Anne Reid – A Night at the Pictures – Live at Zédel

Anne Reid – A Night at the Pictures at Live at Zédel, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

One of Britain’s favourite actresses, Anne Reid, celebrated for her work on stage, in films and on television, is now doing what she always wanted to do, namely cabaret. Her latest one-woman show is called A Night at the Pictures.

Reid’s popularity stems not only from working in Coronation Street in its early days, or later on with Victoria Wood in Dinnerladies and then more recently Last Tango in Halifax, Our Zoo, Playing the Field, Life Begins and many other television series including Doctor Who, Ladies of Letters and Upstairs Downstairs.

She has also made her mark in the theatre, most recently in A Woman of No Importance which last year opened a year-long festival of Oscar Wilde plays at the Vaudeville Theatre. However, in the past few years Reid has taken to cabaret, a performing art form which she always wanted to do, but the plays kept getting in the way.

Cabaret may seem easy but it isn’t and not everybody has it in them to be successful. But Reid does and it is through sheer personality that she grabs her audience’s attention and takes them along with her on a very personal journey.

In her latest show she reminisces about her childhood in Redcar during the war, and relates these experiences to what she saw in the cinemas of the time. Apart from chatting to the audience she, with the aid of accompanist and arranger Jason Carr, performs some of the movie songs she loved along the way.

It is an evening of nostalgia tempered with many funny stories and Reid truly knows how to attract her audience and keep them with her all the way. She would have them eating out of her hand if they weren’t sitting down and that is due to the sheer force of her attractive personality.

The two opening numbers will be all too familiar to anyone who was a child at any time in the 20th century, Oliver Wallace and Ned Washington’s ‘When I See an Elephant Fly’, from Disney’s Dumbo, and Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s ‘If I Only Had a Brain’ from The Wizard of Oz.

They were certainly favourites of Reid and her enjoyment resonates in her singing the songs that made such an impression on her childhood.

This includes Frank Loesser’s delightful ‘Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year’ from the Deanna Durbin film Christmas Holiday.

However, Reid’s favourite songwriters are Harry Warren and Mack Gordon and she performs the song they wrote for the Glenn Miller film Sun Valley Serenade, namely ‘I Know Why (And So Do You)’. She also includes the same writers’ ‘What My Heart Tells Me’, written by them for Betty Grable in Sweet Rosie O’Grady.

Here we are talking about the 1940s when they knew how to write songs for movie audiences.

Along the way Reid evokes the names that gave her the most pleasure, such as Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, Jane Russell, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Esther Williams and Doris Day etc, and she also reveals an abiding interest in the (non-musical) actor William Holden.

She admits too that she would like to have been in a Western as she and Carr duet in a medley of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’ ‘Buttons and Bows’ (from the Bob Hope film The Paleface), Cole Porter’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, from Hollywood Canteen, Frank Loesser’s ‘Jingle Jangle Jingle’ from the film The Forest Rangers, and June Hershey and Don Swanders’ ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’.

Both performers have the audience joining in for ‘Swinging on a Star’, a song by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke that Bing Crosby featured in Going My Way, while a solo musical interlude is provided by Carr on piano playing Richard Addinsell’s ‘Warsaw Concerto’, probably the most famous of the 1940s movie concertos, written for Dangerous Moonlight.

After Irving Berlin’s ‘We’re a Couple of Swells’ for Fred and Judy in Easter Parade, Jerome Kern’s ‘Long Ago and Far Away’ from Cover Girl, and Isham Jones and Gus Kahn’s ‘It Had to Be You’ which has appeared in umpteen films including Casablanca, Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally, Reid’s nostalgic journey comes to an end to great applause, proving once and for all what a great entertainer this actress is.

Michael Darvell