A Step Beyond the Rain: Karen Oberlin – The Pheasantry

A Step Beyond the Rain: Karen Oberlin at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The lustrous New York cabaret star Karen Oberlin brought back to London a show that she called Over the Rainbow at the Crazy Coqs in 2013 but is now tweaked and renamed A Step Beyond the Rain.

Either way it celebrated the work of composer Harold Arlen and lyricist EY (Yip) Harburg, best known for The Wizard of Oz and the iconic ‘Over the Rainbow’, voted the No. 1 song of the 20th century and typical of the songs of hope and dreams for which those socially-conscious collaborators were renowned.

The heartfelt Oberlin version of ‘Rainbow’ even included a stanza that ended up on the movie’s cutting room floor. The Oz segment of the 90-minute show also featured ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ and ‘If Only I Had a Heart’.

With an audience of only two dozen on her second night at The Pheasantry, Oberlin found it hard to create an atmosphere even though treating us, with maximum help from Nathan Martin on the venue’s Steinway, to one great tune after another.

To name but four: It’s Only a Paper Moon’, ‘Happiness is a Thing Called Joe’, written for Ethel Waters in 1943 for the first all-black film musical Cabin in the Sky, ‘Down With Love’ (from the 1937 anti-war musical Hooray For What!) and ‘Last Night When We Were Young’ made famous by Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

The voice is silky and smooth, her phrasing and interpretations beyond reproach, she is agelessly glamorous, not looking a day older than when I last saw her four years ago, and her linking material is well researched.

There was a particularly moving treatment of ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’, written by Harburg and Jay Gorney in 1930 at the height of the Great Depression, an anthem to the shattered dreams of that era. Harburg was so broke at one stage that his friend Ira Gershwin lent him $500, a huge sum at the time.

What was missing were humorous anecdotes and not enough change of pace. She did though manage a reference to Brexit in her version of ‘Lydia, the Tattooed Lady’, which Arlen and Harburg wrote for the 1939 Marx Brothers musical comedy At the Circus.

Oberlin is a serious singer and a very classy lady. She deserved a bigger audience.

Jeremy Chapman