Marti Webb – The Pheasantry

Marti Webb at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 

British singers who have shows written specifically for them, particularly when those writers are as famous as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black, are few but their brilliant song cycle Tell Me On a Sunday transformed Marti Webb from singers’ singer to international star.

Webb was filling in for Elaine Paige in Evita while Paige took a holiday when she was headhunted by Lloyd Webber to collaborate on an idea he and Black had for a show based on the experiences of a friend. ALW, impressed by her Eva Perón, told Webb: “You sing in my key” to which came the reply “And you write in mine”.

Almost 40 years on she’s still knocking it out of the park as one gorgeous song after another tumbled out of a crystal-clear voice winning the struggle with a heavy cold, as loveable Webb bathed her Pheasantry fans in two hours of golden nostalgia.

First seen as a TV special in 1980, Tell Me On a Sunday, a one-woman show which tells of the romantic misadventures of a naive Londoner alone in the States, went on to become a best-selling album and ‘Take That Look Off Your Face’ a No.3 singles hit.

Then, in 1982, it went to the West End as the first half of Song and Dance, running for almost 800 performances, since when Webb has reprised The Girl (we’re never told her name) in several revivals, the last one at the age of 70 in 2014, playing a woman half her age.

The show, which had only two songs written when Webb joined the team, features some of the best work produced by the noble lord and Black, who became her manager, and Webb not only re-created ‘Sunday’ at The Pheasantry but also ‘Come Back With the Same Look in your Eyes’, ‘Take That Look Off Your Face’ and, for her encore, ‘Unexpected Song’ which was added at a later date.

As a tribute to Black, her “Uncle Don”, she also performed some of his other material, ‘Ben’ which also made the Top 5 in the charts, and ‘Always There’, the theme music from that old seafaring soap Howard’s Way.

Webb went up to the Pheasantry balcony for ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ from Evita, the show that took her to prominence only a couple of years after she gave up going to auditions because she was fed up with rejections and went to work in a travel agency.

Yet her 60-year (and counting) career had begun so promisingly at 15 when Anthony Newley took her straight from school for his Stop The World – I Want To Get Off chorus – she sang the beautiful ‘What Kind Of Fool Am I?’

Webb went on to her first West End lead in Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele (they reunited for The Glenn Miller Story at the Coliseum last year)  and played Nancy on an early Oliver! tour.

It’s astonishing how many big-name shows Webb has appeared in after Evita on tours as well as in the West End, among them The King and I, Cats, Annie, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Blood Brothers, Oklahoma!, 42nd Street and La Cage Aux Folles.

She gave us some glorious samples of her work in them, not least ‘Hello, Young Lovers’, ‘Easy Street’ and that Willy Russell masterpiece ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’.

But Webb is not one to live in the past and she had some more modern beauties for us as well: the Oscar-nominated ‘The Place Where Lost Things Go’ from Mary Poppins Returns, a song destined to become a cabaret standard, was a gem.

Freddie Mercury’s haunting ‘Love of My Life’ hit the spot too and although not known as a Sondheim interpreter, her perfectly-pitched ‘Send in the Clowns’ was a joy.

And when the “old lady” needed a break to get her breath back, her young accompanist, the talented Clark Wilkinson, weighed in with ‘Electricity’, the only song from Billy Elliot that stands on its own, ‘Not While I’m Around’ from Sweeney Todd and a very spirited ‘Ring Them Bells’.

Wilkinson and guitarist John Cooper provided superb support as Webb wove her magic through a 28-song set that was impossible not to love. To this long-time admirer, heaven.

Jeremy Chapman