The life and songs of Simon & Garfunkel

Theatre Vamps must surely be the most industrious theatre company on the island. Multiple productions of touring dramas play to small, but always packed out, venues with top-quality acting and concerts of iconic status. 

Fleetwood Mac, Leonard Cohen and tonight’s Simon & Garfunkel. The Vamps don’t simply consign themselves to the songs either but the father and son Flynn duo of Derek and Dean, bring the backstory of the quarrelsome duo to life.

It’s a full house of crinklies (myself incl.) for the Simon & Garfunkel tribute act. 

Most of tonight’s audience have lived the sixties experience of the folk-duo that took preppy college audiences by storm. In that decade, you were either folk or rock, with pop some distance in between. 

Tonight’s audience, like myself, were definitely in the folk camp.

It’s a begin at the beginning for Derek and Dean Flynn as they recall the pair meeting and performing together in high school with a minor hit record with ‘Hey Schoolgirl’, at the tender age of 16. 

Paul Simon took himself off to the vibrant folk scene of London and recorded the ‘Paul Simon Songbook’ while Art went to University in New York. When a Columbia Records producer got together a small session group and inserted that now famous electric guitar riff into the ‘Sound of Silence’, the newly-released record sold a million copies and the duo were up and running.

Tonight’s concert focuses entirely on the acoustic and I find myself wandering down sepia days of preppy concerts and tennis club days where the acoustics of Cohen, Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel wafted in gentle sound waves across the grass courts.

‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’…Bookends…’America’…’Sound of Silence’…’Scarborough Fair’, frames the first half. ‘Mrs. Robinson’ towers over all these gentle numbers with its marvellous elegy to surely the most bored woman in song. 

Mrs. Robinson is the show’s highlight; defining the emptiness of the woman who has everything to show but nothing to reveal.

The second half of the show is dominated by the ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ album. Despite the fact that the duo sold 100 million records and that their work was slick, professional and appealing, there was always the criticism that there was something missing and that not a whole lot happened in their music. 

By the time ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ happened, their sell-by date had already passed and the hugely-popular album itself is no more than a potpourri of the ordinary. Nevertheless, it was one of the best-selling albums of all time and up-tempo numbers like ‘Baby Driver’, ‘Cecelia’, ‘The Boxer’, hits the mark with tonight’s audience although I always felt that the title song is as boring as a long wet winter. 

Simon’s best work came when he went solo and adiosed the boy soprano.

The duo’s acoustic is a sixties-treasure throughout. Derek and Dean bring us right back to a world where authenticity and artistic integrity were prized and celebrated. The lyrical quality of the duo’s catalogue is perfect for folk. 

‘Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme’ and ‘Scarborough Fair’ is everything a folk song should be with the explosive consonants bursting from the front of the lips and the sibilants flowing through the work.

Tonight’s duo works the catalogue well but there’s probably a little too much attack and volume for this compact venue. 

Less is always more. Still, the ballads are well told and the musicality of the Simon & Garfunkel songbook and their backstory weaves a timeless magic over the audience that brings a standing ovation.

Another excellent night from Theatre Vamps.