Beautiful World: Janie Dee at The Pheasantry, London.Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
An evening with that lovable national treasure Janie Dee always carries a frisson of excitement with it because you are never quite sure what she’s going to come up with next and, scatty as she is, there’s always the possibility she doesn’t know either.
The clue to her new show, unveiled in a two-night residency at the sparklingly redecorated Pheasantry on Chelsea’s fashionable King’s Road, was in the title, Beautiful World, and the PR blurb that accompanied it “a journey of man and nature through song with unusual and inspirational guests who are making a difference”.
Passionately green, right down to the gorgeous velvet outfit she wore for her second set, this incredibly versatile and much-in-demand actress-singer never lets up in causes close to her heart, whether it be climate change, community or giving a leg-up to young singers or people who care as much as she does about the environment.
So on top of the songs, many of them like ‘On a Clear Day’, ‘I Remember Sky’, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ – complete with a nifty piece of tap dancing on the spiral staircase – and ‘Fragile’ (“On and on the rain will fall… and say how fragile we are”) reflecting the show’s theme, as did the rousing ‘What a Wonderful World’ at the end, we had a lengthy interlude when Dee brought pro footballer-turned-gardener Tayshan Hayden-Smith up to talk about how the Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017 changed his life and took him, greatly affected mentally as a member of the Grenfell community, on a mission to inspire, heal and educate through horticulture.
From helping minor-league Austrian football team Kitzbuhel gain promotion, he came back home, created the Grenfell Garden of Peace and set up the Grow2Know community group for young people to showcase the power of nature. Charming as Hayden-Smith was and a good speaker too, this probably wasn’t what a full-house audience had signed up for when they bought a ticket but that’s Dee for you, ever unpredictable.
Far more predictable was her first guest, an 18-year-old from Arts Educational, the college in Chiswick where Dee herself trained. This was Edith Gray making her Pheasantry debut with ‘When the World Was Mine’, a cracking number from The Count of Monte Cristo (Frank Wildhorn/Jack Murphy), a musical that, to say the least, has had a chequered history. A German language version premiered in Switzerland in 2009 and the first professional production in English turned up in Utah 12 years later but why no trace of it in the UK?
Dee was in hilarious form getting her teeth around ‘The Boy From …’, that delicious mouthful by Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rodgers wrote for the 1966 Off-Broadway revue The Mad Show as a wicked parody of ‘The Girl From Ipanema’. This is one of the numbers Dee will be singing in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, initially put together as a one-off concert to celebrate the great man’s life and work, when it starts a 16-week run at the Gielgud Theatre on 16 September.
No Dee soirée would be complete without the title song from Cabaret which is always a showstopper. Switching accents from posh to ‘common’ – “She wasn’t what you’d call a blushing flower… As a matter of fact she rented by the hour” – it’s a song for an actress and she’s one of the best. That show means a lot to Dee as it was in Gillian Lynne’s revival of Cabaret in 1986 that she made her West End debut.
Her real name, Janie Lewis, had to be changed when she joined Equity long before that as they already had a Jane Lewis on their books, as she told us when sitting at the piano to play a sweet self-composed song about the crush she had on the much older David Jason as a 17 year old when they worked together in panto in Newcastle.
Admitting her own loneliness at times during the last five years, her version of ‘People’ (who need people, are the luckiest people in the world) was particularly moving. Nobody knows better how to work the room and, as usual, she went around patting a few bald heads (mine included), whispering sweet nothings into a few ears and name-checking as many old friends as she could find. Good cabaret is a gift and she knows all the tricks. As for performance, there’s the odd forgotten line but that’s par for the course with Dee. It wouldn’t be a Dee cabaret without them – it’s the charming way she wriggles out that’s pure class.
Accompanying her superbly on the Pheasantry’s Steinway was the ubiquitous Alex Parker – they first worked together on the Sondheim revue Putting It Together ten years ago and have done A Little Night Music three times since, the last one unforgettably in sheeting rain in Holland Park.
Both are big on community and Parker’s annual musical in his home town of Guildford is only a few weeks away. It’s Sunday in the Park With George this time, an amateur production but in name only. Having marvelled at what wonders Parker and his team achieved with The Bridges of Madison County two years ago, this latest community project should be a corker.
A ‘Beautiful World’ indeed… thank goodness there are caring people like Dee and Parker around to make it even more wonderful.
Jeremy Chapman
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