Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret – Jermyn Street Theatre

Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret continues at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London until 28 September 2024.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Any regular attendee of cabarets by musical theatre performers will recognise that the amount of thought that goes into a show can vary substantially. Sometimes it feels as if the performer’s favourite songs have been thrown into a hat, and we get them in whatever order they’re then pulled out.

The better cabarets hone and shape their sets with care, using thematic relevance to guide their song selection and allowing the performers to take the audience on a journey with them. For award-winning actress and musical theatre star Janie Dee, that’s clearly the type of cabaret that interests her – and with Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret she elevates the form further.

Rather than focus on her extensive and storied career, which would provide ample content for a full-length cabaret show, Dee focuses on the world around us and the need for us to combat climate change. It’s not a preachy message at all, but one of personal anecdote (encountering the suffocation of smog in Beijing; becoming aware of how much single-use plastic is used in the selling of cosmetics) mixed in with mentions of people who are leading the way to cleaning up the world.

One such person is Boyan Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, which is attempting to rid the world’s seas of plastic waste. There is a mass in the Pacific three times the size of France, Dee tells us. We don’t really need the subsequent strewing of detritus across the Jermyn Street stage to reinforce the point, though, fun as it is to watch Dee miming rowing around as she discards litter from her canvas Waitrose tote bag.

The message is reinforced with extracts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Titania laments the effect man has had on the natural world (“The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter change their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world, by their increase, now knows not which is which”).

With an artist less charismatic than Dee, this might come across as trite, but because it’s clearly coming from a place of deep concern one can’t help but be drawn into the artist’s passion. The songs, too, draw one in; from the opening number of ‘On a Clear Day’ and a dementedly boss-eyed follow-up in the form of Tom Lehrer’s ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’, Dee exercises her formidable talent for performance to keep us entertained as she shares her vision for how we can all start with small changes.

It is not a solo endeavour, either; along with musical director Jordan Paul Clarke on keys, Dee is joined by talented violinist Sarah Harrison and accordionist Igor Outkine. As well as lending each of the musical numbers weight, the pair excel in their interlude performances of various movements from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Dee is also joined by performers Josephina Ortiz Lewis and Sophia Priolo, the latter of whom has also choreographed routines for the three women to perform together. With Lewis also singing and Priolo sharing some of her poetry on the topic of climate change, this becomes less and less a solo cabaret and more a carefully curated evening of friends.

Some song choices may raise an eyebrow – Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’, interspersed with comments about each year breaking global temperature records, is a case in point – but it’s all delivered with such warmth and compassion that one can forgive any occasional flirtations with self-parody.

And that’s the beauty of Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret. It offers us a gentle nudge to add to the many others provoking us to do more, individually and together, to help the planet. It demonstrates that cabaret with a political message can also be darned good fun as well.

Scott Matthewman