View from the Green Room: Superb Simon & Garfunkel Tribute concert at the Theatre Royal
Standing ovation for Dan Haynes, Pete Richards, Suzanne Steeman (violin) and Elizabeth Sterns (cello) with their Simon & Garfunkle tribute.
It’s a full house of crinklies (myself incl.) for the Simon & Garfunkel tribute act. Most of tonight’s audience has lived the sixties experience of the folk duo that took the world 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.
My side-seat companions, Eleanor Merryweather and her sister Carol Jones, now living in England, are great company and know all the lyrics. The sisters once lived in Dunhill, and they’re dead proud of their Dad Seán Norris, who was once Irish Weightlifting Champion – now acknowledged with a blue plaque in Mary Street, Dungarvan.
Dan Haynes and Pete Richards are Bookends— the tribute group who clearly love Simon’s songs –, and their singing and phrasing are just spot-on. Richards captures the magic of the truculent Garfunkel’s alto and the songs flow along in those tight harmonies that the duo were famous for. The duo’s acoustic is a sixties treasure throughout, and tonight’s concert brings 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. When the vibrancy of the Leos Strings Duo of Elisheba Stevens (violin) and Suzannah Sturman (cello) hit the later sixties work, the entire show moves on to a different level.
Dan and Pete give us the warts n’ all story of the duo that quarrelled from the off – even in elementary school in Queens, New York where they first began singing together. However, some rear screen projections of record sleeves along with footage of the group would have added to their well-scripted bio-history of the duo.
With the growing interest in folk music in the early sixties, Simon and Garfunkel reformed in 1963 without any great success. While Simon was touring folk-clubs in England and without his knowledge, Columbia released a new version of "The Sound of Silence", overdubbed with electric guitar and drums that rocketed to No. 1 in the US charts and the duo were now a huge hit on the folk-rock scene.
Tonight’s beautifully lit concert is a gem and focuses entirely on the acoustic. 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 soundwaves 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 sixties housewife 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 Waters” album. Despite the fact that the duo sold some 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 Waters happened, rows over Art Garfunkel’s unavailability for recording – due to his film role as Lieutenant Nately in Catch 22 that overran its schedule– determined that their end date as a duo had already passed, and the hugely-popular album itself is no more than a potpourri of the ordinary. Nevertheless and despite my reservations, it was one of the best-selling albums of all time and up-tempo numbers like ‘Baby Driver, Cecelia, the Boxer, El Condor Pasa’ hit the mark with tonight’s audience, although I always felt that the title song is as boring as a long wet winter.
Dan Haynes and Pete Richards are the whole package. Their passion for Simon Garfunkel’s songbook is infectious, and they are delighted with tonight’s singalong audience –some of whom harmonise with the duo. These concerts sell out all over the UK. The performance is tight, professional, slick, and the standing ovation from all three floors is richly deserved.
A good night on the Mall and well worth the ticket.
