Cole Porter’s back. Back at the Barbican, and back in very good hands.
Trafalgar Theatre Productions has quietly established itself as the Barbican’s summer resident over recent years, bringing Goodnight, Oscar, Fiddler on the Roof, Kiss Me, Kate and Anything Goes to the venue in successive seasons. Given that list, a Cole Porter revival feels less like a coincidence and more like a mission statement. Their latest is High Society, and on the basis of a press morning that offered three musical numbers, a Q&A with the cast, and a good look at the design concept, it’s shaping up to be something rather special.
This isn’t a straightforward revival. Director Rachel Kavanaugh has gone back to the source material, leaning more heavily on the original Philip Barry play than either the 1956 film or the previous stage incarnations, and supplementing the score with six additional Cole Porter songs. The ambition is considerable, and the production is billing itself accordingly, as the definitive High Society. Bold claim. But you leave the rehearsal room thinking they might just pull it off.
Image: Alan West
The cast is an intriguing mix of familiarity and surprise. Helen George, best known for Call the Midwife, leads alongside Felicity Kendal, who is, remarkably, only making her second musical theatre appearance. Carly Mercedes Dyer and Nigel Lindsay complete the core company. But the revelation of the morning is Freddie Fox. Taking on the Frank Sinatra role from the film in what is, astonishingly, his musical theatre debut, Fox brings exactly the kind of loose-limbed, unhurried swagger that the part demands. He sings beautifully, too, with a voice that suggests he’s been keeping something of a secret. All three of the numbers performed land well, but Fox’s effortless ease gives the session a genuine charge.
Felicity Kendal, though she didn’t sing, is characteristically magnetic in the Q&A, and the cast as a whole is refreshingly candid and at ease, which bodes well for the chemistry on stage.
Visually, the production looks a treat. The set, glimpsed via a detailed 3D model on display, frames the action like a painting, all clean architectural lines and the sort of patrician grandeur you’d expect from the highest reaches of WASP society. The costume sketches on show match the tone perfectly; that particular brand of effortless, expensive elegance that the period wore so well.
But the real thrill of the morning is simply hearing those Cole Porter songs performed live. There is a lightness to his comic touch, a wit threaded so finely through both lyric and melody, that no recording ever quite captures it the way a live performance does. Hearing it in a rehearsal room, without the full production around it, only sharpens the anticipation for what the Barbican stage will do with it.
Summer can’t come soon enough.
High Society runs at the Barbican 19 May -11 July 2026
Tickets Here
