Café Society Swing – Theatre Royal Stratford East, London

China Moses in Café Society Swing at Theatre Royal Stratford East, London. Picture: Craig Brough

Café Society Swing continues at Theatre Royal Stratford East, London until 16 June 2018.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The stories of so many of America’s greatest black cabaret and jazz stars are dominated by Café Society, the club in New York’s Greenwich Village which ran for ten years from 1938 to 1948.

When he founded the club, Barney Josephson was new to entertainment: up to that point, he had continued in the family shoemaking business. And yet, his club would redefine music, not least because it was New York’s first integrated club. Most other venues that featured black performers were strictly for white audiences – even Harlem’s Cotton Club, which on the rare occasion it allowed black audience members would site them behind columns and partitions.

Not only did Josephson ensure that his audiences could comprise both black and white customers, the venue’s performances were also provocative, inspired by Josephson’s love of European political cabaret.

The story of the venue is told in Alex Webb’s narrative cabaret show Café Society Swing, which after several years of performances in jazz venues and smaller theatres in London and New York now takes up a short residency within the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

With an eight-piece band led by Webb on piano, four singers deliver standards of the time, often imitating some of the performers who found fame on the original Greenwich Village stage, from Billie Holiday to Lena Horne and Sarah Vaughan.

Their standards are mixed with new numbers by Webb, written in the style of the era but which pass commentary on the venue itself, which was promoted as “the wrong place for the right people”. It is to his credit that the original material sits so comfortably alongside the classics – sometimes only the lyrics being incredibly on the nose (such as with ‘Red Scare’, a commentary on the McCarthyism which eventually scuppered the career of Josephson and his brother) is the only clue that the songs are specially written.

But as accomplished as they may be, it is not the new songs the audience have come to hear. Instead, the classics – from ‘All of Me’ to ‘Where or When’, ‘What is This Thing Called Love’ and ‘Stormy Weather’ – become the highlights of the musical performances.

The trio of women – Vimala Rowe, Judi Jackson and China Moses – deliver vocal performances which are enough of impressions to evoke the spirit of Holiday, Horne and the like, but give each singer enough room to fully inhabit each number. Ciyo Brown, the show’s male vocalist, struggles at times to keep up with the sheer class of his female cast mates.

The main problems with the show occur not with each song, but with its linking narrative. Delivered in character by Peter Gerald – first as a journalist hired to do a hit piece on Josephson, then as the venue’s bartender and finally as Josephson himself – there is little to distinguish each character. Gerald is given the thankless task of attempting to deliver a repetitive script that, especially, in Act I, struggles to move the narrative on.

That material does at least give a little context to the setting, explaining how Josephson and his brother Leon, both committed civil rights activists, fell under the gaze of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee – Leon Josephson was held in contempt for his refusal to cooperate, and the resulting backlash led to a drop in business that ultimately caused Café Society to close.

But while the storytelling is slight, the singing is anything but. It is surprisingly passive, though: the highly scripted nature, plus the presentation in a proscenium arch setting, acts to put a barrier between audience and performer that more intimate venues would lack.

And yet that does nothing to diminish the power of some of the songs, most notably Rowe’s rendition of Holiday’s seminal ‘Strange Fruit’. The song, which sings of the lynching of black people in the American South, received its premiere at Café Society. Josephson insisted that Holiday perform it at the end of her set, in complete blackout except for a tight spotlight on her face, and that she would not take an encore.

The reasoning was to ensure that the audience had the maximum opportunity to ruminate on the song’s imagery – and Bell and director Christian Durham give the number the same service here. It is a powerful end to an enjoyable evening of classic music.

Scott Matthewman