Jeff Harnar - Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?

Crazy Coqs, London

***

Jeff Harnar

Jeff Harnar may have started his life on the West Coast, but in his Crazy Coqs’ week-long residency, amusingly titled “Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?”, we meet a man who is unquestionably a product of New York City. His childhood recollections of the view down Broadway from the top of the Empire State Building, through to memories of meeting Sammy Cahn backstage at Carnegie Hall give the night a lifeblood that is derived from the city’s glittering theatricality.

Before his cabaret career took off, Harnar worked as a singing waiter at an Upper West Side restaurant where night after night, he would be elbowed into repeated renditions of Kander and Ebb’s New York, New York. Decades later and now internationally-renowned, he delivers a fresher take on the bombastic ditty. “Don’t get me wrong”, he pleads with over-inflated sincerity as he warms his audience up for the classic number, “It’s not a bad song – the first 10,000 times” and in his affectionately mocking rewrite of the legendary lyrics, we can see his dedication to the genre.

On form however, the man is a treat. As he blazes through glittering show-tunes including My Personal Property and Lonely Town, never dropping his broad smiling facade, we discover that Harnar is a clever negotiator who can juggle his expansive appreciation for New York with an adoring cynicism. To Musical Director Nathan Martin’s tinkering piano, the crooner extracts roaring laughter from his crowd and later, as he screams, riffs and cavorts in a spirit of well-balanced insincerity, he captures the pulse of a fickle town where both everybody and nobody can feel at home. Yes, these musical garments have their dropped stitches, but as Harnar dwells so calmly on the glittery surface of cabaret while teasing us with glimpses at the erudite foundations of his art, his show makes for a strong tribute to both his artform and his city. The show is not yet flawless with Harnar sometimes veering onto uncomfortable ground, blurring the boundaries between ‘nostalgic’ and ‘outmoded’. “Isn’t it quaint and charming how dated these records are?” he enthuses whilst over-indulgently thumbing through a pile of LPs that are possibly long past their Best Before date.

Ultimately we find that the night is marked by a learned appreciation of and a respect for, the cabaret form, that buzzes with a tightly-polished mischievous spirit. Harnar’s stage persona is as glitzy and sharply constructed as the city that inspires him and, fittingly for a show of this name – which sees the performer “trying on some new material, to see if it fits” – his set list is as deliciously frivolous as a shopping spree in Macy’s. Sparkling cabaret, delivered by a man who truly knows his craft.

In residency until 1st March

Guest reviewer: Milly Raleigh

Lee Lessack

The Crazy Coqs, London

***

Lee Lessack

Arriving directly from the States, Los Angeles based Lee Lessack takes up a week’s residency in the chic underground surroundings of The Crazy Coqs with a set that reflects his respect for Stephen Schwartz and which also heavily draws from two of his albums, Too Marvellous For Words and Chanteur, focussed around the works of Johnny Mercer and the Great French Songbook  (his capitals), respectively.

Beautifully baritoned, Lessack with Nathan Martin on piano, is undoubtedly easy to listen to and his set made for a very pleasant 90 minutes or so, but rarely did the evening get out of that riskily anodyne “pleasant” zone. Lessack had just flown in from performing in Orlando, Florida and quite possibly his act was still aimed at Disney-exhausted tourists or expense account businessmen rather than a room packed with an arguably more discerning London crowd.  It seemed to take a while for a rapport to be established with a surprisingly tough audience but on those rare moments when a spark of vibe to the act was kindled, it seemed to be swiftly extinguished in a following number.

Memorable on the night was the Mercer hit I Wanna Be Around, which Lessack delivered with the vituperative panache that the song demands.  With self-accompaniment on cut-down ukulele or fluke, Pineapple Pete was a number of genuine Vaudevillian entertainment, whilst in a remarkable contrast on the night, Lessack’s take on Kathy Lettea’s Where’ve You Been cut a very perceptive portrayal of the impact of dementia on the elderly, providing a moment of genuine and sincere melancholy both in singer and also within the empathetic and for the most part mature, audience too.

But too much of the evening seemed to have been laid out by Lesssack as CD producer/marketer, rather than as a singer who should have thought: what would a London audience really like to hear and as importantly, how would they like to hear it ? Taking the Broadway smash Being Alive from Sondheim's Company he effectively put it to sleep and with his cover of Charles Aznavour’s She, it seemed that Lessack was unaware of Elvis Costello’s 1999 version of the song recorded for the movie Notting Hill. Costello stamped such a re-defining imprint upon the classic French number that all future artistes should recognise they may well be compared against his benchmark. The set’s penultimate number, a take on Edith Piaf’s Hymne A L’Amour was also best suited to Orlando rather than London. The notes were perfect and the tone flawless, but Lessack’s passion for the song that may well have burned fiercely within him, was barely detectable.

Here until Saturday, it is quite possible that Lessack may spice up his act twixt now and then. The man is immensely talented, though many would argue that he has set himself a huge hurdle for this visit: a Yank, singing classics from France, to the Brits. For such a complex cultural crossover to work any singer has to be at the very pinnacle of their career, not pausing on the slopes around that summit.

I want to see Lessack again one day with a set that is less formulaic, more American and one that allows him to really move up through the gears and lose himself in the power of performance that he clearly has the potential to deliver.

Until May 11 2013

www.crazycoqs.com