Standards and Ann-dards: Ann Hampton Callaway – The Pheasantry,

Standards and Ann-dards: Ann Hampton Callaway at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

When in the early 1990s the Prince of New York cabaret Steve Ross instructed me “on no account to miss” an exciting new name on the Manhattan beat when she debuted at Pizza on the Park. Little did I know what a treasure trove of musical magic he was opening up to me.

It was love at first sight with Ann Hampton Callaway – “5ft 10 and worth the climb” – as she took me to places other cabaret divas had never visited.

The rich, husky, multi-octave voice wrapped around her own exquisite compositions, the impersonations not only of the greats of the time but of every woodwind instrument in the band, the on-the-spot improvisation of making a song out of random, unconnected words thrown at her by the audience – it was a polish and versatility you couldn’t find elsewhere.

And that wasn’t even the half of it. The self-deprecating sense of humour so throwaway that you had to be at your sharpest to pick up the joke – “I aspire to obscurity and only occasionally fail” a prime example – the new spins on old American Songbook classics, the mastery of interplay with the audience that makes great cabaret so difficult to achieve, the giving of every part of her being to every song she takes on. Quite simply, every show was a work of art.

For some reason, Callaway went 13 years, from 2001 to 2014, without appearing in London and how we missed her, but she has been here again for a four-day visit with two different shows.

The first one at The Pheasantry with a Callaway spin on standards that have stood the test of time and Ann-dards, the pick of her own compositions, then two days of Jazz Meets Broadway at the Soho Jazz Club promoting her new CD Jazz Goes To The Movies.

For Chelsea, she gave us 22 songs in a marathon one-woman show, just Ann and a piano, that lasted well over two and a half hours and was as close to perfection as you could get.

The first 11 were the standards, from Irving Berlin’s brash ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ and beautiful ‘How Deep is the Ocean’ to Carole King’s haunting ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ – a particularly fine version – to a mash-up of ‘People’ and ‘Being Alive’ (the latter a rare foray into Sondheim) and an unaccompanied ‘Over the Rainbow’.

The Yip Harburg-Harold Arlen ballad from The Wizard of Oz made famous by Judy Garland has been done to death but AHC found a way of breathing new life into it, as she does with virtually everything she attempts.

There’s always a story or ten with Callaway and in the Ann-dards we got the bons mots and the funny name-dropping, making a movie with perfectionist Robert De Niro who demanded take after take, writing a song with Carole King, ‘Tonight You’re All Mine’ and singing it together, and the phone calls with Barbra Streisand who sang AHC’s lyrics for ‘I Dreamed of You’ (music by Rolf Lovland) at her wedding to James Brolin.

Her meetings with La Streisand naturally come with wicked impersonations of the lady who has used at least one Callaway composition on seven of her albums.

The story surrounding the ethereal ‘I Gaze in Your Eyes’ was especially poignant. The words are by Cole Porter in a long-forgotten poem discovered after his death. Callaway succeeded in persuading his estate to allow her to record it with her music.

One day a member of the audience, a First World War veteran, introduced himself and claimed the gay Porter wrote those words as a declaration of love to him. Who knows?

Her ‘The I’m-Too-White-To-Sing-the-Blues Blues’ is a hoot from start to finish while ‘Moody in Paris’ reflects her love of that romantic city in a comical way and features the priceless line “I Want To Be Cafe-Au-Laid”.

She had to do her much-anticipated improvised song with words solicited from the floor, in this instance Taco, Vagabond, Prostitute, Pizzzicato and Pepperoni were among the weird subjects she wove into a melody that roughly made sense.

Two of her finest ‘At the Same Time’ and ‘Perfect’ rounded off an intimate evening that held the audience spellbound by her brilliance. There’s a possibility of a return visit with Broadway star sister Liz in a new show already road-tested in the States. Bring it on – and soon!

Jeremy Chapman