KT Sullivan and Karen Kohler perform Vienna to Weimar at the Crazy Coqs, London
KT Sullivan and Karen Kohler – Vienna to Weimar at the Crazy Coqs, London, until 26 October.
Barb Jungr – Mad About the Boy and No Regrets at the Soho Theatre, London, until 26 October.
Insatiable cabaret buffs, if they’re quick on their feet around London’s West End this week, have the opportunity of seeing three mistresses of the genre, KT Sullivan, Karen Kohler and Barb Jungr, performing at two different venues on the same night. My, how the London Festival of Cabaret is spoiling us!
New York-based Sullivan, who has just hosted the four-day New York Cabaret Convention at Broadway’s Rose Theatre, and Kohler, whose international ensemble Kabarett Kollektif is devoted to popularising European cabaret in the USA, team up for Vienna to Weimar at the Crazy Coqs.
This is exactly what it says on the tin, taking us through songs as different as ‘Vienna, City of Dreams’, ‘I Am a Vamp’, which has the blood-curdling line “I bite my men and suck them dry, and then I bake them in a pie”, and a 1920 gay rights plea called ‘Das Lila Lied’ – through classics like ‘Falling in Love Again’ and ‘Lili Marlene’.
This was a very polished and well-rehearsed set, as it was always bound to be with the incomparable Sullivan and the extremely confident Kohler, a striking German who made much of her life in Texas, in tandem and clearly at ease with each other.
A quick dash from Piccadilly to the Soho Theatre in Dean Street gets you in the nick of time to Barb Jungr’s 9.30 show, Mad About the Boy and No Regrets, which sounds like Noel Coward meets Edith Piaf but turns out to be a walk on the dark side of love.
Mad About the Boy and No Regrets – Barb Jungr at the Soho Theatre, London
While Sullivan and Kohler, with excellent accompanment from Jed Distler, take us from the cushy Viennese sentimentality of Lehar and Johann Strauss through the hard-edged Hollaender-Brecht-Weill cynicism of harsher times, teasing us that the mannishly-clad Kohler and the more voluptuous Sullivan might even be lovers, Jungr assails our senses with an often brutal but always musical attack on some of the great pop classics, from Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ through to the wildly-applauded Brel masterpiece ‘Marieke’ and Leonard Cohen’s haunting ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’.
Julian Clary’s description of Jungr’s act as “a one-woman emotional enema and not for the faint-hearted” is not as OTT as you might think.
Cohen is the one connection between the shows as Sullivan and Kohler come out of period (but not theme) to give us his 1967 composition ‘Take This Waltz’, a translation of ‘Little Viennese Waltz’ by the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca.
The hypnotic Jungr is one of the few British cabaret artists with a big reputation in the States and totally in charge of the stage and her material. She puts a spin on things that is entirely her own, whether challenging the audience with power or caressing a ballad with an incredible stillness. If you are wondering about the show’s title, yes, she did do Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ (in a very jazzy version with some great piano from her regular accompanist Simon Wallace) and not only Piaf’s ‘No Regrets’ but also a 1968 song of the same name written by Tom Rush.
There’s more to come from both Sullivan and Jungr. Sullivan is doing a second week at the Crazy Coqs with an entirely different show, using only women songwriters, called Rhyme, Women and Song, while Jungr, a patron of the Festival, is putting together a free Great American Songbook masterclass at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden on 1 November.
Jeremy Chapman
www.londonfestivalofcabaret.com
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