Issy van Randwyck: Songs of the Dazzling Divas at The Pheasantry, London.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
It’s way back in the last century that I last saw Issy van Randwyck – or Baroness Isabelle of noble Dutch descent, as she was then before becoming Mrs Ed Hall, wife of the artistic director of Hampstead Theatre and mother of two – on the cabaret circuit in the good old Pizza On the Park days.
Her coquettish humour was infectious and her bluesy version of Cole Porter’s ‘Love For Sale’ still fondly remembered. She was delightful then and still is.
Van Randwyck has done much else since, playing Petra at the National alongside Judi Dench (not a bad name to drop if you’re dropping one) in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, doing five years in Fascinating Aida with Dillie Keane (another iconic name on the CV), playing Marilyn Monroe at the Edinburgh Fringe and acting with Michael Crawford (a third good one for the scrapbook) in The Go-Between in the West End among them
Latterly she has been heavily involved with founding, with Ed, the Hampstead literary festival which goes from strength to strength, so this Pheasantry debut was a rare cabaret sighting.
The only real woman in the old days in a drag act at the gay Soho nightspot Madame Jojo’s where she sang Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’ wearing a straitjacket, she did ‘Crazy’ again, minus straitjacket, in her Pheasantry show.
This was 80 spellbinding minutes recalling the songs of seven divas who died all too young, sadly mostly of their own making and because of their inability to cope with fame.
The list is painful to write: Billie Holiday, at 44; Monroe, at 36; Cline, at 30; Janis Joplin, at 27; Mama Cass, at 32; Karen Carpenter, just short of her 33rd birthday; and Dusty Springfield, at 59.
Just think how many more great songs and years of entertainment they could and should have given us.
Van Randwyck doesn’t so much impersonate as give an impression of them, though getting close to the throaty uniqueness that was Holiday and capturing the girlie faux innocence of Monroe.
Apart from singing their big hits, she stitches in commendably short potted biographies of the high-and-lowlights of each artist’s frantic lives and dramatic ends.
Possessed of an underrated singing voice – as I write, I am playing the excellent CD of hers which I bought back in the day – she also has a beautiful speaking voice, a rarity in these days of The Only Way is Essex, which makes listening to her an even greater pleasure.
All 23 songs, nicely accompanied on piano by Tom Attwood, were great-to-hear-again classics but particularly enjoyed were the gorgeous ‘Solitaire’ (Carpenter), a rousing a cappella ‘Mercedes Benz’ (Joplin), ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ (Monroe), ‘You Go To My Head’ (Holiday) and two from the mighty Springfield catalogue, ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’ and Van Randwyck’s encore ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’.
A nostalgic evening, tinged with more than a little sadness, by a lovely, warm performer who should do more of this sort of thing.
Jeremy Chapman
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