Call Me Merman
King's Head Theatre, Winter 2003-2004

There is a formula for shows like this salute to the legendary Broadway star Ethel Merman, an and-then-I-sang autobiography punctuated with music. Author John Kane and song-compiler and director David Kernan have come up with a mild variation in imagining Merman rehearsing for an and-then-I-sang nightclub act, mixing the act's script with rehearsal room chat to fill in the biographical material.

Angela Richards plays Merman, with Susannah Fellows and Mark White as her supporting singers, Michael Roberts as director and Fiz Shapur as accompanist.

I might begin by saying that if this were a real nightclub act I'd have felt cheated, since what we see being rehearsed is structured so that Merman herself would have done comparatively little, many of her most signature songs being given to the younger performers.

That wouldn't matter for the purposes of this show, except that Angela Richards is the only one on stage with any real sense of Ethel Merman. When she's allowed to, she does a fine job of capturing both Merman's brassy nasal sound and the real excitement of her belting.

A pause for those who don't remember. Think 'No Business Like Show Business'. Think 'I Got Rhythm', 'You're the Top', 'Everything's Coming Up Roses', and even if you never actually heard her, you'll hear her sound in your head.

Merman was one of the reigning stars of Broadway from the 1930s through the 1960s, and while she could undoubtedly sing quietly, once it was discovered that she could bounce her voice off the back wall without straining, that was the only kind of song that Cole Porter, George Gershwin or Irving Berlin ever wrote for her.

(And, to be fair, the particular kind of breathing and projection that Merman epitomised - the belting of a song - became sadly obsolete with the introduction and ubiquity of body microphones, so that contemporary singers don't have to learn how to do it. Indeed, were the young Merman to appear today, she'd have to be taught to tone it all down and let the sound engineer do all the work.)

So, while it is a delight to hear Angela Richards belt out 'A Lady With a Song', 'The Hostess With the Mostest' and 'Coming Up Roses' - and not the least of the evening's pleasures is that in the small King's Head there's no need for amplification and we can listen to real human voices -   it is just frustrating that it is the others who sing 'You Can't Get a Man With a Gun' and 'Some People' and that what should be Merman's solos, like 'I Got Rhythm' and 'Anything Goes', are too often turned into duets or trios.

As pleasant to listen to as the others are - and it may even be that Fellows and White are too good as singers to be able to submerge their melodic quality into Merman's brassiness - too much of the show is made up of simply generic renditions of some classic Broadway songs.

And I'm afraid that's not what we came for. The Merman fan looking to recapture memories of the original will find just too little in this show that lets that happen.

Gerald Berkowitz

Return to TheatreguideLondon home page.

Review - Call Me Merman - King's Head 2003