Pieced together by the American theatre and television director Sheldon Epps in 1980 from material amounting to little more than a group of lightly sketched characters and a bunch of mostly familiar songs with a common indigo hue, Blues in the Night is getting its first London revival in 30 years. Always an essay in nostalgia, today its component parts resemble a history lesson – albeit, under Susie McKenna’s direction, a very vigorous and entertaining one.
Artfully landscaped in the Kiln’s intimate space by designer Robert Jones, the setting is the lounge of a cheap hotel in postwar Chicago, where a band accompanies an assortment of singers: three females in various stages of disillusionment – the Lady, the Woman and the Girl – and one bumptious figure, called the Man. The characters are archetypes, but their interaction rubs away some of the cliches. Sharon D Clarke is the dominant figure, with the regal presence of Bessie Smith and the sort of voice that Whitney Houston might have grown into had she survived another decade or two. In one of the evening’s most effective moments of restraint, Clarke’s slow gospel-tinged treatment of Smith’s Wasted Life Blues, accompanied by Mark Dickman’s piano, stopped the show; at the other end of the scale came the graphically bawdy Kitchen Man.
Debbie Kurup combines the elegance of Lena Horne with the ravaged pathos of Billie Holiday in Lush Life, and Gemma Sutton brings a vulnerable vivacity and a strong, clear voice – that of a young Lee Wiley – to Willow Weep for Me. Their foil, the all-purpose no-good-Man, is given full value by Clive Rowe, who combines the build of one Count Basie blues shouter – Jimmy Rushing, as broad as he was tall and known as “Mister Five by Five” – with the smoother delivery of another, Joe Williams. When the women sing together, sometimes joined by Rowe, the effect is rich and thrilling.
The musicians play a vital role, switching easily between the various idioms of early jazz and blues. And no band propelled by the drumming of Shaney Forbes will ever do anything other than swing, whatever the surroundings.
• At Kiln theatre, London, until 7 September.
