Frank Wildhorn & Friends – Palace Theatre, Manchester

Frank Wildhorn & Friends was performed at the Palace Theatre, Manchester.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

At one point in this enjoyable rattle through prolific Queens-born composer Frank Wildhorn’s greatest hits, the man himself introduces ‘The Longer I Live’ as the “11 o’clock song” from his ill-fated musical Dracula.

The song, sung here by Dave Willetts with a careworn charm, is everything you would expect from that description, emotive, reflective and – with its ‘Impossible Dream’/‘I Gotta Be Me’-style construction – slightly reminiscent of something else.

That familiarity tends to be Wildhorn’s modus operandi, but it’s also a strength. Which is why you could call Wildhorn the modern king of the 11 o’clock song. And with ‘This is the Moment’ – or, as he amusingly calls it here, ‘This Is My Mortgage’ – he created the 11 o’clock song to end all 11 o’clock songs.

That number, the highlight from his first, and still biggest, hit Jekyll & Hyde is sung exceptionally well here – and, fittingly, second to last – by Thomas Borchet, the German actor who played Jekyll internationally and who Wildhorn created title roles for in The Count of Monte Cristo and Excalibur.

Wildhorn is yet to top Jekyll & Hyde, and the songs from that show stand head and shoulders above others performed here. ‘This is the Moment’ is also characteristically Wildhornian in the way it can move an audience in spite of its rather standard issue lyrics. But then that’s the reason it works so well as a standalone piece. Many of Wildhorn’s other songs suffer from being shorn of the context of the musicals that house them.

For this reason this show, despite hanging together perfectly well as a one-off concert performance, is really aimed at the faithful fan rather than the completely uninitiated. But, for the already converted, the chance to hear these songs played by the matchlessly professional 30-piece Manchester Camerata orchestra, accompanied by the affable Wildhorn on piano and sung by an eight-strong group of alumni and future performers of his many productions is a real treat – even if you suspect the primary reason for its existence is as a curtain-raiser, and coffer-rattler, for the forthcoming tour of Wildhorn’s Wonderland, which comes to the Palace in April.

The singers that producer Neil Eckersley has assembled certainly deliver the goods. Cassidy Janson, fresh from playing Carole King in the West End super-smash Beautiful, raises goosebumps with Jekyll’s other standout song ‘Someone Like You’, while Laura Osnes delights with the country-tinged ‘How ’Bout a Dance’ from Bonnie & Clyde. But the real find is Natalie McQueen, the young fusilli-haired performer who brings an ageless Amy Winehouse-style swagger to her sections of ‘Bring On the Men’ and is sure to light up the stage as Wonderland’s Mad Hatter.

Wildhorn visibly relaxes when he dons his trademark Dallas Cowboys cap in Act II and his serviceable between-song patter gets more revealing as the night goes on. An anecdote about Julie Andrews – who asked him personally to step into Henry Mancini’s shoes to complete his score for the stage adaptation of Victor/Victoria – and his then Mary Poppins-obsessed son is a heart-warming delight.

As proved by that story, Wildhorn is showbiz through and through. But considering he was raised in Harlem and Florida and spent his teenage years playing jazz piano and rhythm and blues, it’s a surprise that his compositions generally hew so closely to the blue-eyed, white-teethed Broadway template.

Only when he cuts refreshingly loose with the steamy bossa nova of Havana’s title song and the Jazz Age-style ‘Money to Burn’, from F Scott Fitzgerald musical Waiting for the Moon, does Wildhorn’s true range really shine through. Here he proves he’s more than just the Jekyll man.

Chris Bartlett