Love is the Sweetest Thing: Andrew D Brewis – Riverhouse Barn, Walton-on-Thames

Love is the Sweetest Thing: A Valentine’s Day Concert was performed by Andrew D Brewis at the Riverhouse Barn, Walton-on-Thames.

Rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

The sweetest thing for a full Valentine’s Day house at Walton’s oak-beamed Riverhouse Barn on the banks of the Thames was a 90-minute musical love-in with the Surrey town’s own cabaret ace Andrew Brewis taking his audience through great songwriters and great shows, along with a couple of his own which did not in the least look out of place.

Walton-on-Thames boasts two mega showbiz connections – Julie Andrews was born there 89 years ago and in 1910 visiting American composer Jerome Kern fell in love with the landlord’s daughter at the Swan when stepping off the boat for refreshment and married her – so Brewis, a pianist-singer-songwriter, is following a great tradition. More will know him after this as the show was streamed to Germany and the USA.

There were tear-jerking ballads and hilarious comic songs in a perfect mix that made the time fly by. Brewis played them all beautifully on the very piano he helped pay for by giving a concert at the Barn in years gone by. He was greatly helped by having Robert Rickenberg accompany him so sympathetically on double bass.

Brewis is wise enough to know not to ask his singing voice to visit places it doesn’t want to go to or to launch into patter he’s not comfortable with, relying on his piano wizardry to take centre stage and what a feast he served up.

The highspot for many was ‘Joyce the Librarian’ with a laugh in every line and brilliantly written by the late Peter Skellern and Richard Stilgoe. It’s the story of nerdy Joyce finally getting a book borrower to take her to bed. Her George predictably scarpers: “Some other librarian to woo / Now there’s a sob in her voice / As both book and Joyce / Are a fortnight overdue”.

Skellern was also responsible for ‘Still Magic’, the title song of his 1980 album, showing his romantic side and so fitting for Valentine’s. He deserves someone with tip-top timing to do him full justice and in Brewis, a fan since his schooldays, he has found one.

Of course there were the old faithfuls too – ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, ‘Cheek to Cheek’, ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’, ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, a jazzy ‘Lady Be Good’ and that irresistible Fats Waller singalong ‘I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’.

They were what the audience knew best and all were well received, especially the standoutI ‘I Won’t Send Roses’, the Jerry Herman heartbreaker from Mack & Mabel.

There were more funny songs too – one about a tattooist, a saucy one about a busy phone line and a foodie one about a guy who doesn’t want potatoes or tomatoes but “frim fram sauce with the Ausen fay, with chafafa on the side”. Well, Nat King Cole might have known what he was singing about, but not Brewis’ audience.

And step forward Brewis songwriter! If his wonderful ‘My Friend’ didn’t get you, then his second, ‘Things Not Meant to Be’, written wistfully well before he finally got the daughter he had long dreamed of, was a two-hankie job.

Brewis revealed that when Skellern visited his school and young Andrew said “I want to write songs like yours”, back came the reply: “Keep practising!” Several decades on, Brewis confessed: “I still am.” From the evidence of this blissful hour and a half, Brewis has done his homework.

Jeremy Chapman