Man Without a Mask: Hugh Panaro – Crazy Coqs

Man Without a Mask: Hugh Panaro at Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Making his solo London cabaret debut at a very well-preserved 60, what took the brilliant Hugh Panaro, a Broadway Phantom for three decades for more than 2,000 performances, so long to get here?

Three shows at the lovely Crazy Coqs in Piccadilly with a star guest each night, Christina Bianco, Liz Callaway and Laura Pitt-Pulford, were not enough. He was simply outstanding – a tenor full of power and vigour but never overpowering, intensely moving too on ‘Why, God, Why?’ and ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’, and a lacing of showbiz stories that were actually funny and new to a British audience.

Not since 2007 at the O2 Arena when he was one of the Broadway Boys, a quartet which supported Barbra Streisand on her European tour, had Philadelphian Panaro visited these shores professionally. Nine years earlier he had played riverboat gambler Gaylord Ravenal in Hal Prince’s production of Show Boat at the Prince Edward Theatre. Those were the only times we could have seen him in London and I didn’t.

So I arrived at the Crazy Coqs convinced I’d never seen the rugged, fashionably stubble-chopped Panaro before and it was not until he launched into ‘One Plus One Equals Three’ from Side Show that I realised I had. As Buddy Foster, he had sung that Henry Krieger-Bill Russell number at the Richard Rodgers Theatre when I was paying my regards to Broadway back in 1997. Unforgettable not because of him, good as he was, but for the great Meryl Streep, sitting one row forward of me and my daughter at the matinee, requesting us to accompany her to the street to avoid attention from the fans. At the peak of her career then, she was gone in a minute but moments like that last a lifetime.

Panaro’s a bit of a name-dropper too but wouldn’t you be if you’d sung with Strei-SAND (which I now know, thanks to him, to be the correct pronunciation) and that led to a tender version of the Neil Diamond love song ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’ which blossomed into a Billboard chart-topper in 1978 when he and Miss S duetted it.

‘Neverland’ from Peter Pan and ‘Not While I’m Around’ and ‘Johanna’ from Sweeney Todd were linked through a tale about his introduction to musicals as a teenager when he saw both shows on the same day – surely the weirdest combo ever. They had house seats and young Hugh was almost close enough to touch Len Cariou’s Sweeney. And when Cariou strode to the front of the stage, pointing menacingly at the audience, Panaro admits: “I peed myself a little!”

The Sweeney Todd section, which also featured ‘Ah, Miss’, brought back a short conversation he had with the great man himself who dropped into a Sweeney rehearsal, as he was wont to do, to check and give notes. It went like this:

Sondheim: I see you know all your words.
Panaro: Yes, Mr Sondheim.
Sondheim: …but you don’t need to mouth everyone else’s too!

He could have done ‘The Music of the Night’ in his sleep having sung The Phantom of the Opera so very many times between 1991 and 2015 yet the 11 o’clock number of that blockbuster came up fully nuanced and as fresh as paint, a testament to the enduring quality of Lloyd Webber’s luscious music and much refined by some fine playing by his MD on piano Joseph Thalken and Nick Laughlin on bass. The inevitable standing O greeted the lyrical final line.

We were all in bits, not for the first time either as the dramatic ‘Why, God, Why?” – when is Miss Saigon getting a West End revival? – could break the hardest of hearts. Panaro auditioned twice for the part of Chris, the American GI who falls for a local Vietnamese bargirl, but was turned down both times. After the song reached its crescendo, someone in the audience yelled “You should have got the part!” Quite right too – it was my highlight of a beautifully-crafted 80-minute set that must have thrilled everyone.

Although he gave us ‘Something’s Coming’ to start with and ‘It Only Takes a Moment’ as his finale, there was room for the unusual too – the poignant ‘You Have Never Failed Me’ by his musical director and friend Thalken and ‘Right Before My Eyes’ from Elton John’s 2006 flop, Lestat, in which Panaro played the vampirical title role but only for 39 performances as it didn’t last long. The John song (lyrics by Bernie Taupin) was a cracker.

The guest on the day I went was the irresistible Liz Callaway, who happened to be in London visiting friends. The pair first met 40 years ago as Henrik and Petra in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music upstate in cold Buffalo, so ‘Old Friends’, from another Sondheim show, Merrily We Roll Along, was the perfect reunion duet. It was the musical in which Callaway made her Broadway bow aged just 20. It was a short-lived debut, lasting only 16 performances, amazing for a show that’s been such a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic since.

For the Callaway solo it was time for a giggle with her laugh-a-line party-piece Sondheim parody of ‘Another Hundred People’ from Company, at full speed and as vocally challenging as ever. She told us she was coming back to the Coqs next March, a treat worth waiting for.

But it was Panaro’s show. He shone on every count for every minute. I arrived feeling at death’s door and left feeling life was worth living again. A powerful antidote to the blues, that’s Panaro. Please come back soon!

Jeremy Chapman