Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford – until 20 November 2021
Reviewed by Alun Hood
4****
Despite being billed as Tell Me On A Sunday, this touring production really should be entitled An Evening With Jodie Prenger as that is actually what we have here, and very enjoyable it is too. The first act is indeed Ms Prenger in the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Don Black song cycle chronicling the romantic misadventures of a young English woman in 1980s New York, but the second, equally enjoyable, half is a Q&A session with a couple of numbers thrown in. As much cabaret as it is theatre, it all adds up to a rather splendid time.
Few leading ladies are as loveable as Prenger, and even fewer would have the confidence and sheer personality to follow an hour of vocal and emotional fireworks with a session of (frequently hilarious) chat. She even brings on, and duets with, her cover, Jodie Beth Meyer, a vocalist of such charm, range and talent that a less generous spirited headliner might be tempted to lock her in the understudy dressing room for the duration of the evening. The superb musical director Francis Goodhand conducts a small but tight band for Tell Me On A Sunday but then gets to cut loose at a grand piano in the second half.
Tell Me On A Sunday, originally written as a TV special and album for Marti Webb when she was starring as the West End’s second Evita after Elaine Paige, is a fairly familiar property and has gone through a number of incarnations. It was the first half of the long running London and Broadway show Song & Dance (where Webb’s successors included such random talents as recording stars Lulu and Melissa Manchester, and Broadway divas Bernadette Peters and Betty Buckley) then it returned in an extended, substantially rewritten, iteration as a West End vehicle for Denise Van Outen.
The version on offer here is nearer to the Marti Webb original, but with some later revisions and additional songs added. A notable omission is the soaring, heart-catching ‘Unexpected Song’ which was added for the Sarah Brightman screen version and has since been included in most other editions ever since. Stick around for the second half though, as Prenger does an exquisitely understated rendition to close the evening.
Director Paul Foster intelligently strips back all of the bombast and flamboyance that often attends this piece, and lets Jodie’s principal character just speak (sing) to us. Unlike in earlier versions, none of the big numbers feel like set pieces with a diva bowling her big notes and even bigger emotions at the audience. Instead, we get an honest, real, funny rendition that becomes even more moving as the heroine’s romantic house of cards repeatedly collapses around her.
Prenger is warmer and more magnetic than many of her predecessors in the role and if her honeyed purr of a voice is probably better suited to classic big band Broadway (can somebody cast her as Miss Adelaide in Guys & Dolls please) than Lloyd Webber’s poppy, belty melancholia, it’s still a satisfying performance, genuinely moving where it could so easily have just lapsed into sentimentality. She’s a real star.