Simon Green performs his show So This Then is Life at the Crazy Coqs, London as part of the London Festival of Cabaret
Simon Green performs So This Then is Life at the Crazy Coqs, London until 10 May.
It was Green for Go as the suave, debonair and terribly British Simon Green kicked off the second London Festival of Cabaret by road-testing his new show So This Then is Life before taking it to New York where his last compilation, Travelling Light, bagged a Drama Desk Outstanding Musical Revue nomination four years ago.
This was something entirely different from the Crazy Coqs norm with the spoken word, in different forms – poetry, bon mots, aphorisms, monologue and rhyme – sharing the stage with the sung ones of Stephen Sondheim, Harold Arlen, Noel Coward and Julian Slade.
It must be unique for Daphne du Maurier, Lily Allen, Tennessee Williams, Tom Lehrer, Dillie Keane, Rudyard Kipling, Victoria Wood and Simon & Garfunkel to share an evening together, but the elegant Green somehow brought all those and more into his versatile 90-minute gig.
This was the sort of parlando cabaret for which Mabel Mercer was famous, the talk-sing style which can transform even the most frivolous ditty into something that will touch the heart or revive a long-forgotten memory.
Green’s theme was to sit down with his 21-year-old self and explore the paths untrod and mistakes repeated in an ever-changing world and, along with long-time collaborator, arranger, composer and accompanist David Shrubsole, cast a uniquely British gaze over life’s rude awakenings.
It was not entirely what the first-night audience were expecting, and Green had to work hard to overcome a rather hesitant start, but by the end he had everybody onside, cleverly intertwining Paul Simon’s hit song ‘Old Friends’ with Sondheim’s one of the same name from Merrily We Roll Along.
He and Sondheim go back a long way, more than a quarter of a century to when he won the part of Young Ben in the 1987 Follies (with Diana Rigg at the Shaftesbury), and Green gave us a cracking interpretation of ‘Too Many Mornings’, one of that show’s most moving moments.
Just as good was the Stiles & Drewe musical spin on Kipling’s iconic poem ‘If…’ and there was a flood of nostagia in hearing Lehrer’s satirical views of the world (‘Be Prepared’ and ‘I Got It From Agnes’, the unspeakable ‘it’ being VD) alongside the gentle humour of Flanders & Swann’s ‘The Warthog’, Coward’s rather rude ’Alice Is At It Again’ (the ‘it’ this time being naughty rather than perverse) and Victoria Wood’s delightfully wistful ‘Crush’.
And although Shelley Winters’ take on the theatre’s exploitation of naked flesh – “I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience” – did not seem especially relevant, it was well worth hearing for the belly-laugh it provided.
And so begins three weeks of daily cabaret, in its many different forms, spread over numerous London venues including the St James Theatre and Studio, London Hippodrome, Soho Jazz Club and Jermyn Street Theatre. Maria Friedman and Adam Guettel star in a specially commissioned two-day show at the Ambassadors, and the glorious Barb Jungr is doing Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen at the Pizza Express in Dean Street.
There’s David Bedella, Scott Alan and Anna Francolini too, while lesser-known emerging talents such as Xara Vaughan and musical comedy duo Roulston & Young are not being forgotten. Something, in fact, for everyone. Aren’t we lucky?
Jeremy Chapman
Readers may also be interested in:
London Festival of Cabaret 2014 line-up revealed – News
www.londonfestivalofcabaret.com
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