Carly Paoli and Friends - Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Talk about going into a show ‘blind’ – I had never heard of Carly Paoli. There was a part of me that thought I should go for David Phelps (of which more later) and then leave. The name Carly Paoli sounds a bit exotic and the marketing for the show proclaimed her to be an “acclaimed Anglo-Italian soprano”. She currently lives in Wiltshire and was born in Mansfield, and her birth name is Carly Alison Hopkinson. It was a surprise to me to discover after the show that she has a number of albums to her name (there was no merch stand at Theatre Royal Drury Lane – the ones for the resident musical there, Disney’s Hercules, were closed) and no mention of any of them. Perhaps she was as fed up as some other people are of people trying to push sales of things at their gigs. I suppose it was quite refreshing to not have anything in particular being heavily promoted.

I knew nothing either, about Albano Carrisi, known as Al Bano – at eighty-two years of age, he continues to enjoy great popularity in his native Italy. (Paoli is fluent in Italian, having Italian heritage on her mother’s side.) Carrisi has his own Wikipedia page, so I have no intention of regurgitating what’s already on there. Suffice to say he has maintained a strong singing voice into his eighties, even if I didn’t understand a word of it, as it was all in Italian. I was reminded of a book I was recently asked to review, about the life and times of a British opera singer. Most Brits in the opera, he wrote, are not actually conversant in the other languages in which they sing, which most of the time doesn’t matter, because most people attending the opera in Britain aren’t conversant in those languages either. Paoli’s audience, however, yours truly excepted, are a tad more sophisticated.

The show was billed From Hollywood to Broadway, though as a title it didn’t give much away as to what the intermediate stops were along this journey. Classically trained, Paoli liked to indulge in the sort of tune that showed off her soprano vocal – you know, the songs that end on a Really Big Note. But I mention her training because she remained refined and never overdid it, as musical theatre actors can be prone to doing at their own gigs. Paoli’s other guests were Charlie Stemp, with whom she managed to hold her own during a song-and-dance duet, and David Phelps, who she had recorded a song or two with, remotely, during the pandemic.

If Phelps isn’t known amongst London theatre audiences, it’s largely because he’s a singer not an actor, and has forged a career singing largely religious music for America’s Bible Belt. The only musical he’s ever done is a concert version of the Stephen Schwartz musical Children of Eden. Let’s just say I can’t see him doing Schwartz’s Godspell – ever. I knew about his powerhouse voice: I got the hairdryer treatment sat near the front when he brought his own concert to IndigO2 (an 1,800-seater concert space adjacent to The O2 Arena) and he impressed the Drury Lane audience here too.

I mean, it was a concert like no other: it’s not every day that I would go to something that combines opera with songs from The Greatest Showman and a finale that paid tribute to Judy Garland. The thing about crossover concerts is that there might well be some things you don’t like – but there are also likely to be some things you do.