Review: Pink Mancini at Downstairs at the Maj
Pink Mancini at Downstairs at the Maj
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Henry Mancini composed some classic music; you could almost say he provided the comic soundtrack for the 1960s. Apart from Moon River, little could be called sublime, but it certainly echoes through your memory and is likely to put a spring in even the most ardent cynic’s step.
Moon River sits in many people’s top song lists, often at number one. In collaboration with many of the great Tin-Pan Alley lyricists—Johnny Mercer, Hal David and Jay Livingston—Mancini co-wrote many other classics: Baby Elephant Walk, Pink Panther, Charade and Peter Gun. We’ve all seen the Blake Edwards movies and probably remember them more for the music than the plots. Such is Mancini, a journeyman maestro who rose above his Hollywood milieu to become a musical legend.
For Fringe World, Perth divas Libby Hammer and Ali Bodycoat, along with divo Rob Pring, fronted a fine five-piece jazz band on a lively hour’s romp through Mancini’s greatest hits. Dressed all in pink, down to their cotton socks (Pring’s mankini included), the singers shivvied their way through some fourteen wonderful songs.
The band, yet another permutation of Perth’s excellent jazz fraternity, were led by Ricki Malet (trumpet) and included Chris Foster (keys), Nick Abbey (electric bass), Mathew Fagan (guitar) and Pete Evans (drums). In black tuxedos and big pink butterfly bow-ties, they masterfully underplayed the singers in a tightly-charted show. Apart from Malet’s many horn solos, they focused on the whole rather than the individual parts.
To give the show an added twist, woven through it was a high-camp whodunnit. Aided and abetted by giant storyboards—Bang! Bang!, Blood Curdling Scream, It’s him! No, it’s her!—and a music box, they acted out the melodrama. They each accused each other of murdering ‘the shady dame of Seville’ (a Mancini title), before finally settling on… but that would spoil the story.
The show grew out of the popular Hammer-Bodycoat-Pring 2015 performance, Bringing Back Bacharach. The audience response to that was so strong that they had to do another one, but it took Hammer, the show’s writer, some time before settling on Mancini. Whereas the Bacharach story grew naturally from the lyrics, with heartbreak the obvious theme, Mancini posed some problems.
He had the right jazz/cheese mix for their tone, but too many of his tunes were instrumental. Realising that his scores tended to be for tongue-in-cheek crime capers, Hammer recast these limitations as a challenge and hit on the idea of a cloak-and-pistol whodunnit. Unleashing her inner lyricist, she adapted two of Mancini’s most famous instrumentals, Shot in the Dark and Something for Cat, to accommodate the story, and the rest rolled out. The music box came from the lyric for Charade, the cat, which featured in various lyrics and titles, became a common thread, and so on.
As well as singing, in the early 1990s, Hammer studied arranging at the Academy of Performing Arts. Her arrangements for this show enhanced the humour. The outrageously comic harmonies on the chorus of the opening song, Sweetheart Tree, set the tone—the audience was at once on side. For the rest, she magpied parts from different versions of each song. As she says, “Ray Conniff’s vocals with Bobby Darin’s horn line and key change—whatever’s the funniest.” For Pink Panther, she had to work in the D minor key of the music box—she’s a musician, not an engineer, and couldn’t change that.
The result is a total hoot, enhanced by Hammer’s lexicon of elastic looks—mock horror, arch indignation and suspicion. She’d make a fine comic actress.
Each singer took the lead on different songs—Bodycoat on It Had Better Be Tonight, Pring on Baby Elephant Walk, Hammer on Send A Little Love My Way—but in the main, they sang in rotation, a verse each. The highlight of their ensemble singing was the vocal pyrotechnics on Le Jazz Hot.
Bodycoat and Hammer first crossed paths at the Perth Jazz Society in the mid-1990s and have been gracing Perth’s stages, apart and together, ever since. Together, they have done many tribute concerts and Christmas shows, as well as regular jazz gigs and their Pride performance Over the Rainbow.
Rob Pring has a more prosaic background. A retired plumber, Hammer first met him through The Mistletones, a group of Christmas carolers with which they both sang. He also does panto, sings with the Metro Big Band and is currently singing with Comfortably Numb—The Music of Pink Floyd. Hammer and Bodycoat invited him to join their long-standing trio when their original male singer, Tim Minchin, was no longer available.
Given its long history as a jazz venue, not to mention its big sister upstairs, Perth’s premiere theatre, Downstairs at the Maj, was the perfect home for this musical-theatre show. In its manifestation as Greenwich, the city’s first, short-lived specialist jazz dive, it was one of the venues where Hammer and Bodycoat burst onto the scene. It was fitting that they should return to their old haunt now for their latest show.
It was fitting too that, once the murderer was exposed, they ended with a mildly camped-up version of Moon River. Not as sublime as the Breakfast at Tiffany’s original, it nonetheless brought the audience back to earth and reminded them of the deeper elements in Mancini’s music.
Although not quite sold out, the houses for Pink Mancini came close. Best of all, everyone went home wearing a big, cheesy grin and skipping a little. What more could you ask for from a short, sharp fifty-minute show? There’s bound to be a remount; so keep an eye out.
IAN LILBURNE
Photos by Alan Holbrook
