KIT AND THE WIDOW

Mercury Colchester

16.01.09

What a tonic for our recessionary times.

Those corporate cabaret kings, jesters to the gentry, brought their 100 Not Out show to the Mercury.

Apart from a lone engineering student, foolish enough to sit in the middle of the front row, we were a mature crowd, helpless with laughter at those close-to-home targets – White Van Man, Delia and Nigella, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Mandelson, the politically incorrect Romany Caprice [The Gypsy in Me], and, in an outrageous encore, the Picker-Up. This last enjoyed, apparently, by the Duchess of Cornwall.

Kit's brilliant way with words was put to more serious use in the touching song he wrote for his daughter, which I remember from their gig at Chelmsford Cathedral a few years ago, and in a number new to me, Cabaret.

But the moments which will stick longest in the memory are Marcia from Matching Green turning over for the Widow in Der Erlkönig, the Flight of the Bumblebee performed by the Widow with a bag over his head and Kit, on the fiddle, with a net curtain over his head like a real apiarist, and of course their signature dish, the Punjabi Puccini Chicken Korma Nessun Dorma, with the Mercury masses singing happily along.