Picture: Adam Hills
Kerry Ellis, Queen of the West End at the Vaudeville Theatre, London.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Wearing a black suit so sparkly I wished I’d brought my sunglasses, the delightful Kerry Ellis had a lot to live up to given the big ‘Queen of the West End’ giant-screen logo at the back of the stage, but by the end of a well-prepared two-hour shift she had more than made her point.
With a quarter of a century of West End credits from My Fair Lady through We Will Rock You, Les Miserables, Cats, Wicked, Oliver! and Anything Goes to the concert version of If/Then at the Savoy only this February, she is an enduring and rightly loved Star with a capital ‘S’.
She took us through her fairytale life, hooked on musicals after being taken to Les Mis aged 13, with just the screen, an armchair and a piano, beautifully played by Dan Glover, as props. The chair was for sitting on while she rolled film footage of her luminous career, from the growing-up years to her husband and two cute children, clips of magic stage moments and duets with legends like Barry Manilow, Kristin Chenoweth and the great Queen guitarist Brian May, her long-time mentor.
There was plenty of chat, audience participation and anecdotes, like the time a Les Mis cast member sent her Fantine wig flying into a front-row lap and how she first met her future husband, at a wedding where he was best man, she a maid of honour. Ellis was playing Elphaba in Wicked at the time, the first Brit to play the role she later reprised in Broadway, but this guy hadn’t a clue about her or the show yet was so smitten he wrote in the attendance book “Loved the Green Witch!”
Then there was the tale of how she kidded a director worried about her ability to cope with the nine-minute tap sequence in Anything Goes. Ellis was worried too as she hadn’t done tap for 20 years but badly wanted the lead part of Reno Sweeney. So she got the oldest, dirtiest pair of tap shoes off eBay to show she’d been busy practising all along. It worked!
She recalled the thrill of getting her West End entree as a member of the My Fair Lady ensemble and second-alternate Eliza to the illness-prone Martine McCutcheon. On a night out Brian May was so taken with her voice he went and saw the show again when both McCutcheon and the first alternate Alexandra Jay were off sick. Ellis came in at three hours’ notice and knocked it out of the park as Eliza. May anonymously suggested her for the role of Meat in the Queen musical We Will Rock You and that was that. She was well and truly on her way.
My companion complained there was too much talking and not enough songs in the first half but surely that’s the point of seeing a star in concert, to find out what the person behind the voice really is. The song choices were pretty safe – ‘On The Street Where You Live’, ‘Tomorrow’, the inevitable ‘Defying Gravity’, ‘I Dreamed a Dream‘, We Will Rock You and Greatest Showman medleys – after opening strongly with the striking ‘Kings & Queens’, the title song of her fourth and most recent solo album.
Yet the one that showed the power and clarity of her voice to best effect for me was ‘Always Starting Over’ from If/Then. Nothing however could match the long-distance coupling of May playing fabulous guitar on video and Ellis synchronising the words of Queen rock ballad ‘Love of My Life’ – the show’s most striking moment.
Ellis, always one to help and promote young singers when she can, introduced two guest acts she has a connection with, singer-songwriter Kat Neocleous and Arts Ed student Ollie Crouch. Neocleous had enrolled in Ellis’ online singing tutorial, while she’s known Crouch, the son of one of her Laine Theatre Arts contemporaries, since he was knee-high.
Neocleous, accompanied superbly by her guitarist partner Joe Lavimaki, has plenty of power, range and presence but clarity is something that needs some work. The words of her self-penned ‘Same Mistake’ may have been wonderful but if the audience can’t understand, you lose them.
Crouch’s lovely ‘As Long As You’re Mine’ duet with the star of the show was Wicked!
This third of four Westway Sessions Monday concerts at the Vaudeville maintained the high standard set by Lee Mead and Cassidy Janson. Rounding off the season on 23 June is Aimie Atkinson, star of Six The Musical and Pretty Woman.
Jeremy Chapman
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