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Oh Coward!
In dozens of plays and hundreds of songs from the first half of the last century, Coward defined a now mostly vanished archetype of urbane British life: witty, elegant and aloof. This revue scatters the Master’s ruminations on travel and social life among 40 or so of his best-known numbers. With its performers in dinner jackets or evening gowns, sipping cocktails in the cabaret-styled space, the piece risks seeming insufferably twee, but a combination of artful arrangement and exquisite realization instead yields a small treasure. Like Mad Men, Oh Coward! briefly resurrects the past in all its unknowable glamour.
Backed on piano by musical director Doug Peck, Fry, Lindley and Sanders offer tightly harmonized, crisp renditions of such songs as “The Stately Homes of England” and “What Ho, Mrs. Brisket.” The melancholy coursing under these bright melodies, their constant invocations of gaiety offset by the insistent mention of lost illusions, surfaces in a wrenching interpretation of “I Travel Alone,” while Lindley’s haunted “Mad About the Boy” obliquely acknowledges its closeted author’s sexuality. Separately and in combination, the trio embodies the full complexity of Coward’s character: brittle and precise, hale and snobbish, winsome, self-absorbed and endlessly energetic. Their charm easily overcomes slight missteps in coordination. The production, like a first-rate soiree, offers a taste of life lived at a sweet, unsustainable intensity; news that “The Party’s Over Now,” the closing selection, comes all too soon.
