Blues in the Night, Kiln theatre, review: this show will transfix you
Early on in the 1941 film Blues in the Night, there’s a moment of unforced wonder in which the titular blues song gets warbled in a St Louis jail by a wistful black prisoner. He’s in a crowded cell but he’s all alone, singing his broken heart out – and the (white) heroes, in a neighbouring cell, rise up, in awe: “That’s the real misery, ain’t it boys?” exclaims jazz pianist Jigger. “That’s the real lowdown New Orleans blues.”
It wasn’t the ‘real’ blues, actually; the song was written by those ‘Tin Pan Alley’ giants Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer – the composer and lyricist whose umpteen credits elsewhere include The Wizard of Oz (Arlen) and Moon River (Mercer). Yet it felt true, got hailed as one of the all-time great blues songs. It transfixed Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney – among the first people to whom it was played (“the greatest thing I’ve ever heard,” Rooney said) – and it will transfix you when you hear it at the Kiln theatre, where it provides the overall title to a compilation show first seen in the US in 1982.
There are a lot of things you can say against this oddly structured revue, some of them said at its premiere and echoed when the show cropped up in London five years later. Assigning simple labels to a quartet of lost souls – the Lady, the Woman, the Girl, the Man – and convening them in a late Thirties Chicago hotel, with a bar to drift into and threadbare rooms for the women to retreat to and croon in, hardly makes for deep dramatic cohesion.
Who are these people? What are they doing besides reaching for a drink, clinging to their memories and holding out for that someone to make their lives complete? The concept (rustled up by the original director Sheldon Epps) is bargain-basement stuff. No matter, though, when you’re treated to music as powerful as this, drawn from multiple sources (with emphasis on the Bessie Smith songbook), and as richly performed as it is in Susie McKenna’s staging (first seen at Hackney Empire in 2014).
Beautifully designed, lit and musically accompanied, the evening boasts a set of unwaveringly tremendous turns from Sharon D Clarke as the Lady, in mourning for her life, Debbie Kurup as the Woman, sinking into addled reverie, Gemma Sutton as the Girl prepping for a no-show date and Clive Rowe as the Man, pleased-as-punch but also the relentless butt of recriminatory female digs.
You won’t hear anything much finer on the London stage this month than Clarke singing Wasted Life Blues, imbuing it with deep sorrow, stoicism and gritted defiance. But Sutton’s rendition of Willow Weep for Me is a revelation too – as though Hamlet's Ophelia got her own desperate aria. Helping to inject a mood jauntier and jazzier, Kurup’s bawdily energised account of Rough and Ready Man along with Rowe’s roof-raising assault on Baby Doll envelope you like smoke, creating an aura of demented sexual frenzy. All in all, just perfect for the inconsolable physical aches and insane high spirits of a fast-departing summer.
Blues in the Night is at the Kiln Theatre, London NW6, until September 7. To book tickets call 0844 871 2118 or visit Telegraph Tickets
