The Soho club Madame JoJo's isn't known for classical music, and classical music isn't known for laughs. So there are unlikely connections being made in Club Mozart, the new monthly residency of Rainer Hersch, musician turned stand-up comedian.
Hersch is a former touring manager of the London Festival Orchestra, so he is well qualified to poke fun at the classical music world. But I wished, by the end of a jolly evening of orchestral manoeuvres, that he had given his expertise more of a run-out. Perhaps because he seeks to play down to the nonspecialist audience, Hersch swings at the most obvious comic targets when - with his supporting band of professional musicians - he clearly has the wit and talent to be far more surprising.
There was disillusion in store, then, for those music novices (myself included) who hoped to be illuminated by Hersch as well as entertained. Proceedings begin with the airing of glib stereotypes (Hersch is half German) and with a Name That TV Theme contest, for which the first, second and third prizes are bottles of beer. This is lowest common denominator stuff, which can only partially be excused by Hersch's need to get up his initially cool crowd going. Dapper in a frock coat, and with a hairstyle only he and Simon Rattle could get away with, Hersch nevertheless lacks the stand-up's traditional tools to seduce an audience: the strong, sudden personality, the raffish bonhomie.
When he eventually gets to the classical music, though, that ceases to matter. In the first of three acts, he has fun with the mnemonics used by children learning to read music (Expelled Gynaecologist Blames Diaphragm Fiasco), and by absurdly anglicising the lyrics to a Verdi opera. Eyebrows are raised, too, when Hersch proves that a Hoover hose is as musical as a didgeridoo.
This is but the overture, however, to a third act (the second featured guest star Harry Hill) that encapsulates what's right and wrong about the gig. There's a version of Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals reconfigured to accommodate more TV themes, and an 1812 Overture performed on that most lampooned icon of 1970s naffness, the Stylophone.
More successful are Hersch's efforts to point up the power a conductor wields - by playing cat-and-mouse with his orchestra when holding the baton, and by inviting punters to try it themselves. Here, and when the musicians showcase a spoof snatch of contemporary classical music, the show is at its informative, affectionate best. At such moments, Hersch's material and the audience's intelligence find themselves in perfect harmony.
On the first Tuesday of every month until December 4. Box office: 020-8566 0722.
