Just Another Love Story – Above The Arts

Picture: Darren Bell

Just Another Love Story continues at Above The Arts, London until 26 May 2018.

Star rating: five stars ★★★★★

There have been a rash of Sondheim shows in and around the London Fringe in the past few weeks but Ray Rackham’s love letter to the world’s greatest living composer is as good as it gets.

Rackham, the founder of the London Theatre Workshop and rightly praised for his writing skills in his musical play Judy!, has turned quite a trick in shoehorning 42 Sondheim  songs about love in its various guises into 105 minutes – and still find time for an interval.

It is not a new show, first seeing the light of day on Battersea Barge in 2011, winning an award at the Brighton Festival the following year and then getting another airing at the Actors Club in Covent Garden before landing up at the London Theatre Workshop In its early days above a Fulham pub in 2014.

That was where I first saw it, and good as it was, the latest incarnation is even better with a new multi-gifted cast of eight, who move as well as they sing which is just as well as Rackham uses every portion of the room, including the bar area, to give the evening a lovely flow.

None more talented than Oscar Conlon-Morrey, whose desperately heartfelt treatment of ‘Losing My Mind’, the 11 o’clock number from Follies, brought tears to the eye and was alone worth the price of the ticket. Has it ever been better sung?

An Oscar then for Oscar but if he was exceptional, then Belinda Wollaston wouldn’t be far behind. This Australian actress-singer, who was so strong as the middle Garland in Rackham’s Judy! (the original title was Through the Mill), knows how to belt out a tune while retaining the subtlety of the text.

This was very evident in ‘Everybody Loves Louis’ (from Sunday in the Park With George) and the unbearably sad ‘Not A Day Goes By’ (Merrily We Roll Along) which uses her considerable acting skills.

Her duet with Conlon-Morrey on Sondheim’s only attempt at a pop song, the Carpenters-inspired ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ from Assassins, shows another, gentler side of both their voices to great effect.

Each half ended with show-stopping numbers from Company, which returns to the West End with its first female Bobbi in October, and Lowri Ann Davies draws the short straw in being asked to get her tonsils round the absurdly-difficult comedy number ‘Getting Married Today’, gamely achieved without missing a beat or a note.

Elsewhere Rebecca Gilliland has a crack at another tricky number, the pretty ‘One More Kiss’ from Follies and is involved with Wollaston and Davies in an all-girl vocal on the little-known ‘Water Under the Bridge’, written for an unproduced movie called Singing Out Loud in the early 1990s.

Anita Louise Combe gets the most out of ‘Loving You’ from Passionand there is much to enjoy from the other members of the team, Christopher Dickins, Michael Vinsen and Tom Elliot Reade, the last-named teaming up well with Conlon-Morrey, Combe and Wollaston on ‘The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’, the best song in Sondheim’s most recent (but not last) musical Road Show.

This is a beautifully staged little gem, beautifully played too by musical director Simon Holt and his little band of three, and a truly delightful way to while away a couple of hours in the company of great music.
The programme is informative too and the room, which used to be a tip, now has armchair comfort and a great cabaret feel to it. And you wouldn’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Sondheim fanatic to enjoy it. Bliss.

Jeremy Chapman