This show has legs. Don’t be surprised if the director Alastair Knights’s celebration of the British composer Jule Styne eventually finds a home in a bigger West End berth. The running time may be on the short side at the moment, but Knights (responsible for that mesmerising revival of the Sondheim revue Putting it Together earlier this year) has assembled a high-spirited celebration of the songwriter once described by Kenneth Tynan as “the most persistently under-rated of popular composers”.
Biographical information about the man behind Gypsy and Funny Girl isn’t the evening’s priority. Nor do you learn anything about Sammy Cahn, Bob Merrill or Styne’s other lyricists. Instead, Knights’s four-strong cast, accompanied by the pianist and musical director Alex Parker, weave a graceful paper-chain of melody.
There are no big voices on display but in a room as gloriously intimate as Crazy Coqs you do not need to aim for the back of the dress circle. Anna Francolini, Amy Lennox, Simon Bailey and Tim Flavin make a debonair team, uniting at the close for a stunning arrangement of Don’t Rain on My Parade.
Some of the numbers — Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend chief among them — are over too soon. Still, Knights makes clever use of the room’s space, the performers occasionally perching on stools by the bar or threading a path through the audience. Francolini makes a memorable lush on When I’m Drunk I’m Beautiful, a number from one of Styne’s late-period flops, Prettybelle. Lennox scores a bull’s-eye with the ever more frenzied If You Hadn’t But You Did. Bailey and Flavin play more of a supporting role, by and large, but when they have an opportunity to shine they take it with both hands.
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