Gotta Have Hart and Hammerstein: Steve Ross – The Pheasantry

Gotta Have Hart and Hammerstein: Steve Ross at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Manhattan cabaret legend Steve Ross may be in his ninth decade but it’s all still there, the charm, the sophistication, the style of a bygone era and, above all, the knowledge.

This was yet another masterclass, filled with piano brilliance and the songs and stories of all-time great lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein, both inextricably linked to the genius of composer Richard Rodgers.

From Rodgers and Hart came 28 musicals for stage and film, including Pal Joey, The Boys From Syracuse and On Your Toes: from Rodgers and Hammerstein just nine but five of them, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music, among the most popular ever written, still loved and still greatly in demand.

Earlier Hammerstein collaborated with Jerome Kern, most notably on Show Boat in 1927, and Ross gave us a wonderful arrangement of their ‘The Folks Who Live On The Hill’, written for the 1937 movie High, Wide and Handsome.

No one alive today knows more verses of the Great American Songbook than the dapper Ross whose three-day visit to the famed Kings Road cabaret room was a welcome oasis of calm and sanity while the Madness of King Boris Show was playing up the road in Westminster.

Ross contrasted the work of Hart and Hammerstein, the latter’s love of family showing in his mainly happy songs, Hart the self-loathing depressive whose wittiest lyrics often seemed tinged with the sadness of a conviction that he was too ugly to be lovable.

‘Falling In Love with Love’, from The Boys From Syracuse, was a prime example. Who can’t see the pain of “I fell in love with love, love everlasting/But love fell out with me”.

Or the poignant hilarity of ‘To Keep My Love Alive’ (from the 1943-revised A Connecticut Yankee and the last lyric ever wrote) about the insecure lady who bumped off her many husbands so they could never leave her, lovers like Sir Marmaduke who was “so awfully tall he didn’t fit in bed/I solved the problem easily, I just removed his head”.

And anyone who can rhyme “possibilities” with “ill at ease” and “patricide” with “mattress-side” will always get my vote!

As for Hammerstein, what wistfulness he evoked with ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ from South Pacific, as heart-breaking a lyric as he ever wrote: “One girl for my dream/One partner in paradise/This nearly was mine/Close to my heart she came/Only to fly away.”

They don’t write them like that any more and nobody interprets them better than Ross.

I first became a fan back in the early eighties at the Pizza on the Park and shortly after at the Ritz where for a tenner you could have a pudding and an hour of Ross, a bargain particularly for those, like my parents, who would never have dreamed of entering one of the world’s most expensive hotels any other way.

Thirty-odd years later, this was two more hours of truly wonderful songs lovingly interpreted and magically performed where the specialist art of cabaret was never better demonstrated. Long may the Prince of Manhattan continue to entertain us so royally.

Jeremy Chapman