Stefan Bednarczyk has spent decades at the piano making other people’s evenings, and now, at 65, he is quite rightly making one of his own. Before I Forget… is a warm, wry, occasionally devastating tour through a life lived in cabaret rooms, rehearsal pianos and the wings of other people’s shows.
The premise is disarmingly simple: a man, a piano, a microphone, and the accumulated material of a career. Part autobiography, part songbook, the show threads original numbers through a magpie’s hoard of pastiche, tribute and the genuinely obscure. Bednarczyk wrote some of it; the rest he has gathered, like a man emptying out a much-loved coat pocket and finding things he had forgotten he kept. The framing device – looking back from the vantage point of sixty-five – gives the evening its title and its quiet emotional spine, and Bednarczyk is far too canny a performer to let either tip into sentiment.
What strikes you first, in a room as intimate as the Jermyn Street theatre, is that this is an actor’s cabaret as much as a musician’s. From the centre of the front row I had the disconcerting and rather wonderful sense of being sung at directly, eye contact held a beat longer than comfort allows, with a glint arriving half a second before the punchline.
The comic high points are gloriously, ruinously good. A Barry Manilow tribute begins with those crashing, unmistakable opening chords of Mandy and then swerves, with terrible purpose, into what may be the worst song ever committed to a cabaret stage – rhymes that buckle, a narrative that loses its own thread, and an audience helpless with laughter at the sheer commitment of the bit. Later comes a wicked pastiche of early Andrew Lloyd Webber, allegedly banned from the airwaves by nervous lawyers, which Bednarczyk delivers with the straight face of a man who knows exactly what he is doing. It is very funny, though I will admit a soft spot for the Kit and the Widow version, which has a touch more bite (you can find it here).
And then, the evening’s small masterpiece: What Would Have Happened If Stephen Sondheim Had Written Jesus Christ Superstar, an imagined Sondheim soliloquy from the cross, which is somehow both an act of love and an act of mischief. The Sondheim faithful in the room laughed first; the rest caught up a beat later, which is exactly as it should be.
Not every number lands as cleanly. The song selection occasionally drifts into territory that feels dutiful rather than essential – a couple of late-show choices simply don’t have the wattage of the material around them, and you find yourself politely waiting for the next gear change. None of this is Bednarczyk’s fault as a performer; he commits to everything with the same craftsman’s care. It is more that, across an evening built from so many sources, the curatorial eye occasionally blinks. A tighter set list, leaning harder on his own writing and the sharpest of the pastiches, would push this from very good into unmissable.
What holds it all together is the autobiography, lightly worn. Bednarczyk doesn’t dump his life story on you; he lets it leak out between numbers, in the way he introduces a song, in the names he drops without fanfare, in the small admissions about what a life in this peculiar corner of show business actually costs and pays. By the time he reaches the more reflective material in the back half of the show, you realise you have been quietly invested for a while without quite noticing when it happened. That is a particular kind of stagecraft, and you cannot fake it.
The Jermyn Street is the right room for this: small enough that nothing has to be projected, intimate enough that every flicker of intention reads. Bednarczyk doesn’t need much, and he is given exactly that – just the piano, the light, and his own considerable presence. Send me, immediately, a man who can do all four jobs (composer, lyricist, singer, actor) at this standard and I will show you a cabaret that earns its place.
Before I Forget… is, on the evidence of this run, very much one to remember. If you haven’t met Bednarczyk’s own writing before, his back catalogue is well worth a wander here.