Jeff Harnar Sings the 1959 Broadway Songbook at The Pheasantry, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Smooth, polished, seamless… Manhattan crooner Jeff Harnar makes cabaret sound easy which, of course, it isn’t. He doesn’t sing in London often and it was an unalloyed pleasure to see him again.
Harnar has been a master of his craft for more than three decades and, with the brilliant help of longtime musical director Alex Rybeck on The Pheasantry’s Steinway, he turned back the clock to 1959 for 75 minutes of cabaret gold.
It was a year when Ethel Merman and Mary Martin dominated Broadway; The Sound of Music, Gypsy, Fiorello! and Lock Up Your Daughters vied for the dollar in your pocket; a prime seat cost just over $9; and My Fair Lady was in the middle of its 2,717-performance run with Sally Ann Howes having by then replaced West End-bound Julie Andrews.
It was the only year when a father and daughter had musicals launching on Broadway, Richard Rodgers with The Sound of Music, Mary Rodgers with Once Upon A Mattress.
It was the year Flanders and Swann, with the very British humour of At The Drop of a Hat, transferred to Broadway to great acclaim, and Harnar’s version of the wicked ‘Have Some Madeira, M’Dear’ captured all the nudge-nudge innuendo of Flanders’ lyrics.
It was the year Gigi won nine Oscars, a record at the time though overtaken by Ben Hur the following year, and Harnar marked the feat with the title song in best Maurice Chevalier-fractured English.
It’s rare to hear a male voice performing ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’, the 11 o’clock number sung by the Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music, but Harnar’s treatment of it sent a tingle down the spine, while the Yip Harburg/Harold Arlen classic from Jamaica, ‘I Don’t Think I’ll End It All Today’, was another standout.
Harnar is best remembered here for hosting three seasons of the Great American Songbook at Jermyn Street Theatre and Pizza Oon the Park in 2006/7/8.
He brought over such stellar names as Julie Wilson, Andrea Marcovicci, Lilian Montevecchi, KT Sullivan, Steve Ross and Karen Akers and introduced us to a wonderful new talent in Maude Maggart (what happened to her?).
Off his own bat, he has always been a debonair baritone with a wealth of material which he always performs with practised ease and winning smile. And you can hear every word.
The show he brought to London was one of a series of themed compilations he constructed with Rybeck and director Sara Louise Lazarus in a partnership that began way back in the 1980s and established him as a major talent in such holy Manhattan cabaret rooms as the Algonquin and Cafe Carlyle.
Jeremy Chapman
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