John Standing performed Noel, Cole and George at The Pheasantry, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Actor and raconteur John Standing is back at The Pheasantry in the King’s Road, Chelsea with a batch of songs celebrating the music of Noël Coward, Cole Porter and George Gershwin. Sir John is the ideal purveyor of these songs from the 1920s to the 1950s which he performs with insouciance and a thorough delight in entertaining his audience. He packed the basement room at The Pheasantry on a cold April night and everybody went away having enjoyed an evening of pure nostalgia.
Whether the nostalgia element appealed to the room’s mixed-age audience, or whether it was a case of hearing the sort of songs they certainly don’t write now, I couldn’t tell, but I think it was a case of both elements coming together. We mainly know Standing from his acting performances on stage, in film and on television. He has had a long and wide-ranging career, starting with Peter Brook and Laurence Oliver in the 1950s, plays by Shakespeare, Wilde, Anouilh, John Osborne etc, films including The Wild and the Willing, King Rat, The Eagle Has Landed, The Elephant Man, Mrs Dalloway and The Happy Prince etc, and on TV he has appeared in The First Churchills, John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Other ’Arf with Lorraine Chase, The Choir, King Solomon’s Mines, Murder, She Wrote and, last but not least, Games of Thrones, plus many, many other films and TV series.
It is not often that he has taken to singing for his day job but for many years he has staged his own cabaret act, singing the songs he loves from the Golden Age of popular song and telling stories about his career as an actor. He is the perfect raconteur and, being an actor, knows about timing and how to tell a tale to get the best effect. It all seems very off the cuff and throwaway, but I am sure his script is deftly nurtured and his choice of songs carefully studied to appeal to his varied and obviously adoring audience.
He begins with a story about the first time he met Noël Coward, when he was ten years old and couldn’t have cared less who The Master was, as young John was too busy entertaining himself. The accompanying songs for Coward are ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter On the Stage, Mrs Worthington’, ‘Some Day I’ll Find You’ and Coward’s own lyrics to Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do, Let’s Fall in Love’, the last rather scurrilous about the celebrities of the time (1955).
Moving on to George (and Ira) Gershwin, Standing recalls seeing Leslie Caron in An American in Paris and also on Brighton beach where she left her handbag. Rushing back to her hotel with the bag, our hero was less than pleased when its owner gave him a rather offhand: “Thanks.” He then launches into ‘S’Wonderful’ and ‘Our Love is Here to Stay’, the last song that George and his brother Ira wrote together, before George’s untimely early death. Although Ira continued to provide terrific lyrics to other composers’ music, I often wonder what George would have written if he had lived as long as his brother did, into his nineties.
No programme with Cole Porter songs could omit ‘You’re the Top’, ‘It’s De-lovely’ and ‘From This Moment On’ and Standing delivers them with immense panache. After the interval he talks about the time he filmed with Cary Grant (on Walk, Don’t Run) in Japan with some good anecdotes and a passable imitation of Grant too. There are more Porter songs too: ‘Anything Goes’, ‘Easy to Love’, ‘It’s All Right With Me’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, and, remembering High Society, ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?’
It’s back to Coward for the encore of ‘There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner’ which seemed very apt and topical during the week that Brexit never happened. Standing has two terrific musicians to accompany him, namely Will Stuart on piano and Hattie Scott on bass. They provide a fine back-up for these great songs and for Standing’s highly entertaining performance. If you missed him this time around, he will be back at The Pheasantry on 4 June 2019.
Michael Darvell
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