Ann Hampton Callaway performed The Judy Garland Songbook at The Pheasantry, London and Cinematic Serenade at Pizza Express Jazz Club, Soho, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Superlative American diva Ann Hampton Callaway has been rocking my boat for 30 years now – I first saw AHC at Pizza on the Park in 1991 and it was love at first sight. It was Steve Ross, the Prince of New York cabaret, who marked my card when I saw her new-to-me name among upcoming events at the now-defunct Knightsbridge cabaret room and asked who she was. The instruction was simple: “You must see her.”
I owe Steve a lot. To me she was and is the complete package – a wide-ranging, multi-octave voice so warm and husky it melts the heart, a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humour and a great impersonator not only of Hollywood legends but with a voice elastic enough to imitate musical instruments so perfectly that one instinctively looks round the room to see where the band is.
There’s also that unique party piece where she constructs an on-the-spot song which (sort of) makes sense from unconnected words thrown at her by the audience.
More than that, a songwriter par excellence and pretty decent pianist too – an even better one these days having worked on that aspect of her act while marooned by lockdown in her Arizona home.
So gifted is she that the star bride herself asked Callaway to compose the lyrics for the love song with which La Streisand serenaded her husband James Brolin at their 1999 wedding. It was the gorgeous ‘I’ve Dreamed of You’. A CD devoted to her own compositions should be out for Christmas.
This year she brought two shows with her in a four-day visit, the Judy Garland Songbook for two blissful nights at famed Kings Road cabaret room The Pheasantry followed by two editions of Cinematic Serenade at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho.
The Pheasantry set featured the Callaway spin on some of the greatest ballads in the American Songbook, notably ‘Embraceable You’, ‘The Man That Got Away’ and ‘But Not For Me’ in a mash-up with ‘By Myself’ – “such an elegant way to express misery”.
There was plenty of misery in poor Garland’s alcohol and substance-abused life before her death through an accidental overdose in Belgravia at just 47.
One husband also left her financially unstable and owing thousands in back tax. As the lady said: “If I’m a legend, why am I so lonely?”
Garland and Callaway could hardly have looked less alike, the sparrow-like Garland at 4ft 11 almost a foot shorter than AHC “5ft 10 and worth the climb!” But if you closed your eyes, you could feel Garland’s pain in ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the Carousel anthem which tragic Judy must have sung to herself every day but surely never performed more sensitively than in Callaway’s take on it.
The bitter ‘The Man That Got Away’ from the 1954 version of A Star is Born, which provided Garland with her greatest dramatic film role, was a real show-stopper and Callaway’s rich, deep vocal suited the Harold Arlen/Ira Gershwin classic to perfection.
Having won a Golden Globe for A Star is Born, Garland was mortified when Grace Kelly beat her to an Oscar with The Country Girl and never really got over it. Groucho Marks called it “the greatest robbery since Brink’s”. A fine actress as well as singer, Garland was again Oscar-nominated for Judgment at Nuremberg, losing out in 1962 to Rita Moreno in West Side Story.
And after a nine-song medley from Garland’s 1961 Carnegie Hall concert which carried the grandiose title of “greatest night in showbusiness history”, it was shiver-down-the-spine time again as AHC closed the show with an unaccompanied ‘Over the Rainbow’, the Wizard of Oz evergreen most associated with Garland and so searingly performed by Callaway that it elicited an immediate standing ovation.
The dazzling second half, with Irving Berlin’s ‘I Love a Piano’ from Easter Parade demonstrating Callaway’s increased confidence on that instrument, overshadowed the first which, despite the lively ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’ and ‘The Trolley Song’, went a little flat with too many similar sad ballads in a row.
Callaway was entitled to the odd blip in a 28-song, two-hour, one-woman show but picked herself up brilliantly when she forgot a line or messed up a bit of banter, recalling her mother’s sage advice “Don’t talk, just sing” when things go wrong.
Always a storyteller, the way she includes the audience – or Callaway Tabernacle Choir as she calls them on sing-along numbers – is an object lesson in the art of cabaret. Not many have that gift. She even brought my 12-year-old grandson Henry who was sitting next to me into the conversation. He loved her too.
We had another slick example of her quick-wittedness when she did two more sessions at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho with an entirely different concoction called Cinematic Serenade, a trawl through great songs from the movies spanning ‘Blue Skies’ from the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927 to ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ from The Good Shepherd in 2006.
Forgetting a line in mid-number, she bailed out with another bon mot, “like an Indian carpet, the flaws contribute to the character!”, before immediately getting back on track with the song. It’s what great entertainers do.
If anything, this was an even better show. How can you go wrong with classics like ‘As Time Goes By’ from Casablanca, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, pointedly looking at Kari, her wife of seven years who was celebrating a landmark birthday, ‘The Glory of Love’ from Beaches and so many more in a fabulous 20-song set.
‘Arthur’s Theme (The Best You Can Do)’ recalled happy memories of her early days in Manhattan when she lived in the same apartment block as, and got to know, that film’s star, the diminutive Dudley Moore, a brilliant jazz pianist on top of being one half of the hilarious Pete and Dud comedy duo.
The closing number, the dreamily nostalgic title song from ‘The Way We Were’, was a perfect finale but the number I took home with me was the hard-hitting ‘You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught’, as relevant today as it was when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote it for South Pacific.
What words they were, particularly the lines about being “afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made and people whose skin is a different shade” and being taught at an early age “to hate all the people your relatives hate”. Seventy two years on and relationships between different races, colour and ethnicity are still oceans away from where they need to be.
Thank goodness for the wonderful peace that descends on us when outstanding musicians like Ann Hampton Callaway are around, taking us away, if only for a couple of hours, from the horrors of this imperfect world.
Jeremy Chapman
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