Gregg Edelman – Crazy Coqs

Gregg Edelman performing at the Crazy Coqs

Gregg Edelman’s Broadway State of Mind at the Crazy Coqs, London.

After one big Broadway star in Patti LuPone last week, now London embraces another in Gregg Edelman, four-time Tony Award nominee – “or, as my brother puts it, four-time Tony Award loser!” and star of 15 Broadway shows, starting with Evita in 1979 right through to The Mystery of Edwin Drood last year.

And that’s not counting his appearance as Sweeney Todd at the Drury Lane Theatre. Sadly, not our Drury Lane, but the one in Edelman’s home city of Chicago.

What a Sweeney that must have been for Edelman is class, class, class. His Broadway credits include Cliff in Cabaret, the show that made his name in 1987, Billy Crocker in Anything Goes, Stine in City of Angels, Constantine Levin in Anna Karenina, Colonel Ricci in Passion, Javert in Les Miserables and the dual Into the Woods role of the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince, the Tony citations coming for City of Angels, Anna Karenina, 1776 and Into the Woods.

But he’s never played London, more’s the pity. “I’ve had offers but never wanted to spend long runs away from my two children as they were growing up,” he told me afterwards.

Hearing him in person for the first time is a total joy. He acts new meaning into songs we have heard over and over again, like ‘Something’s Coming’ from West Side Story, ‘Bring Him Home’ from Les Mis, Cole Porter’s ‘In the Still of the Night’ and ‘Send in the Clowns’ from A Little Night Music.

Edelman has a unique ability to breathe life into cabaret staples in such a way that one’s first reaction is to say: “I want to go back and hear him do that all over again.”

Of course, a cabaret act is about far more than just singing and Edelman has the easy manner and confidential repartee to charm the birds off the trees. Any aspiring cabaret performer – nay, any sort of singer – should run along to the Crazy Coqs before he finishes his short residency and learn how to phrase, how to act, how to tell a story in song. It looks effortless but we know the effort and the sweat that go into honing such an exquisite 75 minutes.

Edelman even mixes Gershwin, Porter, Sondheim, Lerner, Johnny Mercer and Cy Coleman with songs from the new generation of American songwriters and ‘Time’ by Barry Kleinbort looks more than comfortable among the greats. In fact, it is one of highlights of the evening.

Edelman tells us something I for one didn’t know – that Alan Jay Lerner “loved writing love songs without the word love in them” – and proceeded to do one such number ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’ from Camelot. Whether romantic songs like that one, ‘Long Lost Love’ or ‘Tonight’, or witty ones such as ‘Rhode Island’ and Sondheim’s ‘Everybody Says Don’t’, Edelman’s glorious baritone, sympathetically accompanied by James Church at the piano, soars to conquer, helped, of course, by his superb song choice. He doesn’t put a foot wrong, nor, for even one nano-second, looks like doing so.

Jeremy Chapman