Musical Director: Joe Pettitt
There’s something about big band swing that suits a particular slice of the Great American Songbook. That’s in evidence with the accomplished stylings of the LP Swing Orchestra, whose latest show focuses on Broadway classics.
Kicking proceedings off with Carousel’s June is Busting Out All Over, the 16-piece band under the conductorship of Joe Pettitt sets its stall out early, and is compounded with a barnstorming performance of Lullaby of Broadway featuring Julia Sullivan’s strong vocals.
Sullivan is one of three guest vocalists in the evening. Gary Williams, who has starred as Frank Sinatra in The Rat Pack: Live From Las Vegas, brings that same energy to his numbers, debuting with another Rodgers and Hammerstein number, Hello Young Lovers, delivered in an uptempo “Bobby Darin style” that is both a long way from its setting in The King and I and also perfectly at home with the LPSO.
But it is the third vocalist who really makes the show. Joe Stilgoe combines vocal versatility with killer jazz piano performances. That’s first explored with a rendition of Louis Jordan’s Is You Is or Is You Ain’t Ma’ Baby, qualifying for the concert’s Broadway theme due to its inclusion in the jukebox musical Five Guys Named Moe.
Elsewhere, a number from Show Boat is performed in an arrangement reminiscent of the Ted Heath Orchestra, and the LPSO brings down Act I with two medleys from musicals that have become overshadowed by their movie adaptations. Pettitt introduces them as tributes to choreographers Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins. However, with no dancers on stage, the medleys of songs from Chicago and West Side Story could at least have acknowledged Kander and Ebb or Leonard Bernstein.
The stage-to-screen blurred lines continue into Act 2 with an extended sequence honouring Cole Porter, who worked in both media. This sequence features all three guest vocalists, with Stilgoe and Williams bonding over High Society’s Well Did You Evah, and Sullivan performing a charming rendition of Delovely. Once again, though, it is Stilgoe who excels once at the piano keyboard, leading the band in a rendition of You Do Something To Me before marking upon a solo performance of In the Still of the Night.
While many of the LPSO’s arrangements (by Callum Au) have their roots in established performances of each standard, there’s still scope for some curveballs. One such number is a new arrangement of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s melody arranged in the style of Glenn Miller’s A String of Petals. It’s an audacious mix of styles that works primarily because it’s performed purely as an instrumental, but it’s characteristic of the good-humoured nature that pervades the whole show.
The British influence continues until the end of the show, with numbers from Oliver! performed much more traditionally than the Evita arrangement. The final numbers of the evening come from the pairing of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. While neither Gonna Build a Mountain nor What Kind of Fool Am I may be as well-known as some of the other standards in the LPSO’s set list, they are fun ways to round off a section that demonstrates the ability of British writing talent to break through onto Broadway.
And save for an encore performance of the Gershwins’ The Man I Love, it also brings the curtain down on a fine demonstration of the power of big band. It’s a musical style that really highlights some of musical theatre’s most powerful and memorable songs from the last century.
Reviewed on 7 September 2025
