Lili La Scala: Songs To Make You Smile
Live Review

Fans of nostalgic light comedy ditties will be in their element in Lili La Scala’s show. Cole Porter, Flanders and Swann, George Formby… they are all present, and lovingly presented.

She confesses that Gracie Fields is her heroine, and her own style recreates those clipped vowels and perfect enunciation you’d hear on the BBC Light Programme just after the war. Her evocation of the era extend to the vintage, voluminous tangerine ball gown that sets off her porcelain-doll looks and perfect, classic hair.

Many of the tunes she so simply yet skilfully performs might be familiar: Irving Berlin’s Cheek To Cheek, Flanders and Swann’s The Warthog, and probably Fields’s best-known song The Biggest Aspidistra In The World.

Yet La Scala is clearly an aficionado of this genre, and has painstakingly sought out more obscure numbers such as the marvellously titled Will You Love Me When I Am Mutton As You Do Now I Am Lamb and What Can You Give A Nudist For His Birthday? – a song she assures us has not been sung since Fields herself stopped singing it.

Some of the wit has clearly dated – that is, in fact the appeal of songs such as Adolf, once recorded by Arthur Askey, which describes Hitler’s despotic genocidal action with particularly English Thirties understatement as ‘sticking his fingers in the marmalade’. Yet Formby’s Fanlight Fanny and the marvellous Lydia the Tattooed Lady, which Groucho Marx made famous, certainly stand up today, even if not all the references do.

This heritage is in good hands with La Scala, who has a crystal clear mezzo-soprano, and adds an operatic or vibrato flourish to many of the lines. However, as a show, this is a little flat. This is simply one song after another sung statically behind a fixed microphone – which may be an historically appropriate presentation. but isn’t that interesting to watch. It suggests this elegant performer might be better off as one element in a wider burlesque or variety show rather than holding an hour on her own.

But the show clearly states its aims in its title: Songs To Make You Smile. And in that, mission accomplished.