Monday Night at the Apollo – Apollo Theatre

Cedric Neal and Lucie Jones in Monday Night at the Apollo. Picture: Danny Kaan

Monday Night at the Apollo (the first in the series at the Apollo Theatre, London. Other dates are 14 June and 5 July 2021).

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

As lockdown eases and the West End begins to reopen, it’s clear that the online concerts which have kept performers and audiences going for the last 16 months cannot compare to sitting in an auditorium, being sung to.

Monday Night at the Apollo, a series of three concerts at the Apollo Theatre, is an emblem of an industry in transition. The Shaftesbury Avenue theatre has a socially distanced audience throughout, with the concert also being live streamed to viewers online.

Part cabaret concert, part chat show, host Greg Barnett corrals five guests – Aimee Atkinson, Lucie Jones, Cedric Neal, Cassidy Janson and Julian Ovenden – lobbing softball questions to elicit anecdotes in between some, frankly barnstorming, musical numbers.

Atkinson, whose leading role as Vivian in Pretty Woman: the Musical was interrupted by the pandemic, gets three chances to demonstrate her powerhouse vocals, most impressively on a rendition of Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ that has a 1980s power rock vibe. It’s a rendition that makes sense given the actress’ later confession that she was brought up with a love of rock music, particularly Aerosmith.

Neal has won many fans with his combination of impish charm and deep intensity, and that range is on display here, starting with his cover of Billy Joel’s ‘Just the Way You Are’ or riff after riff on Stevie Wonder classic ‘Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing’ (in a duet with Jones, who achieves the near-impossible task of keeping up with Neal).

Those charms are coupled with talk about his personal faith, the importance of representation (particularly his seeing André De Shields in The Wiz) and, in an intro to a beautiful rendition of ‘Hold Me in Your Heart’ from Kinky Boots, a story of how close he came to the role of Lola in the West End after previously missing out on a first cover spot in the Broadway production. Neal suggests that his troubled emotional connection with the musical might mean he fumbles the song; that insecurity may exist in his head, but if it comes out in his performance it’s only as a greater character depth.

Neal’s former Chess co-star Janson is another West End leading lady whose run was interrupted due to Covid, although her role as Anne Hathaway in & Juliet was recognised with an Olivier Award in the meantime (“If an actor receives an award and there’s no applause,” she recalls, “is it really an award?”).

The humorous streak that has made Janson such a great fit for the role of Anne is evident here, gently ribbing her fellow guests and host Barnett and generally being effervescent company. That is, of course, backed up by her vocal skills, with a beautiful rendition of the Oleta Adams classic ‘Get Here’ and Parade’s ‘All the Wasted Time’ (in duet with Ovenden) being two of the evening’s highlights.

Ovenden himself initially seems reserved in comparison to his fellow guests. But it’s always the quiet ones. It is he who risks turning the conversation into more adult territory, although to be fair he was asked about his nudity in My Night with Reg, his last production on the Apollo’s stage.

And Ovenden is anything but quiet in his vocal performances. With his solo performances ranging from Tom Waits to Dolly Parton, the actor demonstrates a strength, depth and range that appears to be inhumanly effortless.

And yet even he is eclipsed by Jones, for my money the star of this quintet constellation. Thrillingly note-perfect in every musical performance, Jones is just as much at home on the show’s chairs chatting away as she is singing. Obviously, her recent performing life has been dominated by Waitress – after being asked to take a leave of absence so that the show’s creator Sara Bareilles could take the lead role of Jenna, Jones had been due to return the week the West End closed down.

That left, she explains, unresolved issues between her and her character, which she is looking forward to addressing as she embarks on a UK tour of the show. In fact, although she delivers time and again with her musical performances (her rendition of ‘She Used to Be Mine’ is, as you’d expect, a tour de force) it is in the sit down moments that Jones reveals herself to be the ideal guest for this format. Only the gentlest of nudges from host Barnett is needed for her to hold forth, moving from subject to subject with insight and interest. At one point, she asks herself: “I should just stop talking, shouldn’t I?” but the answer she’s looking for is “no”.

In any cabaret format, the question of what to do between songs can turn a good evening into a great one, but the reverse is also true. The chat show format Monday Night at the Apollo is using feels fresh, and despite a few awkward moments artists like Jones and Janson really come into their own in such a setting.

Having been in the physical audience on the night and being able to watch the net broadcast later, it also feels as if this hybrid live-plus-stream format has legs, too. Before the pandemic hit, London was redolent with such events on Sundays and Mondays, as performers and venues filled their “empty” day with one-off material. As we return to that model, the tools that have been honed in the last 16 months give us the opportunity to share such content with a wider audience than before, allowing the industry to grow as it resets. Monday Night at the Apollo has the chance to be at the vanguard of such changes.

Scott Matthewman