Director: Hannah Chissick
After an absence of two years due to the pandemic, the Stephen Sondheim Society’s Student Performer of the Year Award Concert is back, this time at the theatre that bears the composer’s name. As organiser Craig Glenday noted, it’s a show with the longest title in the West End, so it’s no surprise that it often gets abbreviated to SSSSPOTY.
In previous years, the Society paired with Stiles and Drewe’s prize for new composers (which, Glenday noted, “made us SSSSPOTY and SAD”) but upon its return, the award has now paired with the website New UK Musicals, which sells sheet music from a variety of new musicals. The acronym thus becomes SSSSPOTY and NUM, which maybe isn’t all that better.
The structure is the same, though: after auditioning hundreds of student performers, the judges selected 12 finalists to perform live. Each sings one number from Stephen Sondheim’s extensive repertoire, followed by a song from the NUM library. And it is the combination of these two songs that reveal a lot about how each student performer sees themselves. Should the second song reinforce the abilities – comedic, tragic, romantic – that they demonstrated in their Sondheim number, or should they choose a completely different type of song to showcase their versatility?
Over the course of the evening, we see variations of both strategies from the dozen finalists. So, for example, we get Tommy Bell performing Sweeney Todd’s The Worst Pies in London, and backing it up with Stiles and Drewe’s A Place to Come Back To from The Wind in the Willows (although using his native Northern Irish accent for the latter exposes how some of Drewe’s double, tripe and even quadruple rhyming schemes assume that the singer is singing in RP); Ella Shepherd backs up the stirring I Read from Passion with a hilarious rendition of Alex James Ellison’s Press Hash to Re-record (Fiver), leaving ever more psychotic voicemail messages for her ex-boyfriend, while Desmonda Cathabel backs up a fierce rendition of A Little Night Music’s The Miller’s Son with a similarly powerful performance of I’m Ready from Eamonn O’Dwyer’s adaptation of The Snow Queen.
Host for the evening is Jenna Russell, a frequent interpreter of many a Sondheim role and the perfect embodiment of how an admiration for the composer’s works can unlock so many aspects of a performer’s capabilities. Her hosting duties do not preclude her from performing, though: her rendition of Follies’ Losing My Mind is suitably beautiful.
Other guest performances include Alex Young, who won the award in 2010 and was recently the charismatic lead in Anyone Can Whistle at the Southwark Playhouse, a production which finally unlocked one of the hardest Sondheim musicals to master. Her rendition of Don’t Laugh from Hot Spot perfectly sums up Young’s strengths: lashings of humour, through which some deeper elements of character are slowly revealed.
After a long decision and what the judging panel describe as nearly a split vote, Desmonda Cathabel pips Ella Shepherd to the title. Either would be well deserved winners, but the richness of Cathabel’s voice, her attention to detail in every syllable of each song, marks her out as a future Sondheim diva to join the pantheon of women indelibly associated with the composer.
As for the other eleven? As the organisers say, they are in good stead for the rest of their careers. If you can cope with Sondheim, then whatever else the industry throws at you will be a piece of cake.
Reviewed on 30 May 2022
