Stephen Sondheim Society Presents… Alex Young and Friends – Phoenix Artist Club

Stephen Sondheim Society Presents… Alex Young and Friends at the Phoenix Artist Club, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

There wasn’t room to swing a cat at the Phoenix for the appearance of Alex Young, fresh from her triumph as Young Sally, Imelda Staunton’s ghost, in Follies.

This first of the Stephen Sondheim Society’s monthly cabarets in 2018 was a coming-home for this deliciously funny actress-singer who won the Sondheim Student of the Year competition in 2010 and has gone from strength to strength.

Acclaimed performances in Carousel, Show Boat and Anything Goes before her four-month stint in Follies at the Olivier has marked her down as one of the West End’s rising stars and it’s not hard to see why as she has the gift of getting an audience to love her and her quirky ways.

One member of the packed audience was Broadway royalty Ben Platt who won a Tony last year for the title role in the hit show Dear Evan Hansen.

Young paid her dues to Sondheim with ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ and in the group finale ‘Broadway Baby’, but it was in the oldest song of the evening, the music hall ditty ‘Twiddley Bits’, pulling silly faces and relying on her brilliant comic timing, that most played to her acting skills. The song comes from A Chinese Honeymoon which ran for 1,075 performances in the West End in 1901.

On Monday, with regular host Tim McArthur away working in New York, Young stood in superbly and brought some classy friends with her, not least the golden-voiced Laura Tebbutt who is always worth a listen.

And Jordan Shaw who had the enviable job of being paid to snog Janie Dee, the man-eating Phyllis in Follies. Shaw played the handsome young waiter Kevin who serviced the legendary Janie.

Recalling how nervous he was in the early days of rehearsing the part, he told how Dee took him to one side and instructed him to “just f*****g DO it”.

Shaw sang two songs by American composer John Bucchino and ‘Loving You’ from Passion, his favourite Sondheim. He is a talent to look out for.

Snogging was again on the agenda in the scene from Into The Woods where the Baker’s Wife gets willingly ravished by Cinderella’s Prince, a great excuse for Tebbutt, who played the part at the Menier in 2016, and Will Barratt to enjoy three full-on smackers as they duetted hilariously on ‘Any Moment’.

Barratt, who also sang ‘Johanna’ from Sweeney Todd, one of the many big shows he has worked on, was Alfie Boe’s walk-on cover in Carousel at the London Coliseum, working alongside Young and Katherine Jenkins.

‘A Lonely Voice’ from new musical My Land’s Shore, in which Aaron Clingham, MD of these Sondheim evenings, is closely involved, was Barratt’s passionate final offering and if the rest of the score matches that, the show will be well worth seeing at Merthyr Tydfil (where the story is set) when it opens on 20 February.

Songwriter Tim Connor gave us three of his own compositions on a richly varied evening shared between Sondheim classics and new musical work. Young  herself is part of the latter as co-writer with Kate Marlais of F**cked in Marrakech which is due to launch at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in the BEAM2018 New Musical Theatre Showcase on 1-2 March.

With McArthur still away, she will also host the next Sondheim Society show on 5 March when she plans a Follies reunion if she can round up a few of her fellow cast members. It should be another cracking night.

This is the third year of these first-Monday-in-the-month meetings. They are good fun and, at £15 for non-members, good value too.

Jeremy Chapman