Soft Sessions is available on stream.theatre until 2 May 2021.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Perhaps the thing I’ve missed most of all over the past year are cabaret nights. Sitting in a small, intimate space, tightly crammed in (back when we didn’t mind that sort of thing), listening to voices accompanied by one musician, two at a stretch.
Capturing the essence of those sort of evenings is incredibly difficult to achieve online. Soft Sessions: Live in Concert manages it through a combination of great, occasionally surprising, song choices, some beautiful acoustic arrangements, and a sense of shared intimacy with its performers.
The staging is simple: singers on stools behind microphones, accompanists Alex Beetschen and Harrison Wilde (also both responsible for the arrangements) sitting, mask-clad, to one side. Opening with a duet version of Emily Young’s ‘Teach You’ from Grace Mouat and Courtney Stapleton, there’s an immediate impression of understated confidence that feels so comforting.
That segues into the unexpected, as Mouat delivers a heartbreakingly beautiful mash-up of ‘Happy Together’ and ‘My Funny Valentine’. The Turtles’ uptempo 1960s classic and Rodgers and Hart’s mournful ballad could not be more different in their original form, but here they are so expertly conjoined that they feel naturally aligned.
Stapleton returns with her partner, Eloise Davies, for a rendition of Fatai’s ‘Hide and Seek (Blue)’, before Davies duets with Martha Kirby on Chloe x Halle’s ‘Don’t Make It Harder on Me’.
If there’s a single word that sums up the concert, it would be “mellow”, a feeling that’s enhanced by Kirby’s stirring solo of Beyoncé’s ‘Resentment’. Even the show’s most uptempo number, a joyous rendition of ‘Never Too Much’ by Danielle Fiamanya and Jake Halsey-Jones, is blissfully relaxing to watch and listen to.
Between songs, the performers chat with each other, or solo, about what music means to them, both throughout their lives and over the stresses of the past year. Like all cabaret patter, there’s a risk that these moments go on a little too long, but their presence gives the songs room to breathe as well as showing that the personality each performer imbues into their performance is heartfelt and genuine.
Halsey-Jones and Fiamanya close the show with two more great numbers – ‘All Fired Up’ from him, ‘Runnin’ (Lose It All)’ from her – and all too soon the show is over. And like all the best cabarets, one starts counting the days ’til the next.
Scott Matthewman
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