Takin’ Stock 2, Kim Criswell 30 Years Upon the Wicked Stages of Europe at Crazy Coqs, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Three decades on from falling for London, finding the love of her life and starring in a West End show, we can surely call the magnificent Kim Criswell an honorary Brit these days and, boy, it’s our gain and America’s loss – there is no one quite like this dame.
This sequel to Takin’ Stock, put together at the lovely Piccadilly cabaret room in February to celebrate her 50 years in showbusiness, had a bit of everything – famous songs, infamous songs, ridiculous songs, heartbreaking and brand-new-to-you songs, as she put it.
There was too much to cram into one 90-minute set, so happily for us this flame-haired songbird has put together this adorable follow-up, reminiscing on her crossover career here and in Europe in the 30 years since this Virginia-born, Tennessee-raised lady won our hearts in the title role in the 1992 revival of Annie Get Your Gun at the Prince of Wales.
Not many sequels live up to the original but this Takin’ Stock 2 did with bells on. The choice of material, particularly the stand-out songs from little-known or lost shows, was exceptional. Of course, she could hardly leave out ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, the Irving Berlin show-stopper from the feisty musical that made her famous but ‘Everything is Possible’ – from an otherwise anonymous 1977 musical called Nefertiti – was a great find and gave Criswell the opportunity to show her thrilling mezzo-soprano top register. The length she can hold a note at the end, and with such purity of tone, is truly remarkable.
It’s astonishing that she has never played another full-scale West End musical since that early breakthrough. Her last Off-West End sighting was Carrie eight years ago at the Southwark Playhouse, a show that provided the song ‘When There’s No One’, one of the evening’s magic moments. A more positive, looking-forward approach on a similar theme, ‘But You Go On’, from Annie Warbucks, a follow-up to another Annie but far less successful, saw Criswell at her finest, and ‘Trust the Wind’, a haunting piece by David Friedman, was yet another winner.
In lighter vein ‘One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man’, from Wonderful Town was a hoot. Having her fine pianist John G Smith playing Chopin’s ‘Etude in C minor’ as she topped it with Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s witty putdowns was different but worked and had the audience in stitches. “Just throw your knowledge in his face. He’ll never try for second base” – dontya just love that line!
Her storytelling was far better prepared this time and she had a number of good yarns to tell: when she and a fellow cast member went into the audience with a bucket seeking donations – and kept the cash – “the most shocking thing I’ve ever done”.
She had Hugh Bonneville strip down to his underpants in a lively little game they played to alleviate the boredom of waiting to go on, she’s had a live five-foot snake around her neck in Vienna – “the rest of the cast gave me plenty of space!” – and she’s used a shovel when a real-life horse pooed onstage.
Truly an international, she has sung at Buckingham Palace and La Scala in Milan, starred in Candide at the Châtelet in Paris and stolen the show in the Sondheim: Inside Out revue on London’s South Bank.
And the lines from her encore, ‘No Time At All’, a sweet ‘time to start living Stephen Schwartz number from Pippin, say so much: “Now I’ve known the fears of 66 years… but the thing I’d trade them in for is 67 more.” Quite a coincidence that the lady singing it is 66 going on 67!
In my February review I wrote about the pure beauty of Criswell’s voice she had looked after so well that “it is even more beautiful now”. I’ll stick to that. No talk of packing this cabaret game in please, Ms Criswell. Get going on Takin’ Stock 3.
Jeremy Chapman
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