Janie Dee continues at Live at Zédel, London on 16 and 17 March 2018.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
“Making an entrance again with my usual flair,” so sings Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, and no one can deny Janie Dee that accolade as she entered Live at Zédel stage right in a glittering figure-hugging tiger-patterned leotard, prowling round her clientele, the epitome of Eve.
It is a daring start to the evening and a close shave when she comes up against a taciturn tourist from Switzerland! ‘The Glamorous Life’ is her opening song, a number that acts as a leitmotif throughout this evening of personal reminiscences and song put together in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, including a turn by guest artist Paul Robinson, the linking material often more interesting than the song it illustrates.
Dee’s experience as a young singer/dancer in Italy is a case in point. Her stalwart pianist Alex Parker follows suit. In telling us about his enlightening collaboration as MD with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Stephen Ward the Musical (“a hit show that ran for four months…”) he illustrates how a successful musical is constructed from building blocks.
His point of reference, ‘As If We Never Said Goodbye’ from Sunset Boulevard, goes unsung. Dee saves the day with a hilarious story about the composer turning up at her front door, leaving his limousine purring in the street, with a new song in hand.
Dee has always flown the flag for new songs and to that end she introduces a finger-clicking up-tempo ballad modelled on Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’ about Queen Elizabeth I’s penchant for savouring anything tasty in her mouth.
We see Dee in glasses at a typewriter, singing an amusing ditty by Alyn Ayckbourn; donning an aquamarine wig for ‘No One Believes I’m a Mermaid’, a golden oldie from 1932; then comes a song a collaboration between her ballet coach and the organist at her local church that exploits the top range of her voice.
She relished Lehrer’s ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’, galvinises ‘It’s Today’ from Mame, the seemingly innocuous lyric now an invitation to seduction; and follows it with one of Kander and Ebb’s affirmative anthems, ‘Yes’, which brings back happy memories of Dora Bryan having the time of her life in 70, Girls, 70.
From her galaxy of theatrical tales, Dee comes out well from an acerbic exchange with Harold Pinter, and from Ayckbourn learns that patience is a virtue to her understanding the meaning of his play Comic Potential in which she played the lead role at the Lyric Theatre back in 1997.
In the second half of her programme she returns to sing ‘Send in the Clowns’. Just as you feel that this song has been milked for all its worth, she conveys in small gestures the dilemma facing Desiree, in a deeply moving performance. For me, the highlight of the evening.
Adrian Edwards
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