Tim Flavin appeared at the Crazy Coqs, London
Cravin’ Flavin: Memoirs of a Broadway Gypsy was performed at the Crazy Coqs, London.
Broadway’s loss was very much London’s gain with Tim Flavin, a song-and-dance man from Texas whose luck turned big-time when his love life brought him across the pond in the mid-1980s and he enjoyed huge success almost immediately.
Flavin took to us like a duck to water and we turned him into a much-loved West End musical theatre performer to such a degree that four Olivier Award nominations (including one win) came his way, two for On Your Toes in 1984 (for which he won Most Promising Newcomer), and one each for Crazy For You in 1995 and My One And Only in 2003.
As hostess Ruth Leon said in her introduction, Flavin is one of those rare “triple threat” entertainers who can sing, dance and act with equal skill. But now that his dancing days are numbered, Flavin is trying out a new career in cabaret, finding time between rehearsals for his new show WAG! The Musical which opens for a five-week run at the Charing Cross Theatre on 18 July, to give a one-night-special at the Crazy Coqs.
The evidence that the acting part of his many talents remains as bright as ever came at the start of the second set when, using the full room for a very tipsy version of ‘One For My Baby’, he lurched around the tables in an ever-increasing state of faux inebriation before collapsing behind the bar.
And his storytelling skills in relating how he turned from “King of the Flops” on Broadway, with five successive shows that bombed, into a feted West End star seamlessly bound together two dozen songs in a long (but certainly not overlong) show that were worth going a long way to hear.
Like the outstanding Gregg Edelman at the same charming venue a few weeks earlier, Flavin makes it look easy, never having to force a song, never shouty, always appearing to sing within himself, yet soaring to the climax of songs with effortless power.
Starting with ‘Magic to Do’ from Pippin, the song he performed at his first Broadway audition in 1978 – yes, he’s been in the business for almost five decades, yet still looks eternally young – Flavin’s first half continued with the ever-popular ‘Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’ and ‘The Surrey With the Fringe On Top’ from Oklahoma! before giving us a version of ‘Something’s Comin’ (from West Side Story) that has to rank as an as-good-as-it-gets interpretation of the Bernstein/Sondheim classic.
Ever a Sondheim admirer, Flavin then gave us ‘Marry Me a Little’ and ‘Being Alive’ before progressing to delightful interpretations of such well-worn standards as ‘Top Hat’ ‘Steppin’ Out’, ‘You Were Meant For Me’ and ‘Love is Here to Stay’.
After that ‘drunken’ start to the second half, Flavin moved on to ‘The Candy Man’, the biggest pop hit of Sammy Davis Jr’s career in 1972, and with it a story of how he and a girlfriend were invited to a Davis party where the Gene Kelly/Rita Hayworth movie Cover Girl was screened and they all came out to learn that only a few blocks away John Lennon had been murdered that evening.
Yes, he’s certainly been around has Mr Flavin, and whether it was the best from musical theatre or simply iconic pop songs such as the George Harrison-penned ‘Here Comes the Sun’, Michael Buble’s ‘Haven’t Met You Yet’ or Luther Vandross’ ‘The Impossible Dream’, it added up to two hours of pure magic, with Colin Billing a definite asset on piano. Let’s hope he comes back for a full week next time.
Jeremy Chapman
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