Director: Barry Kleinbort
Musical Director: Christopher Denny
Cabaret is all about storytelling and audiences will hear few better stories than Lorna Dallas discussing her time in Kismet at the Shaftesbury Theatre where she played to a packed house till 10.30pm, only to dash to the Savoy for a cabaret turn with curtain up at 11pm – on the promise of juicy Wimbledon tickets. Adding new layers to Dallas’ performance of Stranger in Paradise from that musical, hearing she also had to fly to Cologne every morning to record it in Germany before returning for her evening show and cabaret is just the kind of extraordinary insight that Lorna Dallas: Snapshots is for.
Performed at the Crazy Coqs, Dallas’ favourite space in London, the Anglophile singer has put together a set list inspired by photographs and the memories that emerge from them, taking in songs from a century ago including Jerome Kern’s Once in a Blue Moon that sends the audience home dreaming of true love, to the first ever performance of Milkmaid, a song from Director Barry Kleinbort’s musical about Vermeer’s paintings. In between Dallas offers Burt Bacharach to Kander and Ebb, Ivor Novello and Cole Porter.
But it’s the stories that make this show so enchanting, giving Dallas’ delightful soprano added meaning. She opens the show with (There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me and Remember (Harry Nilsson) segueing nicely into taking her own photographs of the people in the room, a memory captured that will remind her “who I am and where I’ve been.” The wistful theme continues with Walking Among My Yesterdays from Happy Time by Kander and Ebb and later Blues in the Night by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer inspired by a picture of Dallas’ sister singing that very song which she keeps on her desk.
Some of the memories are also excitable ones, including meeting a pre-Hyacinthe Bucket Patricia Routledge in the early 1970s when Dallas first arrived in London, noticing a photograph on Routledge’s side table of her performance as Queen Victoria in Love Match. And while Routledge bemoans her lack of success on Broadway, it prompts Dallas to sing I Think I May Want to Remember Today about the first meeting between the young monarch and Prince Albert.
Love won, lost and missed features heavily in the show, from tours with matinee idols that never came to pass to marrying Gary Brown who fell for Dallas after receiving a headshot, some of the highlights of Snapshots delve into the performer’s own favourite songbook including several pieces by Novello including Waltz of My Heart written for soprano and Paris Reminds Me of You. The composers may be primarily “dead guys,” but Dallas’ vocal reminds us why the songs and their universal sentiment have lasted so long.
Performing with Musical Director Christopher Denny on piano, Lorna Dallas: Snapshots walks the audience through “the photo album of life” in a clever interweaving of songs and stories inspired by photographs and the life they contain.
Runs until 23 July 2024
