Fra Fee was one of several Royal Academy of Music alumni who performed in Curtain Up!, a special 20th anniversary concert
Curtain Up! Royal Academy of Music’s 20th Anniversary Concert at the Prince Edward Theatre, London.
From the music hall delights of Harry Lauder’s ‘Stop Your Tickling Jock’ to The Lion King, Les Mis and Sondheim, right through to Jason Robert Brown, Luther Vandross and Freddie Mercury… the Royal Academy of Music’s 20th anniversary bash ran the whole gamut of the musical theatre genre, and then some.
Donated the gorgeous Prince Edward Theatre (where Miss Saigon continues to delight during the week) by Cameron Mackintosh for a Sunday afternoon, the concert brought together alumni past and present in a lush, lavish celebration enjoyed by a huge audience and even the boxes were full.
The Royal Academy of Music doesn’t do things by halves and you could barely swing a cat on stage with three choirs, including some very small musicians in the 8-12 age group from the Primary Academy – around 130 singers in total – joining forces with the 30-strong Academy Concert Orchestra under the superb baton of Bjorn Dobbelaere, head of musical theatre for the past two years.
That’s not quite the end of the body count because there were six soloists, all noted products of this glorious seat of learning, performing the songs – Stephen Ashfield, Shona White, Fra Fee, Nadim Naaman, Patrick Smyth and Laura Tebbutt.
Tebbutt, a powerful presence who was given plenty of chances to show her versatility standing in for Christina Bianco in the recent Vaudeville run of Forbidden Broadway, was joined by Sebastian Knutsson and Susanna Squires in a stunning Act I finale, ‘Circle Of Life’, from The Lion King, which was one of the highlights of the show.
Ashfield, Olivier Award-winner as Elder McKinley in the riotously funny The Book of Mormon, showed his serious side in ‘How Glory Goes’ from Adam Guettel’s Floyd Collins in a superb arrangement by Eamonn O’Dwyer (another RAM graduate very much on the way up).
Nadim Naaman was hotfoot from the final night, attended by Mr Sondheim himself, of a sold-run of Sweeney Todd at a pie-and-mash shop in Tooting. He was a dashing Anthony in that and, judging from his ‘Any Dream Will Do’ (from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), will be a West End fixture for many years to come.
As will Fra Fee with one of the finest and most distinctive light tenor voices in the West End. He was one of the stars of Candide at the Menier early in the year and it was from that show that he gave us ‘Make Our Garden Grow’, one of Leonard Bernstein’s most enduring melodies.
As a contrast, Marc McBride and Leah Collett emerged from the Anniversary Choir to team up with Ben David Mann for ‘Music Hall Delights’, a trio of funny songs in which ‘A Little Bit of Cucumber’ by TW Connor went down particularly well.
Sondheim was very much in evidence with ‘Our Time’ and ‘Being Alive’ but it was the sumptuous version of ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’ in which current and past students linked so harmoniously that stayed in the mind most.
The names of musical theatre course founder Mary Hammond and programme leader Karen Rabinowitz were mentioned with affection time and again and those two must have shed a few tears of pride and joy listening to the fruits of their labours over the past two decades. It was a privilege to share the afternoon with them.
Jeremy Chapman
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