Ann Hampton Callaway performs her show Diva Power at the Crazy Coqs, London
Ann Hampton Callaway: Diva Power continues at the Crazy Coqs, London, until 12 April.
It’s been 13 years since the multi-talented American singer-songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway last aired her amazing vocal pyrotechnics and wicked sense of fun in London town and that’s far, far too long.
She claims she hasn’t been back since 2001 “because nobody has asked me” but it was just like old times, only substituting the old Pizza on the Park for the lovely Crazy Coqs, as this tall New York-based swinger – “5ft 10 and worth the climb!” – gave us Diva Power, a tribute to the female greats who have been major influences on her musical thinking.
And what magical names they are… Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Cleo Laine, Edith Piaf, Peggy Lee, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Etta James, Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland.
But that isn’t the half of it with Callaway. It never is. Her voice has such range and flexibility that she can use it to imitate every instrument in her (non-existent) band, an eerie experience because it is a trick I have never heard anyone else able to do.
Her human impersonations are equally spot-on, ‘Tenderly’ Sarah Vaughan-style is affectionately over-the-top and has the audience in stitches.
And then there’s her party piece where she calls on members of the audience to shout out a few names and ideas to which she then puts a tune and improvises an entire song.
On Wednesday it was about Angus the accountant and a cougar called Diane who met up, flew Virgin, but didn’t return that way. Or something like that. Every night is, of course, different.
If cabaret is all about versatility, then Callaway has to be top of the pile because her classy, intelligent piano work, whether in jazz or ballade mode, complements her vocals perfectly . She can wind an audience up with humour (so slick you have to be quick off the mark to catch it), then reduce them to rapt attention with an unaccompanied ’Over The Rainbow’ that stops the heart.
Her way is to take famous standards, put her own spin on them and make you think of them in a new light and is particularly effective with the more modern material of Joni Mitchell and Carole King.
It is the latter’s big hit ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ which has everybody singing along and her version of Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ is totally beautiful.
Finally, she knocks a combination of two big Streisand hits ‘People’ and ‘Being Alive’ (which Stephen Sondheim wrote for a male voice in Company but can be just as powerful with the right female one) right out of the park. Her husky, deep-throated range and total stillness when she sings is almost ethereal.
What is missing is anything by Callaway herself, a disappointment to those, like me, who believe her love songs stand comparison with the very best.
Streisand has loomed so large in the singer-songwriter’s life that at least one of Callaway’s songs is featured on seven Barbra CDs including ‘I’ve Dreamed of You’ which she wrote for Streisand to sing at her wedding to James Brolin.
But we didn’t get that or ’Where Does Love Go?’, ‘At the Same Time’ or ’I Gaze Into Your Eyes’, that posthumously-discovered Cole Porter lyric to which she wrote sublime music.
Such a shame she chose to hide one of her many talents on this visit, but maybe she’ll come back before another 13 years have gone and run through her incomparable list of ‘Ann-dards’.
It was those which turned many of us on to her in the first place. Hard to credit it was a quarter of a century ago that the great Steve Ross instructed me as he finished his week at the old Pizza On the Park “on no account to miss” a new name in the Manhattan cabaret firmament who would shortly be making her London bow there. Always a man of taste, Mr Ross.
We went, we saw, she conquered. And still does. At £25 a throw, 90 minutes with a true genius has to the biggest bargain in town.
Jeremy Chapman
www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs
Readers may also be interested in:
Jeff Harnar – Crazy Coqs – Review
Christine Andreas – The Pheasantry – Review
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