The Stage

A Funny Valentine

Published Monday 2 March 2009 at 12:05 by Neil Bonner

One of the many appealing things about this show is the fact that you don’t have to be a jazz aficionado to enjoy it. Frankly, the name Chet Baker meant little to this reviewer at the outset, but I filed out of the Garrick’s intimate studio theatre inspired to delve more closely into the music of the celebrated American trumpeter.

Writer and narrator Mike Maran has a wonderful knack of storytelling that brings his subject matter to life. Straight away you want to know why a talented jazz musician should end his life by falling out of an Amsterdam hotel window - especially when Maran teasingly tells you that he knows how and why he fell… Because he was with him.

Baker’s life and career were ruined by illegal substances and it soon emerges that our storyteller in the white linen suit represents the drugs that destroyed him. Along the way, though, we get to know a good deal about Baker, with lots of biographical information and anecdotes cleverly woven into a story that is as fascinating as it is sad.

And there’s music aplenty, thanks to the on-stage presence of hugely gifted trumpeter Colin Steele and, on this occasion, Robert Pettigrew (an occasional but superb stand-in for Dave Milligan) on piano.

Mike Maran, like most of those who knew Baker, it seems, is clearly enthralled by the baby-faced trumpeter who went on to captivate the jazz world, and utterly dismayed by the way he succumbed to a lifetime of drug abuse.