Maria Friedman has staged several solo cabaret shows but this one, dedicated to Stephen Sondheim, Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand, is a collaborative affair, with several parts and many singers.
Bouncing on stage, a glamorous fizz of energy, Friedman kicks off her silver stilettos and pads around in stockinged feet, inhabiting every song. Her voice is crystalline, quivering, silky, deep or high, as the song requires it; it is filled with all the hope and youth of a wannabe in Broadway Baby and driven by mournful knowing in Losing My Mind.
She sounds all the more glorious in this intimate space, the stage lit up by bulbs that give it the look of a theatrical jazz club (lighting design by Paul Pyant, with superb musical accompaniment by pianist Theo Jamieson, double bassist Paul Moylan and drummer Joe Evans).
Under the direction of David Babani, this is a show that oozes love for performance. The big dramatic moments that come through the songs are sometimes accompanied by cute vignettes about Friedman’s friendships, and working relationships, with the three composers.
But the bigger conceit of this show is to not merely look back but find a future for their legacies. So there is a choir from the Royal Academy of Music and two prominent young singers plucked out: the ebullient Indonesian-born Desmonda Cathabel and 19-year-old Alfie Friedman. His status as Maria’s son slightly undercuts the sense of democratic discovery being showcased on stage, although it does not take away from his astonishing talent – his singing is one of the biggest highlights.
There are solos and group numbers, the latter coming together gorgeously in Hamlisch’s I Hope I Get It and in Legrand’s The Windmills of Your Mind. But the various elements make for a mixed bag of a show: partly a look back to three extraordinary legacies, with Sondheim at the centre, and also something of a “Maria Friedman show”, with stories about her life, family, struggles and career highs. This is charming but sometimes cheesy in its self-celebratory tone: we are told about the time she was called up by Hamlisch who was struck by hearing her voice on the radio, with Hamlisch’s widow, Terre, appearing on stage to retell the story. Friedman sits with singers Ian McLarnon and Matthew White, who perform throughout the show, and speaks of how they met, had kids, and came back together again. It is all forgivably self-indulgent but draws the evening into becoming a long, slightly flabby affair.
It is clear that Friedman has an indefatigable passion for song. She will go on performing until she drops, she says, and there is, in the numerous finales at the end, a sense that she could simply go on telling stories and entertaining us, in an all-night cabaret lock-in, given half the chance.
At the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 17 April
