E-mail to a friend Find tickets

Maria Friedman Re-Arranged

Published Friday 28 March 2008 at 12:00 by Mark Shenton

There may be bigger personalities and better singers in musical theatre, but no one else working in the genre in Britain could offer the generous range of moods, colours and musical styles that Maria Friedman does.

Her latest one-woman, plus lavish 11-member orchestra, show has a repertoire stretching from Kate Bush to Purcell.

Combining a genuinely warm intimacy with a serious intensity, she may be the piper that calls the tune in every sense here, but that band - marshalling more than 40 instruments between them under the expert stewardship of co-musical directors Chris Walker and Michael Haslam - is an integral part of this luxurious wallow in musical glories.

With each member gorgeously showcased in turn in Michael Legrand’s Le Trombone - which is, ironically, one of the few instruments not to be on offer in the line-up - Friedman is the glue that holds them all together as she moves among them and does a kind of musical rap with each player.

That glue occasionally comes unstuck, too, among some of the risks she takes. A medley constructed from the score to Sunday in the Park with George, for instance, that is told from the point of view of Dot (who she played in the show’s British premiere at the National Theatre in 1990) includes a rendition of Finishing the Hat that offers some gender changes in the lyrics, but makes no sense coming from this character.

No matter, in other Sondheim songs that make up a substantial part of the programme, she proves herself one of the world’s greatest interpreters of his material, with a dazzling, lyrically agile version of Story of Lucy and Jessie, a genuinely haunting In Buddy’s Eyes and a touchingly pensive Broadway Baby.

As she performs songs that Audra McDonald, Liza Minnelli and Barbara Cook have made their own, she doesn’t wilt by comparison, but puts her own rich, rare stamp on each of them.

E-mail to a friend Find tickets