Stuart Matthew Price, a leading man to be

Stuart Matthew Price performed at the St James Studio in The Roles I’ll Never Play

Stuart Matthew Price – The Roles I’ll Never Play. Reviewed at St James Theatre Studio, London.

Stuart Matthew Price, who is about to turn 30, made his London stage debut exactly six years ago in the Donmar Warehouse’s UK premiere of Jason Robert Brown’s Parade, where his stand-out tenor rang out over the opening number, ‘The Old Red Hills of Home’. Since then, I’ve followed him across a series of fringe productions of Broadway flops that have included Sweet Smell of Success, Mack & Mabel and most recently Dear World, and on each occasion, his boyish good looks have belied the fierce, resonant vocals he so effortlessly produces.

But if he has therefore not yet achieved leading man status, perhaps it is just a question of time: when the boy becomes a man, and his looks catch up with his voice, there’ll be no stopping him. So perhaps it’s a good thing that he’s already thinning on top a bit, even as his vocal register is bulking up.

And in an intimate and generous cabaret at the St James Theatre, he stretched himself in new, alternative directions, to explore the sort of songs that are being denied to him by at the moment by being too young, too old or too male for.

Too young, of course, can be the most easily fixed; when he sang Bobby’s ‘Being Alive’ from Company, with the kind of piercing feeling and pulsing anxiety that climaxed a wonderful trio of Sondheim songs that also included Sally Plummer’s ‘Losing My Mind’ from Follies and Beth’s ‘Not a Day Goes By’ from Merrily We Roll Along, it made me realise what perfect casting he’ll be for that role when the time comes (the character is specified as being 35).

On other hand, he’s already too old (and the wrong gender, too) for Matilda the Musical’s ‘When I Grow Up’, lovingly folded into Annie‘s ‘Tomorrow’ and Oliver!’s ‘Where is Love?’ But hearing a mature adult male voice render these children’s songs gives them a heartrending beauty and resonance, too, especially in the beautiful arrangements provided under the auspices of the wonderful MD Mark Aspinall, with expert guitar from Charlie Laffer and vocal support from three ArtsEd students Ben Fenner, Aimee Hodnett and Natasha Ferguson (whom Price also allowed to each do a separate solo turn elsewhere).

Elsewhere, there were a couple of audition pieces, too, for future incarnations of Les Miserables and Love Never Dies: he gave heartstoppingly lovely renditions of ‘Bring Him Home ’and ‘Til I Hear You Sing’. And he closed out a set that also included a beautiful jazz tribute to Michael Jackson with one of his own, self-penned songs, ‘Who I Am Today’, that suggests his talents run deeper than just being a brilliant singer.

But no wonder he is; as a writer, too, he has the same kind of sincerity and feeling. We’ll be hearing a lot more of Stuart Matthew Price in the coming years.

Mark Shenton

Mark Shenton writes a daily online column for The Stage (www.thestage.co.uk/shenton) and is also theatre critic for the Sunday Express and London correspondent for Playbill.com.