An Evening with Lee Mead at The Pheasantry, London.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
It is 15 years since Lee Mead’s life changed and, out of 10,000 applicants, he won Andrew Lloyd Webber’s TV talent show search for an unknown to play the title role in the 2007 West End revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
The prize was a six-month run in the Webber-Tim Rice musical that proved to be such a hit that Mead was still singing Joseph for the 600th time two years later and out of that success came further West End opportunities like Wicked, Legally Blonde and, a national tour with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
From there Mead has gone on to straight acting as the lovable Lofty for a couple of years in TV soaps Casualty and Holby City. But he has always loved doing his own show at The Pheasantry and here he was paying his annual visit, much to the delight of those ladies of a certain age who want to mother the curly-haired pin-up who made good.
The audience weren’t going to let him go without joining in on ‘Any Dream Will Do’, the song from Joseph that was the title of the TV competition that discovered him and gave him a No. 2 hit in the pop charts.
Before that finale he and his three musicians, MD Adam Dennis on piano, Don Richardson on bass and John Pearce on violin, treated us to a mix of show songs and classic pop ballads, all delivered by one of the purest, easy-to-listen-to voices in the business. It’s not short of power either when the song calls for it.
On the musical theatre front it was strange to hear ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ and ‘Maria’ sung by a man as they, of course, are songs indelibly associated with women – the first is Mrs Johnstone’s big number in Blood Brothers, the other from West Side Story – but Mead made them his own for a few golden minutes.
Chicago got a look-in with ‘All I Care About is Love’ and there were nods to Waitress with ‘It Only Takes a Taste’ and to ‘The Only Fool is Me’ from Fat Friends – Mead has a meaty role in that when its postponed UK tour gets a belated lift-off.
Great songwriters figured in the rest of Mead’s set: George Michael’s ‘A Different Corner’, Robbie Williams’ ‘She’s the One’, Ed Sheeran’s ‘The Joker and the Queen’, Randy Newman’s ‘She Chose Me’, Billy Joel’s ‘Just The Way You Are’, Aviv Geffen’s ‘The Only Fool is Me’, Josh Groban’s ‘February Song’, Brian Wilson’s ‘God Only Knows’, Michael Bublé’s ‘I’ll Never Not Love You’ and Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’.
Mead did them all proud but I wish there had been a little more change of pace and subject matter. They were mostly serious ballads about love, generally love that has gone wrong, and we could have done with a faster one and a funny one to break them up.
While Mead’s voice is terrific and he has a cosy charm, he is no cabaret natural and the in-between banter needs polishing up. Too many throwaway lines tailed off and were hard to understand.
And empty tables must be a sign of these Covid times, even for a big name with a big following. Mead fans normally travel from all over and make a weekend of it in London, making him an automatic sell-out. Maybe folk have got out of the habit of going out after 18 months of lockdown or are still fearful of catching the bug but it’s a worry.
Jeremy Chapman
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