The Essential Dame Shirley was performed by Natalie Douglas at The Pheasantry, London.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★★ ✩
The warm, big-voiced Natalie Douglas is one of the elite, award-winning names on the New York cabaret circuit so it was hugely disappointing that she had a small first-night audience when she brought her Shirley Bassey tribute show to London.
This mirrored the tiny turnout for the opening night a few weeks back of Karen Oberlin, another A-list performer from the Big Apple, and is becoming a cause for concern in the cabaret world. If these high-quality artists cannot draw a decent house, what do music fans want?
It cannot be that it is too expensive because prices at The Pheasantry and at Pizza Express’ other music venues, in Soho and Holborn, are half what they are at 54 Below in Manhattan and other NYC cabaret haunts.
“We are getting really worried,” said Ruth Leon, who has been bringing over these high-class American performers first to the Crazy Coqs and now to The Pheasantry for the past six years. “If anyone has the answer, I would love to hear from them.”
Douglas’ three-night residency, her second visit this year, is devoted to showcasing the songs associated with the iconic Dame Shirley whom she can certainly match in power and personality.
The Bassey tribute, her first to a British artist, follows concert salutes to Sammy Davis Jr, Linda Ronstadt and Nina Simone at her spiritual home, Birdland, the jazz mecca on West 54th Street where all the greats have played.
From the moment she walks on-stage, Douglas exudes sunshine as she launches into one of Bassey’s biggest hits, ‘Big Spender’, from Sweet Charity (Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields). Her voice would fill the Festival Hall, never mind The Pheasantry, but also has a subtlety and purity about it that makes ‘If You Go Away’, Rod McKuen’s not particularly accurate translation of Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’, so affecting.
She goes lower down the register for terrific versions of ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’, a number one hit in 1984 on both sides of the Atlantic (though not for Bassey) and Jerry Herman’s anthem from La Cage Aux Folles ‘I Am What I Am’.
And before the inevitable ‘Goldfinger’ finale, we have a bit of Lionel Bart (‘As Long As He Needs Me’) and two big Bassey hits ‘I Who Have Nothing’ and ‘Never, Never, Never’, while earlier George Harrison’s ‘Something’ is Douglas in more reflective mode.
Douglas’ girlie, ditzy, scatterbrained stage persona is fine in small doses but not all of her linking material is audible, also a fault with one of the songs which she over-powers, ‘No Good About Goodbye’ (David Arnold/Don Black).
It is impossible to overstate the excellent relationship music director Brian Nash, who arranges the 14 songs, strikes up with the Pheasantry’s Steinway. Helped by Carole Krebs on cello, Nash creates a beautiful, almost orchestral, sound safe in the knowledge that Douglas’ powerhouse vocals will always cope.
Jeremy Chapman
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