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Maureen McGovern - A Long and Winding Road

Published Thursday 21 May 2009 at 13:15 by Mark Shenton

“There’s got to be a morning after,” Maureen McGovern once sang in the 1973 Oscar-winning theme tune to The Poseidon Adventure. And more than 35 years later, the one-time ‘disaster theme queen’, as she was dubbed, is back again, radiant and resplendent under a canopy of flame-coloured hair, still holding on through the night.

And what a night. She may have taken, as the title song of her new album and cabaret set has it, a long and winding road to bring her back to Pizza on the Park for the first time in more than 15 years, but it has been one both well travelled and worth a detour to visit yourself. Just as vintage wine improves with age, so McGovern - always possessed of one of the most technically proficient and lovely voices in cabaret - has matured with a new darker, mellower quality to her sound that resonates more beautifully than ever.

The last time she was here in the early nineties, her programme centred around Gershwin and her magnificent 1990 album Naughty Baby. Now there’s not a showtune in sight, as she visits a repertoire of classic pop songs by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Lennon and McCartney, Jimmy Webb and Carole King, amongst others.

That both expands the reach of the American Songbook (under whose umbrella this season is presented) and also allows her to find different emotional colours to paint with. There’s a liltingly haunting version of Mitchell’s The Circle Game that finds her “captive on a carousel of time”, and could sum up the place where she finds herself and we now find her: “We can’t return/we can only look behind from where we came/and go round and round and round on the circle again.”

Now cheerfully admitting to 59, she is entering a new phase of life that sees her at the height of her vocal powers - she doesn’t just sound beautiful, but she is connecting to the lyrics as never before. There’s a similarly wistful spirit of enquiry to her wondrous version of King’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?. Yes, and for years to come, I hope.

As accompanied by Jeff Harris, who also provides the gorgeous, movingly effective arrangements, this is the classiest cabaret London has seen for some time. It was also, incidentally, one of the poorest attended I’ve been to - on the second night, there were just 19 of us there when the show started. But if there’s any justice, it should be full for the rest of the run.

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