Nicky Haslam, Earl Okin and Elaine Delmar – The Pheasantry

Nicky Haslam, Earl Okin and Elaine Delmar performed at The Pheasantry, London (The Pheasantry’s tenth anniversary celebrations finale).

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The last night of the tenth anniversary week at The Pheasantry presented another three of the venue’s favourite performers, as the previous shows had also done. Introducing them, hostess Ruth Leon admitted they were all artists The Pheasantry would welcome back at any time. All three are completely different in their own approach to entertaining diners.

First up was Nicky Haslam, the celebrated interior designer and decorator who in his time has also been a breeder of horses, a photographer and lately a writer for the London Evening Standard, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The World of Interiors, The Spectator, Vogue and Tatler, as well as his autobiographies.

Another string to his career was to take up performing in cabaret. He has just turned 80 but for several years has been entertaining his fans by singing songs from the Golden Age of popular music and theatre shows. With musical director Tom Wakeley at the piano Haslam presented a short set of classic songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Cy Coleman and Jule Styne.

Haslam began with ‘It’s Good to Be Here’, a number made famous by Ethel Merman in the stage show Happy Hunting in 1956. It was written by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (they also wrote the book of The Sound of Music) with music by Harold Karr and lyrics by Matt Dubey. He performed his opening number in a style that was appropriate for the occasion.

What was particularly good about his set was that he chose not the usual favourite songs by Cole Porter but the more unfamiliar ones including ‘Mind If I Make Love To You?’ and ‘True Love’, both from the film High Society, ‘Goodbye Little Dream’ and ‘Friendship’ from Anything Goes, and ‘In the Still of the Night’ from the film Rosalie. He was joined by his guest, the luscious Cleo Rocos, for a duet of ‘Friendship’ and ‘All of You’ from Silk Stockings.

Haslam knew Porter and he puts across his friend’s songs with the requisite passion and insouciance. He hasn’t the greatest voice in the cabaret world but with his timing, charm and personality he had this audience transfixed. There were countless verses to ‘Friendship’, some of which he may have penned himself and he also recounted scurrilous showbiz stories he garnered from Porter.

Anyway, with ‘Long Before I Knew You’ from the Jule Styne-Comden and Green musical Bells Are Ringing, ‘Once Upon a Time, Today’ from Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam and ‘Real Live Girl’ from the Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh musical Little Me, Haslam provided a tempting taste of his full act. No doubt he will return to SW3 again.

Next up was Earl Okin, a former schoolmaster turned songwriter and performer who has in his time written songs for Cilla Black, Georgie Fame and Helen Shapiro. Having worked alongside Ralph McTell, Fairport Convention, Jean-Luc Ponty and Van Morrison, it was touring with Paul McCartney and Wings that finally made him take up a full-time career in music. He has a particular love of the bossa nova style and he performed some really beautiful and elegant songs, accompanying himself on guitar to produce a quiet and reflective mood that had the house in total awe.

Then, moving over to the piano – he’s bi-instrumental – he ventured into something completely different in songs by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Beginning with ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine’, written for the 1946 show St Louis Woman. Okin opened the song in his arrangement that sounded like a Bach Partita but he then developed it into something bigger and more expansive.

He also gave us ‘One For My Baby’ written by Arlen and Mercer and sung by Fred Astaire in the 1943 film The Sky’s the Limit. The song was also recorded by both Arlen and Mercer, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Frankie Laine, Marlene Dietrich, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte and many other artists, but most people perhaps associate it with Sinatra who, arguably, sang the definitive version.

Okin added his own, not inconsiderable version to the collection and then deigned to offer his own lyrics for what the barman might have said in return at three o’clock in the morning when he was hoping to be back home and in bed before ten.

He complains that he’s had enough of this lone drinker saying his wife don’t love him because he’s no Sinatra but more like Jean-Paul Sartre in philosophising mood. It was a brilliant idea executed with terrific panache.

And finally… the Pheasantry’s tenth anniversary week of celebrations ended with a jazz singer, the remarkable Elaine Delmar, who has been called (by me) ‘the first lady of British jazz’.

Delmar has always sung the music from the Great American Songbook and here it was no different. She opened with ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’ by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which she performed with particularly fine enunciation, a quality in which she specialises. With Gershwin’s ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ and ‘Summertime’, each song was performed with superb artistry, particularly ‘Summertime’ with every line evincing great emotional strength. She was accompanied by two brilliant, highly-skilled musicians, John Pearce on piano and Simon Thorpe on bass.

Cole Porter is also a favourite of any Delmar evening, so we had ‘It’s All Right With Me’, ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ and ‘Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love’, three of Porter’s most popular numbers to which she gave of her best. It may be difficult to bring a new approach to Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’ from A Little Night Music but, fine artist that she is, Delmar put a new gloss on this oft-recorded number which came up freshly-minted and very movingly so.

One song I didn’t know was ‘Joy’ by Gerry Niewood and Todd Buffa in which Delmar’s singing lived up to its title – it was indeed the very essence of joyful. Finally, Rodgers and Hart were represented by ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ from Pal Joey, while Delmar closed her set with ‘Yours Sincerely’, a number from their 1929 show Spring Is Here. This was an apt way to end a week of celebrating a decade of music at The Pheasantry. Here’s to the next the next ten years!

Michael Darvell