Bryan Batt brings his show Batt On a Hot Tin Roof to the Crazy Coqs, London
Bryan Batt performed his show Batt On a Hot Tin Roof at the Crazy Coqs, London.
Some performers’ cabaret sets stuggle to feel coherent. I’ve lost count of the number of times the sole theme seems to be “here are songs I learnt for audition purposes, and so help me I’m going to reuse them now”. And it can be painfully obvious when there’s little thought to the craft of creating the ideal cabaret set list.
Any performers who struggle in such a way should study from Bryan Batt. In a comparitively short set – running just a shade under an hour and a quarter – he bounces around between ballad and comedy numbers, interspersing songs with anecdotes plucked from various points in his life. At first glance, the songs could have been selected at random, but such apparent effortlessness has clearly come about through much fine tuning and hard work. This is Batt’s second visit to Crazy Coqs with this show after a run in 2013, and his light touch makes it feel fresh and vital.
A native of New Orleans and a resident of New York, Batt sees himself as a native of both cities, loving their similarities as much as their differences. And this duality extends to his relationship with his parents – his mother, the hoop-skirted Southern Belle who introduced him to theatre and dance, and his businessman, sports-loving father, with whom Batt confesses he often failed to connect. His story of how the pair finally managed to find some common ground, in a shared love of baseball-themed musical Damn Yankees, leads into a beautiful rendition of ‘Diamonds’ that is the romantic highpoint of the set.
Elsewhere, there is a smoothness to Batt’s musical delivery that perfectly suits a short 1960s-themed sequence, starting with Tony Hatch’s ‘Downtown’ and continuing into Bacharach and David’s ‘Wives and Lovers’ and ‘This Guy’s in Love With You’. It’s the perfect time at which to touch on Batt’s time playing Salvatore in the TV series Mad Men – set in a time when life was great, “if you’re into racism, sexism and homophobia”, as he says with a smile.
Just prior to the climax of his set – a peerless rendition of La Cage aux Folles’ ‘I Am What I Am’, accompanied as throughout by an accomplished James Church – Batt presents a couple of love songs to his twin home towns, in the form of ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans’ and the Billy Joel standard ‘New York State of Mind’. And it is the latter which seems to sum up Batt’s personality with which he imbues this whole delightful evening: while it may have an NYC state of mind, it has a NOLA heart.
Scott Matthewman
Readers may also be interested in:
Time After Time – KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler – Crazy Coqs – Review
So This Then is Life – Simon Green – Crazy Coqs – Review
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