Travels With My Piano: Steve Ross at The Pheasantry, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The London cabaret scene is a better place when New York legend Steve Ross is in town and on the first of a three-night stint at famed Chelsea nightspot The Pheasantry he took us on a magical global journey filled with style, charm, humour and versatility.
In his 80th year, the debonair Ross, in the green velvet jacket presented to him by the Noël Coward Society, is as dazzling as ever on the Pheasantry’s Steinway – the thrilling ten-minute piano-only medley of seven Edith Piaf songs alone is worth the ticket.
The joyous and passionate ‘I Love a Piano’, a 1915 Irving Berlin song from the musical Stop! Look! Listen!, shows a man very much at the top of his game and happy in his work.
Ross has been a welcome visitor for a very long time – he opened the much-loved Pizza On the Park cabaret room in 1982 and sang it out in 2010 – and I remember seeing him in 1985 at The Ritz when for a tenner you could have a pudding and a show.
The voice is never amazing but that doesn’t matter as it is his phrasing and timing, his sympathetic acting of the material, his understanding of a song and the knowledge he imparts that make Ross such a special treat.
It’s hard to believe anyone else has so many songs in his/her repertoire. Where else would you hear work by Mischa Spoliansky or Leonello Casucci or even Bob Merrill and Albert Hammond? And who’s going to pick up the baton on these lesser-known classics when Ross is no longer entertaining and educating us?
The achingly moving ‘Just a Gigolo’, a 1928 composition by Casucci and Julius Brammer later translated into English by Irving Caesar, charts the decline of an escort whose looks are on the wane and is one of the big moments in a mesmerising 95-minute set of 25 songs that Ross does in one take and no guest to give him a breather.
No one does songs of lost love and loneliness better than Ross and the beautiful ‘Mira’ from Carnival by Merrill based on the 1953 movie Lili is another cracker, while the more modern ‘99 Miles From LA’ by Hammond and Hal David is a personal favourite.
There’s plenty of Coward including the very fruity ‘Bar On The Piccola Marina’ and one from the largely forgotten 1963 musical The Girl Who Came to Supper.
This was ‘Saturday Night at the Rose and Crown’, one of the Cockney numbers Coward wrote for ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea when he created the role of fish and chip vendor Ada Cockle for her and she won a Tony for it.
Counterpointing that is the beautiful ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’, written by Ivor Novello for Perchance to Dream as the Second World War was drawing to a close, evoking the joy of parted couples being reunited after the fighting is done.
London, New York, Paris, Vienna, Brazil, LA… Cole Porter (a great Can-Can medley), Coward, Loesser, Trenet, Harburg, Novello, Tauber, Spoliansky, Merrill, even a dab of Lloyd Webber with ‘Memory’ and Ross himself with ‘Whenever I Think of Paris’.
Songs in pretty decent French and German… a spoken version of ‘Why Do the Wrong People Travel?’, the satirical Coward poem made famous by Elaine Stritch… and more, much more. It has been quite a journey by the immaculate Ross, now in his sixth decade as the Prince of Manhattan cabaret, and it is fascinating to share it with him.
Jeremy Chapman
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