Liz Robertson performing at The Crazy Coqs. Picture: Marcos Bevilacqua
Reviewed at The Crazy Coqs, London.
Forty years on from making her showbiz bow as a cabaret dancer at the nearby Savoy Hotel, the ageless Liz Robertson is back in cabaret mode for her one-woman show at The Crazy Coqs, the new go-to Piccadilly nightspot for lovers of the genre which becomes ever more polished and popular with its showcasing of the best from both sides of the Atlantic.
The tall and elegant Robertson still looks a million dollars. Cast as Eliza in the 1979 revival of My Fair Lady at the Adelphi, she went on to marry its co-creator, American musical theatre great Alan Jay Lerner two years later, and spent the last five years of his life with him. So it is no surprise that much of the evening is a homage to the man she called “the Shakespeare of lyricists”.
After opening with Sondheim’s ‘Putting It Together’ (from Sunday in the Park With George), she quickly gets down to the nitty gritty with ‘Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here’ which her old man wrote with Burton Lane. After a pair of Cole Porter songs, other Lerner gems follow such as ‘No Man is Worth It’, ‘How Could You Believe Me’ and the evergreen ‘Too Late Now’.
There are eight Lerner collaborations in total but she keeps us waiting for anything from their most famous show, My Fair Lady, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ bringing the evening to a predictably schmaltzy end.
But she doesn’t duck Lerner’s flops, giving us the title song from Dance a Little Closer, in which she made an embarrassing Broadway debut in 1983. This broke all records for short-running musicals by closing after the first night and was not helped by a coruscating review from famed New York critic Frank Rich who called it “a huge, extravagant mishmash that seems to have taken on a self-destructive life of its own”.
Laughing about it now, Robertson recalls that showbiz insiders renamed it “Close a Little Faster” just as another, much later show she was in, Love Never Dies, got the cruel alternative title of Paint Never Dries.
One of the two songs she chooses from Dance a Little Closer, the powerfully-sung ‘Another Life’, turns out to be the most interesting ballad of the whole set, a bitter and materialistic outpouring about preferring money and security to romance.
But for me the best Lerner song on display is the funniest. ‘Why Him?’ (from Carmelina) is one of the highlights, along with two non-Lerner songs, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black’s ‘Tell Me On a Sunday’ and the wonderful ‘Old Friend’.
Any programme which includes the latter, from a long-forgotten 1978 musical by old friends Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford called Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road, has me for a friend, as it has the simple power and aching beauty of being able to move the listener to tears.
To be the honest, the voice is not the greatest, particularly in the dodgy, not to say occasionally flat, upper register and the linking anecdotes not the sharpest, but this is a good, solid evening’s entertainment, maybe a bit bland for some, but gaining in strength and confidence in the later songs, and yet another success story for the Coqs which has some first-rate Americans coming over to tickle our cabaret palate. Just because they are not so well-known here means only that you should get to know them now!
Jeremy Chapman
Liz Robertson appears at The Crazy Coqs until Saturday, 27 April
www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs
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