From The Heart: Maria Friedman continues at Live at Zedel, London until 5 May 2019.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Not many British cabaret performers qualify for the epithet “great” but this week London is blessed with showcasing two of them, Maria Friedman in the lovely Crazy Coqs room at Zedel and Dillie Keane at The Pheasantry.
Friedman has a ten-day, 11-performance residency (two shows on 5 May) to launch her new, highly personal show From The Heart. It was a privilege to be in the first-night audience for 90 minutes of magic.
What makes her special is that she gives so much of herself, leaving nothing behind, and understands that the elusive art of good cabaret is far more than singing. It involves storytelling and making the audience feel part of an intimate experience.
Here she sings the First World War tongue-twister ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’, a ditty that goes faster and faster, without pausing for breath and then repeats it with a lisp before bringing the scrolled words in massive type onstage and commanding us to do the same!
And she’s not afraid to own up to mistakes, stopping ‘Breathe’ halfway through and starting again because she didn’t think she was doing the song justice.
It is Friedman’s selfless way of putting its young composer Theo Jamieson, who just happens to be her accompanist, in the spotlight.
It is from Love Child, a musical in development by Jamieson, the awesomely talented MD of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Funny Girl, High Society (directed by Friedman) and The Wild Party.
In a far-ranging programme of landmark songs in a life that has embraced stage triumphs – Best Actress in a Musical Oliviers for Passion and Ragtime – and directing acclaim (Merrily We Roll Along, High Society), there is so much to enjoy, not least the wonderful stories woven around the material.
This is a lady who can do practically everything (not sure about dancing!) and can turn her hand to straight acting roles in soaps Casualty and EastEnders while topping the bill at the great cabaret rooms of the world like the Cafe Carlyle in Manhattan.
Stephen Sondheim wrote the Passion medley which she sings at Zedel for one of her Cafe Carlyle appearances and, of course, she played Fosca in the original West End production of that show at the Queen’s Theatre in 1996.
As you’d expect from one of the great Sondheim interpreters, there’s plenty of his stuff in this set, which kicks off with ‘If You Can Find Me I’m Here’ from Evening Primrose.
Her Passion medley features the beautiful ‘Loving You’ while ‘Children Will Listen’ from Into the Woods is part of a mash-up with ‘Papa Can You Hear Me?’ from Yentl and ‘Goodbye For Now’, which Sondheim wrote for Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds, closes this breathtaking show as a most appropriate encore.
As a good friend of the late Marvin Hamlisch who was instrumental in getting her into some spectacular concert dates on both sides of the States, Friedman does full justice to ‘Nothing’ and ‘At the Ballet’ from A Chorus Line.
The Beatles also get a look-in with a hypnotic version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – “for all the lonely people, where do they all come from?” – and Friedman turns again to Yentl for a thrilling version of ‘A Piece of Sky’, as gorgeous a song as the Bergmans, Alan and Marilyn, can ever have written.
The very personal ‘Nursery Rhyme’ she wrote for the birth of her first son Toby, now 24, warms the heart; Randy Newman’s satirical ‘Short People’ is a good laugh; and it is never a hardship to hear Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’, one of those pop classics that will endure forever.
Songs by her long-time MD Jason Carr, Adam Guettel and Comden and Green complete a wonderfully varied set and I can’t wait to go again. Outstanding.
Jeremy Chapman
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