Comparing Notes: Lucy Schaufer and Edward Seckerson – Crazy Coqs

Comparing Notes: Lucy Schaufer and Edward Seckerson at the Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

After the madcap buffoonery of the inimitable Oscar Conlon-Morrey the previous month, it was a far more peaceful guest that Edward Seckerson introduced in his popular Comparing Notes series at the Crazy Coqs, that chic cabaret room near Piccadilly Circus.

On a sombre Sunday afternoon just two two days after the passing of Stephen Sondheim, it was inevitable that the genre-bending American mezzo-soprano Lucy Schaufer would honour the great man, particularly as it was only this summer that she was baking ‘The Worst Pies in London’ as Mrs Lovett in an Iowa production of Sweeney Todd.

Having been born in Carpentersville (the title of her 2013 solo album) north west of Chicago, singing with the Des Moines Metro Opera was something of a homecoming for Schaufer who married the English tenor Christopher Gillett in 1996 and now calls Wiltshire home.

There was a certain irony in that comic number because Schaufer herself, a serious cook and jam maker, would have made mincemeat of the villainous Nellie in any pie-making contest. It wasn’t ‘Pies’ but the lesser-known ‘Wait’ she chose from Sondheim’s masterpiece – a song, she said, that was “Mrs Lovett’s way of seducing Sweeney”. And so it is.

“Don’t you know,
Silly man,
Half the fun is to
Plan the Plan?
All good things come to
Those who can
Wait”

There was more Sondheim as an encore – ‘Take Me to the World’ from the 1966 TV movie Evening Primrose – but not too much as she was determined to be as upbeat as possible as per the riotous ‘Voter’s Prayer’ which exhorts politicians to “forget fornication, focus on our nation” and “keep it in your pants”.

Who could LA songwriters Michele Brourman and Amanda McBroom have been writing about? In fact, it is a non-partisan call for political candidates to rein in their libidos if they hope to be elected.

Brourman is a particular friend of Schaufer’s as she acknowledged when performing the former’s arrangement of Hedy West’s ‘500 Miles’, a 1960s folk lament about a traveller far from home, out of luck and too ashamed to return.

For the rest, it was weightier stuff, works by American composers Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein and William Bolcom, Jule Styne’s Great American Songbook classic ‘Time After Time’ and ‘Dividing Day’ from Adam Guettel’s Light in the Piazza.

But it’s the music not the label that interests Schaufer. Not keen on being pigeon-holed, she eschews words like ‘crossover’ and ‘opera singer’ although she has performed in many of the world’s greatest opera houses.

And she’s not snobby about ‘jukebox musicals’ either, chiding classical music writer Seckerson when he implied that genre was cluttering up the West End at the expense of more high-falutin’ stuff by riposting they were giving jobs to good people and “is it so wrong that people are enjoying themselves?”

She added that, so soon after Covid lockdowns had all but killed off live theatre, producers were to be congratulated and thanked “for putting things on, it’s tough out there”.

With her husband, Schaufer founded Wild Plum Arts a couple of years ago, its purpose being to nurture composers by commissioning and collaborating to perform new works. And at the end of 90 civilised minutes comparing notes with Seckerson, beautifully accompanied by the ubiquitous Alex Parker on piano, lovable Schaufer was to be seen selling her wild plum jam to raise more funds for her pet project. Quite a lady!

Jeremy Chapman