Anna Bergman – You‘re All the World to Me – Crazy Coqs

Anna Bergman performs her show All the World to Me at the Crazy Coqs, London

Anna Bergman: You’re All the World to Me continues at the Crazy Coqs, London, until 18 October.

Crazy Coqs regulars are not often treated to a bit of Puccini as an encore, but when American soprano Anna Bergman comes to town, you get the full multi-lingual package, from West Side Story, Rodgers and Hart, a Neapolitan love song and Michel Legrand to some “terribly British” Noel Coward and even a sprinkling of Franz Lehar operetta.

Finally, the piece de resistance, as the classically-trained Bergman forsakes stage, amplification  and accompaniment to stand in the midst of her audience and deliver the Puccini/Adami aria ‘Ch’il Bel Sogno di Doretta’ from La Rondine, an awesomely thrilling climax to an all-to-short evening.

This diplomat’s daughter, who grew up in Paris, Rome and Vienna before settling in the States, and sings five languages with flawless accent – four of which, English, French, German, Italian, she gave us here – is one of those irritatingly perfect human beings who make us lesser mortals feel inadequate and eager to find fault with her.

That, however, turns out to be all but impossible. Blessed with an eternally lovely face, a figure that’s the envy of any woman half her age and, in flattering black, an unerring dress sense, she somehow manages to sing even better than she looks.

Starting with Bernstein/Sondheim’s ‘Tonight’ and ‘Something Tells Me’ from High Spirits, Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray’s 1964 musical version of Coward’s Blithe Spirit), Bergman seamlessly embraces French mode with ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’, ‘I Love Paris’ and ‘Sous Le Ciel de Paris’.

Following ‘Heather On the Hill’ from Brigadoon, she moves into Lehar with ‘Meine Lippen Sie Kussen So Heiss’, flirting with some highly-delighted male audience members along the way, and the ‘Merry Widow Waltz’.

Her assertion that for a single girl finding the right man in New York is fraught with difficulties has to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it does seque into the show’s one piece of out-and-out humour, the unfamiliar ‘Museum’.

This comic song, by Addy Fieger and Francesca Blumenthal, about how you meet a better class of pick-up at an art gallery, provides her ever-excellent accompanist Nathan Martin with the opportunity to weigh in with some amusing vocal interjections of his own.

The “British” section of the evening with ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ and the Coward classics ‘You Were There‘ and ‘Sail Away’ swiftly swung into a tasty Rodgers and Hart threesome, ‘Falling In Love With Love’, ‘Easy to Remember’ and ‘Manhattan’, and a touch of Umbrellas of Cherbourg with Legrand’s ‘I Will Wait For You’, all standard cabaret fare but still a joy to hear in this safe pair of hands.

It was all done and dusted by nine o’clock on opening night but not before the show’s Lane/Lerner title song ‘You’re All the World to Me’ (from the film The Royal Wedding) prefaced that stunning Puccini finale.

Hitting every note, whether Broadway standard or Austrian operetta, with total precision and without ever straining for effect, glorious Bergman is an object lesson to today’s younger singers, not all of whose top notes are always the prettiest.

We could, however, have stood quite a bit more before trudging out into a dank, inhospitable night. Give me 50 minutes of poise, class and talent over 100 minutes of well-intentioned mediocrity anytime but, after listening to a reception that was admiring rather than ecstatic, I was left wondering whether, particularly for out-of-towners among the audience who had travelled a long way, it was quite enough.

Jeremy Chapman

www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs 

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