Cycle Route Through Soho

It's been quite a week of opening nights with many of my friends and review colleagues at different shows at practically every night of the week. For my sins, I only really had one show, which I attended in an official capacity and that was A Song Cycle For Soho, downstairs at the Soho Theatre on Thursday.

As many, many of my colleagues in the office will tell you I was not looking forward to this event. Revue shows are a hit-and-miss affair and revue shows of new work such as this have to be particularly special to engage my enthusiasm. Add to this the extraordinary respect artists have occasioned Soho, which when you take a step back and look at objectively, is a particularly vile and increasingly touristy part of London. There is little to romanticise about stepping over a vomiting, drunk, euro-trash after all.

Thankfully the creator of this song cycle, Andrew Brinded wanted to avoid the cliche ridden praise of Soho's less reputable reputation favour of a more left of centre approach. There are a distinct lack of "tarts with hearts", no "runaways" and thankfully very few "cor blimey cockerney accents".

A Soho Song Cycle For Soho is very, very good as you should expect of a revue written by about 20 of the UK's leading musical theatre writers. Witty, poignant without turning schmaltzy and above all entertaining. I have never doubted that there are some very talented composers out there, what there are lacking are some good book writers and to my way of thinking, Brinded is the shining light of this venture an worth keeping an eye on for the future.

On a slightly different note, thanks to the inordinately bad press reception at the Soho, I ended up sitting behind a pillar practically in darkness. This meant that I was unable to check out the programme to see who wrote what as I went along. It turned out that the song I found the least successful in this show was written by none other than Stiles & Drewe - pedestrian, repetitive tosh, I had scrawled in my notes. Ooo-errr