Maria Friedman and  Friends Celebrate Sondheim – Crazy Coqs

Maria Friedman and  Friends Celebrate Sondheim continues at Crazy Coqs, London until 8 January 2022.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

What a belter of a start to 2022! The formidable Maria Friedman is rightly showbiz royalty and this was a right-royal celebration in song and story of her mentor and friend, the late, great Stephen Sondheim.

Far more than just a singer, Friedman is a storyteller, communicator and actress of the highest order and one with such a generosity of spirit that she namechecked every single member of the Crazy Coqs team – “the best in the world” – looking after a packed house in a joyous 100 minutes at the chic West End cabaret room.

With a framed photo on the piano of Steve and herself, Friedman said she and her brilliant MD Theo Jamieson were initially planning a programme of her career favourites with a bit of Bacharach and the Beatles on the agenda but the death of her muse prompted a rethink and this tribute was the felicitous result.

With a voice every bit as good as it has ever been, La Friedman – assisted by three well-chosen friends, old and new, Ian McLarnon, Matt White and an exciting Royal Academy of Music student on her UK professional debut, Desmonda Cathabel Christie – sang some of her beloved Sondheim’s greatest creations as if her very life depended on it.

One by one, she ticked them off. It’s tempting to say the highlights were a simple, quietly persuasive ‘Send in the Clowns’ and a louder, all-guns-blazing ‘Losing My Mind’, but to talk of highlights you have to have lesser lights and lowlights and of those there were none.

It was natural that the three Sondheim musicals with which Friedman was most associated, Sunday in the Park with George and Passion and, as director, Merrily We Roll Along would figure large on her journey in this week-long Crazy Coqs residency.

Sondheim saw her for the first time singing ‘Broadway Baby’ as a late replacement in a 1989 charity concert – where someone in the gallery shouted “Get off, we want Elaine Stritch” – and met her at the press-show party with his first question: “Who are you?” She later said: “It wasn’t much of an opening line but I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!”

Intrigued, he went to the National Theatre the following day, saw her in the play Ghetto and, mightily impressed, lobbied for her to star as Dot in the West End premiere of Sunday in the Park.

As she was “living in a bedsit and broke”, getting that role was a life-changing moment in Friedman’s enduring career so it was with the title song, alongside McLarnon as the artist George, and the ethereal ‘Sunday’ that she marked that early high.

Six years later came her Olivier-winning Fosca in the West End premiere of Passion at the Queen’s Theatre, the cue for another Friedman story.

Taking the instruction from the script that Fosca was, to be polite, extremely plain, the make-up department slapped on a few unsightly warts and goodness knows what else, only for the composer himself to come along and peel it all off with the words: “Now that will do.” Facially virtually back to her normal self, it wasn’t perhaps Sondheim at his most charming but his notes were always straight to the point.

From Passion, Friedman chose ‘God, you are so beautiful’ and the gorgeous ‘Loving You’ and following that came the confident Desmonda Cathabel Christie’s ‘The Miller’s Son’ from A Little Night Music which marked down the young performer, only four months at RAM, as a talent to watch out for. Like Sondheim himself, Friedman always goes out of her way to encourage up and coming artists.

From Sweeney Todd, Friedman revelled in the macabre humour of ‘A Little Priest’ (she was Mrs Lovett in the Sondheim 80th birthday concert at the Royal Albert Hall) and later put heart and soul into ‘Children Will Listen’ from Into the Woods.

To give her a well-earned breather, Ian McLarnon, who was in the Follies cast at the National, took centre stage with that helter-skelter showstopper ‘The-God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues’ and Matt White’s lovely tenor duetted with her on ‘With So Little to Be Sure Of’, one of the few saving graces of that rare Sondheim flop Anyone Can Whistle.

Merrily We Roll Along proved equally uncommercial until Friedman came along to direct it, the 2012-13 revival receiving more five-star reviews than any other musical in West End history. ‘Old Friends’ and ‘Our Time’ celebrated that success with everyone chipping in so infectiously on the latter that the whole house joined in the reprise.

As an encore Friedman seemed to be speaking directly to Sondheim with the heartfelt sign-off ‘Goodbye For Now’ from the Warren Beatty movie Reds. Simply magical.

Originally written as an instrumental, Beatty asked Sondheim to put lyrics to it with a view to Diane Keaton recording the number. It never happened but, in Friedman’s hands, it became the perfect ending to a perfect evening.

In view of Friedman namechecking every member of the Crazy Coqs team in her thank you speech, it would be churlish of me not to mention the rest of her team, Joe Evans on drums and Paul Moylan on bass, both, like Friedman herself, at the very top of their game in Jamieson’s classy arrangements of this classic material.

On a scale of 1 to 10, Friedman and Friends rates a 12 for me – and there’s still time to see it. Beat the door down for a ticket – it’s what great cabaret looks like and when you think of the outrageous prices some West End musicals are charging, this has to be the biggest bargain of the January sales.

Jeremy Chapman