The Heart of It: Liza Pulman – The Other Palace 

The Heart of It: Liza Pulman at The Other Palace, London (also 30 January 2023).

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Fronting her band with old style glamour, red satin for the first half, pink sequins for the second, tousled blonde hair and a beaming smile, Liza Pulman launches into her set with ‘Sing’/‘Hello Again’. An evening of classics from Streisand’s early years and some from her later more contemporary albums, Pulman does indeed sound at times like Streisand, the same elongated phrasing, and fortissimo finishes, though her classical training adds a burnish to those top notes that she repeatedly prolongs, holding them long after the musical accompaniment ceases.

Old tracks like ‘I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling’ and the classic Streisand ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ from the rarely seen musical House of Flowers are performed with an arrangement for guitar with Adam Chinery. Musical director and arranger Joseph Atkins swings with the jazz-tinged arrangements on keyboards and accordion aided by the five-piece band, Tom Mark (bass), Rich Craig (drums), Chinery (guitar), Steve Walker (trumpet) and Rich Pardy (sax/clarinet).

Pulman gives us a beautiful ‘My Favourite Year’, ‘Evergreen’ and Irving Berlin’s lament ‘What’ll I Do’. A jaunty ‘If I Only Had a Brain’ is followed by a mix of Sylvia Fine’s (Mrs Danny Kaye) ‘Lullaby of Ragtime’ with the theme from the film Ragtime, called ‘Ragtime Randy’. There’s also ’Come in From the Rain’ and Legrand’s ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’. Snippets of her life story pepper the songs and the first half closes with Bond theme ‘Nobody Does It Better’.

Act II opens with another classic Streisand, ‘I Stayed Too Long at the Fair’, followed by ]New York State of Mind’. Then a beautiful Judy Collins song, ‘My Father’, new to me.

Bernstein’s ‘Some Other Time’ from the stage version of On the Town, though beautifully sung, sadly misses the melancholy of people who, having found a connection, are aware that they may never meet again. So poignant in its original quartet version.

A tale about going into a music store to buy some Schubert sheet music and emerging instead with Streisand leads into Neil Diamond’s ‘You Don’t Bring me Flowers’. Bringing us to a close with ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Blackbird’.

Pulman has a phenomenal instrument and is an accomplished musician. She can sculpt a soft phrase with great beauty, but, and herein lies the nub, all too often she goes for the huge soaring crowd-pleasing finish, fingers stabbing the air theatrically and after a while it becomes predictable and wearing. Her beaming smile and sense of comedy, no doubt honed from her years as part of Fascinating Aida, often intrude on the more heartfelt songs, a glimmer of a smile breaking through. She tells us that in her choice of songs she wanted to ‘lift our hearts’ and ‘break our hearts’. The first she achieves in spades, but for this listener it needs a greater depth of emotion to do the latter.

Leon Ferguson