Love, Hate and Everything Between: Adele Anderson (with Dean Austin) – The Pheasantry

Love, Hate and Everything Between: Adele Anderson (with Dean Austin) at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Adele Anderson is full of surprises, all of them nice ones. The tallest member of Fascinating Aida finds songs no one else sings and only a few know, then turns them into little masterpieces we want to find out more about.

Composers such as Stephen Redwood, Rupert Holmes and Don Covay may be unfamiliar to many but Anderson groups three examples of their work to illustrate how the art of letter writing, in particular love letters, has almost vanished, overtaken by the internet.

So ‘Waiting For Letters’, from a 2019 Redwood musical Long Distance, ‘Letters That Cross in the Mail’, a Holmes number Streisand included on her 1975 album Lazy Afternoon, and ‘Letter Full of Tears’, a 1961 Covay ditty which Gladys Knight and the Pips recorded, came up as fresh as paint to these unschooled ears.

And who these days has heard of Cheryl Hardwick and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, the composers of ‘Making Love Alone’, a secret pleasure that gives a woman “a special kind of bliss, not engendered by a kiss”?

Or else she writes them herself, often with Fascinating Aida founder Dillie Keane or Sarah Travis. One such gem, with assists from Keane and past Aida collaborator Sarah-Louise Young, was ‘Mr & Mrs & Me’, probably the pick of an eclectic 23-song set which embraced as many aspects of the show’s title as could fit into two hours of cabaret magic.

That song was a highly amusing take on a menage a trois where “romance is romancier when you can bring a friend” and suggests an idyllic arrangement where “she gets the laundry, I get the nookie” with three days off a week, so that “neither of us gets tired!”

Now and again she weaves in a cabaret regular such as ‘Ring Them Bells’, a riotous Kander and Ebb song about two New Yorkers running into each other while holidaying in Dubrovnik and discovering they’ve lived for years in neighbouring 29E and 29F apartments without ever speaking, or that Cy Coleman/David Zippel beauty ‘With Every Breath I Take’ from City of Angels.

But even when she knocks on Cole Porter’s door, it is with one that even Pheasantry host Ruth Leon, a font of American Songbook knowledge who could almost certainly tell you what size shoes Porter took, had to admit she had never heard of.

Join the club, Ruth – and what a revelation ‘I’m Unlucky At Gambling’ was. From the 1929 movie musical Fifty Million Frenchmen, it’s the sad tale of a lady so unlucky in love that when she dates a croupier she fancies and tackles him in the back row of the cinema, he turns out to be even keener on Hugh Jackman than she is, Anderson updating Cole’s lyrics by swapping Jackman for silent-era heartthrob John Gilbert.

For Anderson, humour comes in so many different ways and her tongue-in-cheek delivery of ‘To Keep My Love Alive’ accentuates the dazzling wit of Lorenz Hart’s lyrics in the last song he wrote with Richard Rodgers before dying of pneumonia.

Written for the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee, it’s the quasi-grisly history of a serial murderess who, while never untrue to any of them, bumps off 15 husbands, one whose “flirtations make me ill at ease and when I’m ill at ease I kill at ease” and another who “didn’t sleep at night” but when she bought some arsenic “now he’s sleeping all right”.

Not known as an interpreter of the works of Stephen Sondheim but aware, rather dismissively, that “What is a cabaret without a Sondheim?” she even manages to unearth one of his least-known ones ‘Happily Ever After’, the original closer of Company but jettisoned in favour of ‘Being Alive’ as being too bitter an attack on marriage for the audiences of the day.

Anderson makes the most of a diatribe that concludes that marriage is an institution where someone bleeds you of all the things you don’t want to tell. “But why should you sweat?/What do you get/One day of grateful for six of regret.” One gets the impression she thinks it superior to the happier revision. And that Sondheim secretly agrees.

Beautifully put together with her arranger and musical director Dean Austin, whose contributions on the Pheasantry’s Steinway were an absolute treat, the whole show was an object lesson in how to compile and project a cabaret idea.

Also much admired and enjoyed by a full house were Jason Robert Brown’s ‘Surabaya Santa’, the two-hankie job ‘Beautiful Sadness’ and the traditional folk song ‘Matty Groves’, a lusty ballad of adultery, betrayal and revenge.

Seamlessly presented by this fiercely intelligent lady, mining the experiences of an extraordinary life in which a gender change after university and a protracted duel with cancer are but two components, it was hard to believe this memorable show was making only its second appearance, having premiered at Above The Stag in Vauxhall in June.

Jeremy Chapman