Some impersonators manage a passable Elton and leave it there. Jess Robinson conjures a whole roomful of women singing his songbook instead, and the result is one of the most purely enjoyable hours you can spend in the theatre.
The premise of this comedy-cabaret is disarmingly simple. Robinson takes the Elton John catalogue and hands each number to a different iconic woman, singing it in her voice, not a nudge-and-wink impression but a full inhabitation, phrasing and personality and all. Elton, she tells us, is channelled by a squabbling committee of divas who live rent-free in her head, each convinced the next song is hers and more than ready for her close-up.
The early stretch keeps to the classics. Amy Winehouse takes Tiny Dancer and sings it small and slurred and a beat behind the band, and the cleverest thing Robinson does all night is refuse to send her up. Kate Bush gets hold of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and lets it slither, mid-phrase, into Running Up That Hill, a piece of arranging wit that earns applause. Billie Eilish breathes Candle in the Wind almost to nothing, so close to the mic that the room leans in with her. A Judy Garland trembles, a Katherine Jenkins soars, a Britney chews through the hits with glorious indifference, and sad songs, it turns out, say plenty once the right woman has them.
The second half hauls the room into the present with a needling Lily Allen and a startling Raye, before a Barbra Streisand finale lands the evening. An operatic sing-off earlier on, two sopranos brawling for the same aria out of a single throat, is the sort of gag only a genuine musician could pull off. The showpiece arrives near the close, when Robinson scoops up audience suggestions and stitches them, live and without a net, into Don’t Go Breaking My Heart across some twenty voices. The room, thick with regulars who plainly know the drill, whoops like it has never seen a trick before, and the whooping is earned, because there is nowhere to hide in that number and she carries it off brilliantly.
Where it misses is in its reticence. Robinson comments in passing at her own history, a grandmother, a memoir, a marriage she files under practice, then hurries past quickly. We leave wishing she trusted us with more. Also, less happily, the backing is pre-recorded, and a voice this alive keeps seeming to reach for a live band that never answers; you can feel how much further the room might travel with players who could push back at her.
This is a superbly equipped performer doing the thing she does better than almost anyone alive, with warmth to spare and not a bar wasted. The divas may squabble in her head, but on the night they sing in perfect, generous order. The sun does not go down on this one until Robinson is good and ready, and when the lights come up she is, unmistakably, still standing.
