dyed, so he tells me).

The Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based Lessack, who first hit London in 1996, immediately got me onside (and a polite if not rapturous Crazy Coqs audience) with three great songs – ‘At the Same Time’ by that genius of a singer/songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway, ‘Being There’ from Stephen Sondheim, and ‘Dreamscape’, which Schwartz wrote for his 1997 album Reluctant Pilgrim and remains one of his finest creations.

Although he gave the audience chapter and verse about the majority of his programme, it was a shame he made no mention of Sondheim or Company, the show ‘Being There’ comes from. Maybe he thought the song was so famous it needed no introduction, but it is a fair guess that younger members of the first night audience might not have known the material, despite the current West End success of Merrily We Roll Along.

The show continued with ‘Much At All’ by folk-rock songwriter Susan Werner and another song from the same period, ‘Storybook’, from the 1997 Broadway musical The Scarlet Pimpernel by Frank Wildhorn and Nan Knighton.

After a section devoted to one of Lessack’s muses, the great Johnny Mercer, in which Lessack not only sang ‘Pineapple Pete’ but played a ukulele-type square-bottomed instrument called a fluke, while accompanied by his usual London pianist, the always-outstanding Nathan Martin (who learned the entire show at one rehearsal, we were informed), it was time for the Paris part of proceedings with two songs apiece by Gilbert Becaud and Aznavour, including the latter’s biggest hit ‘She’, and ‘Hymne d’Amour’ for which Edith Piaf wrote the lyrics.

For an encore we were treated to that classic ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ which, it has to be admitted, sounds more beautiful when Art Garfunkel sings it, and despite the variety of the material, the one flaw was that the show was too one-paced with too many lyrical ballads often sounding similar and not enough uptempo stuff to balance them.

Lessack, who flew in from Orlando where he has been working, is here until Saturday, and if you like good words and a voice that’s always in tune and easy on the ear, then head for this welcoming and very welcome Piccadilly nightspot which goes from strength to strength.

 Jeremy Chapman

www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs