“fills the space with her voice, her personality and her affection for the material she is singing”
It’s quite a feat to squeeze a six-piece band into the intimate space of The Crazy Coqs; part cabaret club and part cocktail lounge tucked away deep beneath the streets of Piccadilly. But whereas the band take up pretty much all of the stage, it is Liza Pulman who fills the space with her voice, her personality and her affection for the material she is singing.
She makes clear from the start that this is not a tribute act or any over indulgent homage to Barbara Streisand. Her stamp is indelibly her own, and although she clearly holds Streisand in high esteem, she doesn’t demand that the audience do the same. For me, at least, what is being showcased are the many composers and songwriters behind Streisand’s phenomenal success. And, of course, Pulman herself.
Accompanied by her band, the Stardust Ensemble, she kicks off with ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’ before launching into a refreshingly upbeat, Bossa Nova rendition of Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’. Touches like this set the tone for the evening. You may be overfamiliar with the original tune but Liza, aided by her MD and musical arranger Joseph Atkins, has a knack of breaking away from the usual treatment of a song. Later on in the set, during ‘New York State of Mind’; where Billy Joel drops his register in the bridge, she soars; the purity of her sustained notes replacing the original melancholy vibe of the song with the promise that anything is possible.
Ballads are interspersed with lighter, more uptempo tunes such as Harold Rome’s ‘I Can Get It For You Wholesale’, Fats Waller’s ‘Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now’, Paul McCartney’s ‘Honey Pie’ and ‘Second Hand Rose’ from the Broadway hit that catapulted Streisand to fame in the sixties. But Liza comes into her own when she wraps the warmth of her voice around (to name only a few of the highlights) the Streisand penned ‘Evergreen’, Marvin Hamlisch’s ‘The Way We Were’, Randy Newman’s ‘I’ll Be Home’ and the gorgeous ‘I Wish You Love’, half sung in French to the solo accompaniment of Atkin’s accordion.
The set list is peppered with anecdotal banter giving us an insight into her own, and also, Streisand’s career and personal life. Her self-deprecatory manner with the audience is relaxed and engaging, yet at times does feel as precisely orchestrated as the songs. But there is no denying her command of the material and her affection covers not just every note of the tunes but extends to her musicians and to the audience.
I must admit, I was fearing an evening of schmaltz, but with Pulman’s early operatic background and later career in Musical Theatre, she sweeps away the undertones with her heartfelt renditions. You don’t need to be a fan of Streisand to appreciate Liza Pulman’s performance. You don’t need to be a fan of the sometimes middle-of-the-road material, nor a fan of cabaret or Musical Theatre, or Hollywood. But after ninety minutes in Liza’s company, you will almost certainly become a fan of her.
As its title makes clear, the August offering at the Crazy Coqs is an unashamed nostalgia-fest. A Spoonful of Sherman: The Songbook of Your Childhood references that most famous of all dictums from the nation’s favourite nanny, and, as you would expect, sugary treats from Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Winnie the Pooh, The Jungle Book and Bedknobs and Broomsticks are liberally scattered throughout the marathon 39 song programme.
The Shermans truly are a songwriting dynasty, and we are guided through the evening by Robert J. Sherman, who gives us a whistle-stop biographical tour as a punctuation to the music. Robert is a songwriter himself, who clearly takes enormous pride in his extraordinary family history. He is a genial host – a little on the diffident side – and his evident pleasure at sharing the music of his grandfather, and his father and uncle, is charming, as is his obvious delight at hearing the suite of his own songs, which appear towards the end of the evening. This reviewer could have done without the sentimental underscore, and some of the weightier bits of biographical info seemed ill-matched to the occasion, but, in general, this somewhat old-fashioned format suited both the material and the venue.
The evening did lack a bit of sparkle however, and this could have been addressed by trimming the programme. Both Helena Blackman and Daniel Boys were in fine voice, but frequently seemed hampered by the lesser material. In addition, Christopher Hamilton, on piano, provided a couple of excellent and much-needed bravura comic cameos, but the zip was then too often lost. I Wanna Be Like You would have been a natural segue from The Wonderful Thing about Tiggers, for example, but instead the pace was brought right down by My Own Home, surely the least inspiring song on The Jungle Book soundtrack. In a similarly odd bit of programming, it seemed deliberately contrary to introduce the wonderful Al Sherman classic, There’s a Harbour of Dreamboats, as a Frank Sinatra favourite, and then give it to Blackman to sing.
These programming peccadilloes are indeed just that, but they do mean that A Spoonful of Sherman remains a perfectly pleasant evening out, rather than being the supercalifragilisticexpialidocius experience it might have been.
