Do we really need Rob Brydon: the Jukebox Musical? Actually, yes
Rob Brydon: A Night of Songs & Laughter London Palladium, W1
★★★★★
The guaranteed cringe-moment when I used to watch impressionist Mike Yarwood as a child was always his “And this is me” finale shift into song, when he’d stop doing, say, James Callaghan, and try his hand at being a British Sacha Distel.
Touring with a soirée stuffed with songs, and backed by an eight-piece band, Welsh funnyman Rob Brydon risks cringe-overload, even among admirers. Comparisons with Yarwood might seem strained – of course, Brydon isn’t known outright as an impressionist, but his skills in that regard are considerable; and much of the appeal of the hit TV series The Trip lay in his and Steve Coogan’s casual jousts in the art of mimickry. We know he can deliver the goods vocally in more chest-heaving ways: he topped the charts with Ruth Jones and Tom Jones singing Islands in the Stream, deploying the Gavin & Stacey persona of Uncle Bryn. That was “just a bit of fun” – to cite the catchphrase of his breakthrough character, divorced cabbie Keith Barret – and typically “meta” of a comic who plays with ideas of who he is. Do we have the stomach, though, for something akin to Rob Brydon: The Jukebox Musical, in which he mixes jest and earnest, a trip down memory lane with his own hit parade?
In the event (and to my surprise), yes. Treading the Palladium boards which once helped spring Yarwood to fame, Brydon is sharp-suited, quick-witted and judiciously self-effacing, aware of the potentially uneven nature of the night.
“I’m under no illusion I am Michael Ball,” he croons by way of daffy introduction. “These songs are dear to me/ part of my history.” It takes a brave man to plunge swiftly thereafter into a rendition of Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat from Guys and Dolls, but Brydon, 56, does so and, emanating chutzpah, over-rides the incongruity of it.
You have to shift gear with him, according to his choices, which move through his decades, but don’t accord with a neat chronology. One moment, he’s singing Tom Waits’s Broken Bicycles, reflecting on a long-ago student romance and lost love. The next, he’s doing a section of Under Milk Wood having impersonated Richard Burton (sliding, knowingly, for laughs, into Kenneth Williams) and then Anthony Hopkins. He ends his accompanied account of Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices” thus: “I’m going into the darkness of the darkness forever; I have forgotten that I was ever born.”
Would other comic entertainers push things so abruptly in so melancholy a direction? Brydon almost makes a song and dance about how relatively aged his audience is, that Welsh warmth of his enabling a very barbed tongue (“What is it about me that attracts the old and infirm ... is it a show or a healing?”). But that demographic may be a secret advantage – however much he exaggeratedly recoils at the crowd’s perceived dowdiness, its acceptance of old-school “variety” and midlife awareness that humour can sit cheek by jowl with heartbreak enables his cruise-ship mix of sarkiness and sentimentality.
Whether channelling a Tom Jones-like sonic boom with Delilah, inhabiting older Elvis or summoning Neil Diamond, it’s teasingly debatable whether these songs fully connect us to the “real” Rob Brydon. But they do let us plug into our own emotions amid copious convulsions of laughter – no small feat.
Touring until July 2022. Details: robbrydon.live