Picture: Conor Weiss
Snapshots: Lorna Dallas at the Crazy Coqs, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Some cabaret singers age gracefully, others disgracefully but the unique voice of the great American Lorna Dallas doesn’t seem to age at all. The top notes are as rich and thrilling as ever, the personality as warm and every word an object lesson in how to deliver a song and tell a story.
The glorious, opera-trained soprano she first brought from New York to London in 1971 when she starred in Show Boat with Cleo Laine has been well looked after. And she’s clever enough to know the type of material that shows it off to best advantage.
Her latest collection, Snapshots, were pictures from her life, whether it be musical images, photographs or works of art. She took snapshots of her audience with her smartphone to illustrate how easy it all is now while reflecting on the old-fashioned equipment of the ‘flash, bang, wallop, what a picture’ era of Half a Sixpence.
And as for art, she introduced a song called ‘Stillness’ from a yet-unproduced musical Travels in Vermeer written by her musical director Barry Kleinbort and so affecting it stood proud in such august company as Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Harold Arlen, Jerry Herman and two of her special favourites, Jerome Kern and Ivor Novello.
Opening with a slow, lilting ‘(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me’ that was as far removed from Sandie Shaw’s No. 1 1960s hit as you could get, we knew were in for a treat and for 75 minutes Dallas held her audience spellbound. ‘London, dear old London’ from the 1922 Kern/PG Wodehouse/George Grossmith musical The Cabaret Girl underlined the enduring love of the city she has called home now for two-thirds of her life, ‘Waltz of My Heart’ from The Dancing Years and ‘Paris Reminds Me of You’ from Arc De Triomphe harked back to the golden wartime days of the once-fashionable but now neglected Novello, and the yearning beauty of ‘Song On the Sand’ from La Cage aux Folles (“I hear La da da da da da da da da da da da da, and I’m young and in love”) provided an exquisite moment in a magical set, elevated by musical director Christopher Denny’s wonderfully sympathetic arrangement.
Dallas’ gentle anecdotes, although not laugh-out-loud funny, were charming. She is quite a serious person but the Kismet episode – she played Marsinah in the 1978 West End revival – had us all in fits. Cabaret is all about storytelling and stories don’t come much better. She would sing ‘Stranger in Paradise’, the hit song from the show, to a packed house at the Shaftesbury Theatre, then had a car waiting to take her to the Savoy where she did a late-night cabaret and the following morning, when a German TV company wanted her to sing the song “auf Deutsch”, she flew over to Cologne to record it over there…before flying back for her evening performance at the Shaftesbury. Those were the days! And she did it sublimely in both languages for us.
It was a masterclass for any young, aspiring cabaret performer but seeing a greying Crazy Coqs audience with an average age far closer to 60 than 30 brought home the sad realisation that a large majority of today’s wannabes may not even have heard of Dallas who was so popular in the ’70s and ’80s that she even had her own BBC TV show. But she gave it all up for two decades and more to enjoy marriage to her adored Garry Brown, Johnny Dankworth’s trombonist and musical agent. He’s gone now but Dallas never fails to bring him into the conversation. He must have been quite something… and she very much still is.
Jeremy Chapman
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