Takin’ Stock: Kim Criswell 50 Years Upon The Wicked Stage – Crazy Coqs

Takin’ Stock: Kim Criswell 50 Years Upon the Wicked Stage at Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

A rare sighting of the flame-haired Kimmie bird in a cabaret setting brought the twitchers out in force at the Crazy Coqs to hear a voice in a million – and it really is – holding court in a long-awaited debut at the Piccadilly nightspot.

Yes, the great Kim Criswell, born in Virginia but one of us since she came over 30-plus years ago to play the title role in Annie Get Your Gun in the West End, fell in love and stayed, was back in town in a show to celebrate her 50 years on the stage.

Amazingly she has never starred in a West End musical since that well-received UK debut although did play the mother from hell in Carrie for a month at the Southwark Playhouse in 2015.

Maybe the eight-shows-a-week musical theatre life was not what she wanted but she switched seamlessly to concerts, stealing the show wherever she went. I saw two of those, Sondheim Inside Out on the South Bank, and a Richard Rodgers retrospective at the Wigmore Hall, but she’s played on bigger concert platforms than those, most notably the Royal Albert Hall.

I first saw her when she lit up the cabaret room at the much-missed Pizza on the Park in the last century and was bowled over by the pure beauty of that incredible voice. She has looked after that glorious instrument so well that, if anything, it is even more beautiful now.

I remain hypnotised and what an eclectic selection of songs, mostly chosen to illustrate a particular time in a stage career that began at 15 – she’s still miffed about not getting the lead in Finian’s Rainbow when she was in ninth grade!

Although there were songs in her Crazy Coqs set that everyone in an audience packed so tight there was barely room to swing a cat would have been familiar with such as ‘Unusual Way’, written by Maury Yeston for Nine, and ‘I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan’, the rest represented a very personal choice.

Criswell was one of the first entertainers to lend their names and their voices to AIDS benefits and there were tears in her eyes for gay friends she had lost as she sang ‘My Brother Lived in San Francisco’ (from the 1989 musical Elegies For Angels, Punks and Raging Queens).

In a more light-hearted vein, ‘Another Mr Right Left’, about all her early wrong choices in affairs of the heart – written by David Zippel and Wally Harper for the great Barbara Cook – and ‘Flings’, from New Girl in Town, Bob Merrill’s first attempt at a musical and all about what it says on the tin, lifted the mood but the piece de resistance was surely ‘By the River’ – “River calling/Come be my lover/I will bring you freedom/Flow along with me/To the sea” – I’m loving it so much I’ve learned the words.

‘By the River’ was part of a song cycle, a gorgeous crossover piece Yeston wrote for the 1991 Carnegie Hall centenary celebrations. Wonderful work on piano there too and all evening from the magic fingers of John Gladstone Smith.

‘Over The Rainbow’, The Wizard Of Oz’s big number, is so overplayed that the heart sinks a little at yet another version but when Criswell sings with such perfection, you find new layers to admire. Doing it alongside ‘Look to the Rainbow’ from Finian’s Rainbow, also with Yip Harburg’s lyrics but this time from a Burton Lane score rather than Harold Arlen, was an inspired coupling.

Finishing the show with a song full of hope for the future, ‘Just Go On’ – “Sometimes the only way to go/is just to go on” – fitted its spot on the programme admirably but it was a pity that Annie Get Your Gun, the musical we know her best from over here and which changed her life, was not given more space.

‘I Got The Sun In the Morning’ was part of her opening medley in which ‘Hostess With The Mostess’ from Call Me Madam evoked memories of Ethel Merman but unless I missed it, that was the limit of AGYG in the 90-minute programme.

Criswell even worked in a mention of Megan and Harry in her opening mash-up but although there was the odd light touch, she spoke too long and too fast. As it was the first set of her four-show visit, she was entitled to be nervous and no doubt the patter got sharper later in the week. After all, Criswell has been off the cabaret scene for a good while and it is a devilishly difficult discipline to get right.

That opening medley was the only music in a sticky first 20 minutes during which she took us through her beginnings in American successes with Nine, Cats and Side By Side By Sondheim and a letdown with her 1981 Broadway debut show The First (it lasted less than month) in which she had wear a fat suit.

The five stars are for her outstanding voice and a fascinating song choice, not the sort of material you sing along to on karaoke night at The Old Bull and Bush but so rewarding to hear great songs that need to be heard but often are not.

Jeremy Chapman