I Know Things Now: Jeff Harnar Sings Sondheim – The Pheasantry

I Know Things Now: Jeff Harnar Sings Sondheim at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Smooth, polished, inventive… dapper American cabaret star Jeff Harnar makes singing look easy, even when confronted by Stephen Sondheim’s notoriously difficult lyrics.

The Californian, now 60 (but you’d never have guessed it), seems to have been coming to these shores forever and not just as a singer because he acted as director and host of The American Songbook in London at the Jermyn Street Theatre for three years, bringing over a feast of top-line New York cabaret artists.

More recently, he linked up with KT Sullivan for two editions of Sondheim’s work under the title Another Hundred People at the Crazy Coqs in 2015-16 but I Know Things Now was his solo London debut with what was similar, gender-bending material to his last visit.

With this totally sung-through programme once he had told us “this my story, the music is Sondheim’s”, Harnar defied cabaret traditions by dispensing with any anecdotal or explanatory between-song banter.

That works if your audience are dyed-in-the-wool Sondheim addicts but for the casual tourist and young Sondheim wannabes a song sheet with the names of the featured shows would have made for a more fulfilling evening.

With the terrifyingly gifted Jon Weber on piano, Harnar has never sung better, seamlessly and cleverly running one great set of lyrics into another. I counted 24 of Sondheim’s finest woven into a golden hour. It might have been more because there was only a snippet or two of some of them.

When last in London, he and Sullivan even topped that by shoehorning 40 examples of Sondheim’s genius into a 70-minute set.

From ‘Can That Boy Foxtrot’ with its hilarious innuendo and ‘You Could Drive a Person Crazy’ through the tongue-twisting ‘Not Getting Married Today’ and the less familiar ‘The Best Thing That Ever Happened’ to ‘Children Will Listen’, ‘Old Friends’ and Company’s stirring final anthem ‘Being Alive’, this was a set to delight but also challenge every Sondheim fan’s preconception of the meaning of much-loved favourites.

Openly gay, Harnar put his own spin on songs more associated with Sondheim’s women, such as ‘Losing My Mind’, ‘Not Getting Married Today’, ‘Send In The Clowns’, ‘Loving You’ and the biting satire of ‘Could I Leave You?’ with that cruel line “How could I leave when I left long ago, love”.

His light tenor never strove too hard nor strained for effect. Every word, even in the relentless rush of ‘Not Getting Married Today’, came over as clear as a bell, every line delivered with precision and point on a classy first night of a three-day Pheasantry stay.

Jeremy Chapman