The Heart Of It: Liza Pulman – Riverside Studios

Lichfield Festival – Liza Pulman 4 (credit – Dom White)

Liza Pulman performs her show The Heart Of It at Riverside Studios, London until 30 April 2022.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Liza Pulman pours her heart and soul into The Heart Of It, her new revue, which finally sees the light of day after a two-year delay.

Looking resplendent in scarlet before the interval, and in a shimmering gold outfit in part two, she celebrates her return to live performance in an evening where songs are interlaced with anecdotes packed with biographical detail, much of it a pointer to her assured stage presence.

Trained as a classical singer at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, followed by seasons at Glyndebourne Opera, Pulman’s epiphany came on a visit to Chappell’s music shop where intent on buying ‘Schwanengesang’ by Schubert she came out with a Streisand songbook. Later came Fascinating Aida, another instructive schooling.

In revue vein, Pulman’s bawdy joke about our Prime Minister, new to me, and judging from the laughter from the audience, to them too, landed spot on target, less so some of her camaraderie – perhaps tongue in cheek – directed toward her musicians.

Unhackneyed tales from Hollywood, a fascinating piece about her song choices made in conjunction with aimable and skilled musical director Joseph Atkins, as well as more personal family detail (a shade too much?), are woven around her songs where due diligence is given to the songwriters, in particular the female composers and lyricists, and to singers like Streisand, whose artistry she acknowledges, without following it slavishly.

It is a happy choice to end the show with ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, a song from the 1920s that Streisand revived early in her career, and wise too to stick with that chart. Otherwise Atkins’ arrangements refresh many a standard, going back to Irving Berlin’s ‘What’ll I Do?’, again from the 1920s, which was subsequently revived as a leitmotif to portray the doomed affair of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in the film of The Great Gatsby (1974).

Also of note is ‘If I Only Had a Brain’, now in waltz time. The band swings joyously through ‘I’ve Got A Feeling I’m Falling’ where Steve Walker on trumpet and Richard Pardy on saxophone exudes bonhomie. Their soulful solo spots in ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’ are special too.

The guitarist, Adam Chinery, coming forward on stage, provides a rapt accompaniment to ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’. More from him would be welcome, as would an occasional gentler touch on the tiller within the evening, as for instance during ‘Lullaby in Ragtime’, a sweet song from Sylvia Fine, aka Mrs Danny Kaye, that is harnessed to Randy Newman’s ‘Ragtime’, which does it no favours.

So some caveats about music choices and narrative, but nothing that could mar this celebration of an artist at the peak of her powers, and, who, cannily, holds in reserve her finest vocal of the evening for her encore, ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’.

Adrian Edwards