Review - Vary My Days @ Kennington Village Hall

It’s a new song cycle, devised by Tom Bayliss, a final year Music Theatre student at London’s Arts Ed, along with second year colleague Lewis Cochrane, who brought together a small backing band and a cast of five singers from their college peer group.

It premiered at Kennington Village Hall, and will surely prove to be a springboard to stardom for this talented company.

Vary my days is a line from the song Being Alive from the Sondheim show Company. There’s life aplenty, for sure, but the theme is love, illustrat-ing beautifully and hauntingly the universality of the great love songs in musicals, classic and modern.

In concept, it’s close to Jason Robert Brown’s masterpiece, Songs for a New World, and it’s apt that VMD opens with that title song. And then come the classics, some popular favourites, others less well known, and all plucked out of context and offered here as songs of love, often unrequited love. Why, god, why? from Miss Saigon becomes the cry from any man who’s unsure that he wants emotional turmoil. And while I dreamed a dream has become famously detached from its Les Misérables roots, surely never with such heartfelt pain as Francesca Lara Gordon’s rendering.

Who would have imagined that Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera would work as a lullaby to a baby, yet here’s velvet-voiced Omari Douglas crooning into a cradle with utter tenderness.

There are big, powerful ballads from the big and powerful voices of Benedikt de la Bedoyere and Edd Campbell Baird, with Edd winding up with the dramatic Goodbye from Catch Me If You Can.

Perhaps the only number not strictly a love song is Edd’s Bui Doi from Miss Saigon.

Everyone in the packed audience had their favourites but in Gordon and Katie Pearson’s duet, I heard the best ever version of the Chess classic I know him so well.

These young people are West Enders in the wings and ready to fly.

Eileen Jones