The Golden Age of Broadway: BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, London.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
There was something for everyone in the musical feast laid on by the BBC Concert Orchestra and five top-drawer vocalists for a packed Royal Albert Hall in celebration of the Great American Songbook.
Concentrating on the Golden Age, from the end of the Great Depression in the late 1930s to the period after the Second World War when the great songwriters did some of their best, life-enhancing work, this was a night of nostalgia and lush melody.
Many old favourites were represented, among them South Pacific (currently at Chichester), Anything Goes (a must-see at the Barbican), My Fair Lady, Carousel, Guys and Dolls and High Society, but also shows which rarely get a mention these days but still have a stand-out song that survives.
Generally it was a safe selection rather than an exciting one and we could have done with a little more humour to balance the stream of ballads.
Some like ‘All the Things You Are’ from Very Warm For May, the final collaboration between Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, become much-loved cabaret standards while the show itself withers into obscurity.
That show ran for only 59 performances in 1939 but has one other claim to fame – after being taken to see it, the nine-year-old Stephen Sondheim was inspired to make a career out of writing musicals. We have much to be grateful for!
In the same category of great song, not-so-great show came ‘My Funny Valentine’. Gorgeously interpreted here by Louise Dearman, everybody knows it but how many know Babes In Arms, the Rodgers and Hart musical it comes from?
The same comment applies to ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’, again a memorable song from a not-so-memorable show Oh, Kay! by the eloquent Gershwin brothers George and lyricist Ira, the latter embarrassingly referred to as “George’s lovely wife” on one radio show at the time.
Clarke Peters didn’t appear often on the concert platform but when he did, particularly with the very moving ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ from South Pacific and the lively ‘Luck Be a Lady’ from Guys and Dolls, this great showbiz veteran made every note count.
Another golden moment came from Jamie Parker in crooning Sinatra mode with ‘You’re Sensational’ from High Society while his take on ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ – rated by Lloyd Webber “the greatest song ever written for a musical” – would surely have pleased South Pacific’s composers even though Rodgers and Hammerstein had tailored this show-stopper for a bass, specifically the ex-Met opera star Ezio Pinza.
Dearman and Parker joined forces to great effect with the smooth Nadim Naaman and Katie Hall, making her first stage appearance since becoming a mum, for ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ from High Society.
‘I Got Rhythm’, the upbeat Gershwin number from Girl Crazy often known as ‘Who Could Ask For Anything More?’ as that refrain is repeated four times, and the delightful Naaman-Hall routine with Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’ from Anything Goes were other highlights in two hours of old-fashioned entertainment.
Presenter Katie Derham’s two studio guests Bonnie Langford and musicals historian Neil Brand added considerably to the show with their insights, Langford reminding us she made her Broadway debut at 10 playing Baby June in Gypsy. Indeed, after more than half a century in the business there can’t be many shows with suitable parts for her vast array of talents that she hasn’t appeared in.
Looking at Richard Balcombe conducting the mighty orchestra in such glorious surroundings, she said how great it was to be able to SEE music being played again as well as feeling it.
Langford’s passion for musical theatre burns as brightly as ever and she has a wonderfully upbeat way of talking about it while the ever-informative Brand, admitting that Guys and Dolls was his favourite musical, made the interesting point that all these great composers, apart from Porter, were Jewish.
Brand saw parallels with the public relief at escaping the Depression and the War to the determination for positivity after the trauma of Covid. Concerts like this one are a tiny but very welcome step back towards normality.
Still a long way to go but we’ll get there. That was a constant theme in a concert produced by Seren Irvine and directed by Bridget Caldwell for BBC TV and radio.
Jeremy Chapman
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