With his new show HERE AND NOW, performed in the Cavern theatre at the El Rocco bar, balladeer Robert Green, with Alexander Sussman tinkling away at the piano, wowed audiences with a medley of some twenty songs from The Master, Noel Coward.
Green maintained a fast pace through the show, flying through the songs and sustaining a dialogue between the numbers. Green built up a bit of a portrait of The Master, from his time as a child prodigy, supported by a loving mother, through his many years of creativity and social commentary, to his passing at a grand old age as a father figure of the British stage. It caught me unaware that the genesis of David Lean’s classic film BRIEF ENCOUNTER was a Noel Coward short story.
Coward’s intensely British nature came across with many of the songs Green choose, including the classics MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN, STATELY HOMES OF ENGLAND, and LONDON IS A BIT OF ALL RIGHT.
Green delivered a ripper of a version of MRS WORTHINGTON and performed the slow numbers well too, including a delicate, well phrased rendition of LET’S SAY GOODBYE- ‘there will be no regrets/that love didn’t last’!
A quirky Noel Coward lyric that I hadn’t heard before, ‘Present tense is the only one we can live in now’, from the title song, is one to remember.
Green has brought in most of the dollars as a legal eagle, for the last thirty however singing remains his great love and joy. He revealed that his first cabaret show goes back quite a way in time, back to 1984.
The show ended to warm applause,with two final songs, and Green advised that he will be taking part in the upcoming tribute season to Coward to play at the Genesian Theatre in early December, 2012. Once a Coward devotee, always one!
Robert Green’s HERE AND NOW played the El Rocco Bar, Kings Cross on the Thursday 8th November and Saturday 10th November, 2012. For more information on Robert Green visit his official website www.robertgreencabaret.com.au.
© David Kary
15th November, 2012
Tags: Sydney Stage News- HERE AND NOW, Robert Green, El Rocco Bar Kings Cross, Noel Coward, Sydney Arts Guide, David Kary