For the final instalment of Opera in Song we were taken on a journey through cabaret and comedy songs led by Nicky Spence as both compere and performer, alongside a selection of young artists equally well versed in opera and song repertoire. These are materials that are impossible to imagine outside a theatrical setting, and yet co-directors Julien Van Mellaerts and Dylan Perez had come up with a programme that took us in many unfamiliar but unfailingly dramatic directions. Perez also performed throughout on the piano, adding many deft touches of his own in the form of counter-melodies, improvisatory riffs and parodic allusions that at times amounted almost to a re-composing credit.
I counted twenty-two songs in the official programme before we got to the bunch of encores, and only a larger-than-life personality such as Spence could have held all this diverse material together effectively. He did so with great brio all the more impressive given that he was contending with regular blasts of Boney M from outside in the park, and many shifts of mood in a sequence which also contained several introspective and poignant numbers alongside more obvious showpiece numbers, A short review can only make some gestures towards the range and sophistication of the materials presented, let along conveying the cumulative joy and good humour of the performances along the way.
The only slight wobble came at the start with some uncertain leads in Sondheim’s ‘Comedy Tonight’, something of a reminder that when rehearsal time is limited that trickiest of composers can always trip you up unless you are very careful. But after that it was serene plain-sailing, with a veritable menagerie of Lehrer and Flanders and Swann that fully engaged the audience in a singalong too. We than segued into a long central section of seven numbers devoted to the wrinkles and vagaries of romantic relationships. Ellen Pearson found a lot of wry humour in Bolcom’s ‘Toothbrush Time’, and Spence contributed his own raunchily updated version of Lehrer’s ‘Masochism Tango’, and a similarly ‘improved’ version of Coward’s ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington.’ Kurt Weill’s ‘Saga of Jenny’, with all the singers as a chorus, was a real high point too, another instance of the excellent structure of the programming.
Some of the most unusual and least well known material followed in a third ‘buffet’ section devoted various fruits and foods, all made suggestively symbolic of other things altogether, and serving to remind us that so often the key to a successful comic song is what is between the verbal and musical lines as much as what is on them! So far from leaving little to the imagination, in fact they all did as much as they could to stimulate the audience’s imagination… and here Masimba Ushe was especially notable in ‘The Green-Eyed Dragon.’
As the shadows lengthened and the noise from the park faded away, so the tone darkened with Sam Snowden’s rendition of ‘Mr Cellophane’ and a stirring, beautifully projected performance by Dan Barrett of Billy Bigelow’s Sololoquy as a sort of ’11 o’clock number’. But that was just a tease, for then we were swept off into a coda of pertly projected comedy classics sufficient to send everyone off into the night in the best of champagne spirits, and eager for a reprise next year.
Opera Holland Park
21 July 2024
Performers: Daniel Barrett, Ellen Pearson, Dylan Perez, Samuel Snowden, Nicky Spence, Masimba Ushe