Musical Director: Ryan MacKenzie
As the penultimate performance in the Janie Dee-produced cabaret season at Charing Cross Theatre, West End actress Laura Pitt-Pulford’s cabaret performance is the epitome of what the season has been trying to accomplish. An awareness of the beauty of the world, an appreciation of the challenges we need to accomplish to arrest the climate emergency, and all without resorting to fear or scare tactics.
Starting with It’s Today from Jerry Herman’s Mame, Pitt-Pulford’s song choices revolve around both time and nature. That’s followed up with Jason Robert Brown’s Stars and the Moon, a song especially penned for cabaret performances that extols a consumerism ideal, a woman rejecting love and nature in favour of yachts and champagne – until she gets everything, but has nothing.
From there, we get some Sondheim (I Remember from Evening Primrose) and a version of Little Shop of Horrors’ Somewhere That’s Green, Howard Ashman’s lyrics adapted to dream of a future that’s less suburban and more eco-conscious. Throughout, musical director Ryan MacKenzie’s piano and Saran Davies’s cello provide beautiful accompaniment.
Perhaps the sweetest – and certainly the most overtly romantic – sequence is when Pitt-Pulford reminisces about her engagement to George Blagden and their subsequent wedding, in the middle of a rain-soaked forest. Blagden joins his wife on stage for a medley of What a Wonderful World – in which Pitt-Pulford, rather hesitantly, attempts to accompany herself on ukulele – and Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.
As the evening continues, the repertoire varies from a comedy number from Falsettos and the Joseph Kosma/Johnny Mercer romantic classic Autumn Leaves, to Jon Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. Pitt-Pulford continues to pepper her intra-song moments with talk, emphasising family and community, and the need to stay connected.
She concludes with a song chosen by her son, Arlo, who loves the 2024 film The Wild Robot (the only Oscar-nominated film to pass the Climate Change Reality Check, a Bechdel Test-like measure that identifies whether films acknowledge the climate crisis). Even When I’m Not is a song that ties the permanence of love to the natural world, and in that moment, sums up Laura Pitt-Pulford’s cabaret beautifully. As a celebration of music, of family and of nature, this could hardly be bettered.
Reviewed on 13 July 2025
