Aaron Tveit - London Palladium

Aaron Tveit did well to sell out the London Palladium – twice – to the best of my knowledge I hadn’t seen him perform in anything in person, though there were some people around me who had been brought along to his debut London concert who knew nothing about him at all. He had been in a production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins at the Menier Chocolate Factory at the tail end of 2014 going into 2015. I didn’t see it. The Menier seats 180 people and that production had sold out for months before it even started. If I recall Tveit from anything at all, it would be the motion picture adaptation of Les Misérables, in which he played Enjolras, though as he told the Palladium crowd, he initially sent in a ‘self-tape’ – speculatively, mind you – for Marius. Hence the inclusion of ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ in the city where Les Misérables has been playing for almost forty years.

As for this concert, it did not start well from my vantage point. Blinded by the stage lights, which shone so brightly I was forced to avert my gaze, I had actually wondered if I ought to get up and leave at that point. I had bagged an aisle seat, so it was perfectly feasible. I had rushed back down from a quick trip to Edinburgh to catch the last night of a world premiere musical, and yet I couldn’t see a damn thing. Great. Just great. But I stayed the course, and it paid off. Tveit knew what he was doing – I imagined there might be too much stuff from shows he had done on Broadway that hadn’t even made it over here. As it was, there weren’t too many of those in the first place, and the likes of Catch Me If You Can and Saved! were wisely glossed over altogether.

The crowd was an excitable one: thankfully, I didn’t have anyone whooping and hollering in my immediate vicinity. It was also a somewhat classy one too – they promptly stopped cheering as soon as Tveit resumed his pristine and rehearsed narrative. I’m not knocking his concert anecdote style – there’s nothing wrong with preparation and order. Tveit wasn’t one to check in with the audience every five minutes to ask if everyone’s enjoying themselves, which I think has become a bugbear for me over the years – if anything, it takes up so much time that it’s basically filler, especially when the performer pretends they ‘can’t hear’ the screams and shouts of the audience, forcing an even louder and more annoying yell. None of that here, which meant (for anyone who thinks I’m being curmudgeonly on this point) that with an interval and an encore, Tveit was done and dusted in two hours. And yet I didn’t feel shortchanged in the slightest.

I loved the merchandise list, which had one item: “Programme - £10”. No T-shirts with “AARON TVEIT” on them. No coffee mugs. No keyrings. That said, with such a rich and beautiful voice, he would do well to record another album – he has one, called The Radio In My Head, but it’s over a decade old now. There aren’t many people who can go from ‘Maria’ from West Side Story to ‘Dancing Through Life’ and ‘The Wizard and I’ from Wicked and make it all sound utterly sublime. Tveit’s support act, Ricky Rojas, gave the audience a couple of tunes from Moulin Rouge! The Musical. If I had to pick a favourite, I’d go for the medley from Next to Normal, which suited the small band as well as Tveit brilliantly.

Bryan Perri – Keys/Musical Director

Tom Clare – Drums

Tom Green – Guitar

Magda Pietraszewska – Cello

Hugh Richardson – Bass

Kamila Bydlowska – Violin