From List to Lust: Steve Ross Sings Cole Porter – The Pheasantry

From List to Lust: Steve Ross Sings Cole Porter at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

It’s always a good week for nostalgia lovers when the Crown Prince of New York cabaret makes his annual visit to the spruced-up Kings Road nightspot and, dapper as ever in his green velvet Noel Coward jacket, here, in a three-day residency, he was once again proving the old ones are the best – and that goes for performer and song.

For the 40 years he’s been coming to London, I have known Steve, whether at The Ritz (where for a tenner you could have one of their divine desserts and 90 minutes of his spellbinding spin on the Great American Songbook – a rare Ritz bargain), the much-missed Pizza On the Park, the Crazy Coqs and latterly for his longtime friend Ruth Leon at The Pheasantry.

Privileged too to stay at his Manhattan apartment and see at close quarters the piano mastery he tries to pass on to his eager students. One of life’s gentle pleasures, an education too, has been to watch him perform.

The voice may not be as strong as it was and the lines don’t come as word-perfectly but the faithful who come every year are always willing to cut him some slack: shortly 85, he has earned it. The voice was never the reason for seeing him anyway, it was the timing and the vast knowledge, the elegance and the charm. His piano skills, practised till his hands were raw, never wither nor the depth and diversity of his repertoire.

It’s doubtful if anybody has a greater knowledge of the Great American Songbook or indeed the works of British songwriters of that era like Coward, Novello and Flanders and Swann. For this visit, it was Mr Cole Porter, pure and simple. Plus one or two sweet stories, the mixture as usual.

Ross took us through the ‘list’ numbers, starting with ‘You’re the Top’, those great, romantic, love ballads such as ‘Night and Day’, ‘(You’d Be So) Easy to Love’ and ‘They Couldn’t Compare to You’ and through to the ‘lust’ of the show’s title – from ‘Love For Sale’, written from a prostitute’s angle, to ‘I’m a Gigolo’ – ‘As I’m slightly undersexed/You will always find me next/To some dowager who’s wealthy rather than passionate…’ and lesser-known gems from Out of This World, “his lustiest show of all”. What versatility, what wit, what musicianship – the songwriter who has pretty much everything.

On display: Porter’s many-faceted genius even down to pop classics like ‘True Love’, made famous by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in High Society, and a huge hit in my youth for Pat Boone. Remember him? And the funny little stories. Like when Porter’s Tony winner Kiss Me, Kate overtook his best friend Irving Berlin’s long-running Annie Get Your Gun as Broadway’s favourite. Over came Berlin’s congratulatory message: “Anything I can do, you can do better!”, a twist of course on the older man’s own big hit.

Then there was the tale of the Jewish matchmaker, a creation of Fyvush Finkel, a Yiddish comic who went on to Broadway fame in the original Fiddler on the Roof in 1964. After extolling all the virtues of a potential bride, the over-eager young client asks the matchmaker: “Yes, yes but is she good in bed?” To which comes the measured reply (and it has to be done in a Jewish accent): “Some say yes, some say no…”

We had a parody of perhaps Porter’s best-loved song ‘Begin the Beguine’, written by Coward’s accompanist Norman Hackforth, a composer who went on greater fame as the Mystery Voice in Twenty Questions, BBC’s most popular radio quiz in my teen years. And a terrible pun involving the injection of sheep glands in humans – ‘I’ve Got Ewe Under My Skin’.

A bit of everything, all precious cargo, and watching Ross play us out with ‘Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)’, his many British admirers must have left wondering if this suave, charming Anglophile will ever pass this way again. And, if he doesn’t, who is going to carry the flame then?

Jeremy Chapman