Review: The Great American Songbook

But innocence is no barrier to sophistication, and The Great American Songbook, which is drawn from the golden era of American song writing between the early 1920s and the 1960s, contains some of the most lyrically and melodically inventive numbers ever written.

There is no doubt that we and the songs are in good hands

The roll call of American composers is great, long and, it would surely not be too smug to point out, mostly Jewish. George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hammerstein, Jerome Kern and not forgetting the greatest of them all, Cole Porter, who it would surely be churlish not to point out, was not Jewish.

“It was the songs who made the stars,” says Roberts in his introduction. “Not the stars who made the songs.”

This is true. You could stick a pin in this evening’s list consisting of 34 songs, plus a medley of four Cole Porter numbers, and come up with a classic every time. I Get A Kick Out Of You; Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered; The Lady is a Tramp...

But so popular, so well crafted and so witty are these numbers that they have also become karaoke fare, and the music to which the musically challenged turn when they want to cover a lack of talent.

You have to be pretty bad not to get a positive reaction out of an audience with numbers like Blue Skies; It Don’t Mean A Thing; Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love...

As long as a singer moves at the right time from major to minor, the memory of the song takes over. My long-dead, and beloved dog Henry could woof out a version of Ol’ Man River, but as long as he stayed in key it’s Paul Robeson’s voice that my mind is listening to.

So it comes as a relief to say that Messrs Roberts and Caruana and Ms Louisa Parry make a classy combination.

There’s no hiding here behind the compositions. And by the time the trio have got through the jaunty opening with Another Op’nin’, Another Show there is no doubt we and, just as importantly, the songs are in pretty good hands.

The lively band consisting of bass (Mat Elliott), drums (James O’Carroll) and the appropriately named David Horniblow on sax, clarinet and flute, are expertly led by pianist and musical director Andy Rumble.

But by the end of this two-hour show, the format frays somewhat and Heather Simpkin’s production is running out of ideas fast.

Parry distracts with a couple of tap routines and no less than four costume changes. Any more and walking off stage in one dress and back on in another would have become something of a running joke.

Perhaps it should be. In the bits where songs are not sung, we are regaled with that terrible thing that is so often the fatal flaw in these revues — the blandly written hagiographic patter about the geniuses behind the show’s material.

As usual it is delivered here by a cast who sing a lot better than then they talk. But when they sing, they sing as well as in any musical show I’ve seen in a long time.

Caruana’s gruff but accurate vocals have shades of Nat King Cole, Parry can jazz scat quite beautifully, and even though in the lovey-dovey moments there is more sexual chemistry to be found in a few sticks of celery than between Parry and Roberts, it is not long before the next great American song is given the treatment it deserves.