Singer Harold Sanditen hosts Open Mic nights every Thursday at the Crazy Coqs, London
Open Mic nights at the Crazy Coqs, London, every Thursday at 10.30pm.
Night-owls grumble there is not much cabaret around in London once they have seen a show or a movie, so the success of the Crazy Coqs’ Open Mic Thursdays is to be welcomed.
Starting at 10.30pm and hosted by cabaret singer and performer Harold Sanditen, they give a West End opportunity to emerging talents as well as established singers who want to road-test songs for future programmes.
This week the line-up included Adam Kirkaldy, for example, who is back at the Coqs on Monday for a sell-out show called Stormy Weather he is doing with Stefan Bednarczyk in aid of leukaemia. Fred Kenyon warmed up for her Cabaret Confidential gig at The Pheasantry on Tuesday with a stylish treatment of Jason Robert Brown’s ‘If I Told You Now’, and Gary Bland told us after ‘I Cannot Hear the City’ (from the half-forgotten Hamlisch musical Sweet Smell of Success) that he was working on a Sondheim cabaret for the spring.
But the two acts that most caught my attention were Frank Loman, a German singer but now long-time Londoner, with a thrilling interpretation of ‘Falling Slowly’, the hit song from Once, and Helen Rivera, a singer-songwriter-pianist with her very witty composition ‘I Know You’re the Woman For Me’.
Rivera has great timbre and timing, and if she has a bank of songs of similar quality, it would make an evening well worth paying to hear.
Listening to ‘Falling Slowly’ just an hour after seeing the new Lloyd Webber musical Stephen Ward in preview was a reminder that every show needs at least one big, hummable number to have the chance of major success, and showstoppers from the noble Lord are in short supply at the Aldwych unless it is the super ballad ‘Hopeless When It Comes to You’.
What these weekly Open Mic evenings bring to the table is the wide variety of performer and song. Inevitably, some are better than others, but nobody goes in expecting a Barbra Streisand or Michael Bublé, and the general standard of entertainment is certainly high enough to encourage return visits.
Jeremy Chapman
www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs/open-mic-night
Readers may also be interested in:
Karen Oberlin – Over the Rainbow – Crazy Coqs
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