Kerry’s Christmas: Kerry Ellis – The Pheasantry, Chelsea

Kerry’s Christmas: Kerry Ellis at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

How times change! The last time I reviewed Kerry Ellis at The Pheasantry long before all those endless lockdowns the place was rammed, as you would expect for a singer of her popularity, and the only table they could give me was opposite the entrance door and next to a stacked coat stand.

On Thursday, the second night of her three-day December residency, the place was only just over half-full even with social distancing. So what gives?

Well, Ellis is still Ellis, absolutely first class. So are people lying low as a fearful reaction to stricter Covid precautions? Or is £35 – Ellis rightly comes more expensive than most Pheasantry acts – for a 75-minute set off-putting? Surely not, a bad 75-minute West End play can cost twice that. More likely the former as I’m told theatre ticket sales have also dipped suddenly with more cancellations than normal.

So naturally we had plenty of festive songs, even a Christmas Carol (’In the Bleak Midwinter’). ‘Santa Baby’ was livelier and saucier than most and Ellis ended the show with her favourite, the underrated Carpenters’ ‘Merry Christmas Darling’, now half a century old but not showing its age.

After the Christmas song section, we all had to put our requests into a wine cooler. She pulled out one from We Will Rock You in which she featured early in a career that’s seen her cross over from stage musicals like Wicked (Elphaba, West End and Broadway), Les Misérables (Fantine), Oliver! (Nancy) and Cats (Grizabella) to recording artist and concert/cabaret performer. She is now also an author, Bumpkin to Broadway was published in hardback last month. These showbiz tales gave her something to do, she said, during lockdowns.

Somebody requested ‘On My Own’ but she dodged that one – “not my song” – by offering instead another Les Mis show-stopper, the haunting ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ – “Les Mis was a big show for me back in 2005.”

Now 42 and mother of two sons, eight and four, she admitted feeling her age when on a trip to Dublin she talked about learning her Les Mis part from a double cassette and her young audience didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, another how-times-have-changed moment.

Ellis was fortunate early in her career in 2002 in attracting the attention of Queen guitarist Brian May who has always had her back, casting her in We Will Rock You, recording with her and performing in concerts with her. He saw something special in Ellis – and how right he was.

She has never forgotten that and now helps progress young talent in her shows. Every time I’ve seen her, there’s a guest spot for someone who has caught her eye and on this occasion it was Caitlin O’Malley, who is just graduating from Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom where Ellis herself trained from the age of 16.

Not many O’Malleys are Welsh but the 21-year-old Swansea lass is and she certainly has a future if her two offerings, ‘When I Look At You’ from The Scarlet Pimpernel and ‘She Used to Be Mine’ from Waitress, are anything to go by. The latter, by American songwriter Sara Bareilles, has quickly become a cabaret standard. I’ve now heard it from three different young ladies in the past month, all good. It is a song I have a lot of time for, as obviously do they.

Earlier Ellis had paid tribute to the late Stephen Sondheim with an admirably controlled ‘Send in the Clowns’. She is a good model for any aspiring young singer, particularly for how she tackles the high notes, soaring but silky smooth without trace of the harsh belt that so many with less experience seem to think is dramatic. It rarely is.

Ellis is not known for her Sondheim work but she did play Mary in Merrily We Roll Along at Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud. She recalled that learning her first Sondheim song at Laine was: “ the hardest of my life but once learned, the words and rhythms are ingrained in your brain forever. We have lost a true legend.”

Two other songs stood out for the way she delivered them – Joni Mitchell’s emotive ‘River’ and a new one to me, ‘ Always Starting Over’ from If/Then (book and lyrics Brian Yorkey, music Tom Kitt) which had a Broadway run in 2014/15 but is yet to make it here.

Accompanied by her terrific “showbiz husband” Craig Adams, Ellis is a cabaret natural, warm, chatty, gently amusing and always worth seeing. We could easily have taken another 15 minutes.

Jeremy Chapman