Rachael Louise Miller joined the cast of A Christmas Evening With the Sondheim Society at the Leicester Square Theatre, London
A Christmas Evening With the Sondheim Society at the Leicester Square Theatre, London.
Five of the brightest young names in the musical theatre world went into cabaret mode for the Christmas edition of the Stephen Sondheim Society evenings in Leicester Square, mixing the old with the new. The last two winners of the prestiguous SSS Student Performer of the Year competition, Kris Olsen and Turlough Convery, were joined by Alice Fearn, who was Rapunzel in the Regent’s Park production of Into the Woods, Rachael Louise Miller, who opened the series in June, and Kate Hume, a recent Trinity Laban graduate who appeared in the satirical musical The Daily Fail at Waterloo East Theatre.
Although Sondheim is hardly known for his Christmas material, two rarities were uncovered for the show: Olsen extracted all the wit from ‘Christmas Island at Christmas Time’ – just about the hottest, sweatiest place you could be in December – and Hume gave us ‘If I Had Three Wishes For Christmas’, written as part of an elaborate pageant at Minsky’s for Gypsy, but didn’t make it to the show because of running-time problems.
Sondheim says in his book that he cannot remember why the Christmas Island song (with music by Mary Rodgers) was written, but the likelihood is that it was a promo for record and TV companies. Sondheim apart, the two most interesting Christmas songs were modern rather than the schmaltzier famous ones.
Taylor Swift’s ‘Christmases When You Were Mine’ was a regretful look-back at a lost love, well sung by Miller, while ‘Christmas Cliches’, a 1990s composition by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (whose current musical Seussical is the subject of good reports at London’s Arts Theatre), reminded us that it’s “the tree full of toys and tinsel” and the turkey, the “roof full of plywood reindeer” and the bells, the mistletoe and “each sentimental card dripping glitter on the floor” that make Christmas still special.
Included in the evening were the two joint-winners of the Sondheim write-a-song-for-Christmas competition, ‘Under the Fake Mistletoe’, a much more cynical approach from Tarek Merchant, and ‘Christmas and You’ by Charles Bloom.
The next in the series on 13 January is Simon Wallfisch, an opera singer who specialises in humorous songs and has promised an unusual treatment of some of Sondheim’s material.
Jeremy Chapman
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