LondonTheatre1

London Theatre: Tickets | Reviews | News | West End | UK Touring Productions

View All Shows Booking Now
  • Home
  • Top Selling Shows
    • Musicals
    • Plays
      • A Christmas Carol
      • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
      • The Mousetrap
      • The Woman in Black
      • Witness for the Prosecution
    • & Juliet
    • Back To The Future
    • Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club
    • Dirty Dancing
    • Frozen The Musical
    • Heathers
    • Jersey Boys
    • Les Misérables
    • Mamma Mia
    • Matilda the Musical
    • Moulin Rouge
    • Only Fools and Horses
    • Pretty Woman the Musical
    • The Book of Mormon
    • The Lion King
    • The Phantom of the Opera
    • Tina the Musical
    • Wicked
    • London Theatres
      • Seating Plans
      • Adelphi Theatre
      • Ambassadors Theatre
      • Apollo Theatre
      • Apollo Victoria Theatre
      • Duke of York’s Theatre
      • Fortune Theatre
      • Gillian Lynne Theatre
      • Harold Pinter Theatre
      • Lyceum Theatre
      • New Wimbledon Theatre
      • New Wimbledon Theatre Studio
      • Phoenix Theatre
      • Piccadilly Theatre
      • Richmond Theatre
      • Savoy Theatre
      • Trafalgar Theatre
  • News
    • Interviews
  • Reviews
  • UK Shows
    • Alexandra Theatre
    • Aylesbury Waterside Theatre
    • Brighton Theatre Royal
    • Bristol Hippodrome
      • Bristol Theatre Seating Plan
    • Edinburgh Playhouse
    • Glasgow Theatre Royal
    • Grand Opera House York
    • King’s Theatre Glasgow
    • Kit Kat Club London
    • Leas Cliff Hall
    • Liverpool Empire
    • Manchester Opera House
    • Manchester Palace Theatre
    • Milton Keynes Theatre
    • New Theatre Oxford
    • New Victoria Theatre Woking
    • New Wimbledon Theatre
    • New Wimbledon Theatre Studio
    • Princess Theatre Torquay
    • Regent Theatre Stoke
    • Rhoda McGaw Theatre
    • Richmond Theatre
    • Stockton Globe
    • Sunderland Empire
    • Swansea Arena
    • Victoria Hall Hanley Stoke
  • Newsletter
  • West End Theatres
Home » Reviews » Barb Jungr sings Dylan and Cohen at the Crazy Coqs | Review

Barb Jungr sings Dylan and Cohen at the Crazy Coqs | Review

June 19, 2021 Last updated: June 19, 2021 1:40 pm By Alan Franks

The pairing of work by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen in a single recital is a logical move. Though the latter died five years ago, his and his old friend’s songs go on and on. (Some of them for ten minutes and more.) It can take a bold talent to pick up some of these sublime, enigmatic things and deliver them as cabaret items.

Barb Jungr sings Dylan and Cohen at the Crazy Coqs
Barb Jungr sings Dylan and Cohen at the Crazy Coqs

Barb Jungr does just that and the result is absorbing. Tempting to say her performance is a triumph of manner over matter since her sheer theatricality is in contrast to the stanza-upon-stanza progress of some of the songs’ narratives. But that would be to ignore her making of such common cause, such intimacy with the lyrics’, and the tunes’ emotional hearts.

Sometimes, as when she is introducing the 1976 song “Isis,” allegedly about Dylan’s ex-wife Sara and their marriage, she admits to being flummoxed by it. She is in good company – us, and, perhaps, also, the author. It was after all written in the wreckage of a passionate relationship, when resources of logic and ordered words were perhaps at a low ebb. No matter; what’s evolving here, and throughout the programme of eight songs, is a knowing, even larky partnership between a skilled trouper from Rochdale (yes, where Gracie Fields also came from) and material descended from deep in the last century’s American, hence also British, folk tradition.

“It will be a challenging evening,” warns Jungr at the start. “For all of us,” Not to mention for her accompanying pianist Jenny Carr, who sensitively shares the responsibility for re-presenting these transatlantic works with the dramatic confiding of a European chanson. Worth noting here that Jungr’s immigrant parents were a Czech scientist and a German nurse.

“We’re drilling down to the bottom of things,” she goes on, explaining that the songs are “an exploration of love by two men who have experienced every type of feeling.” They – the two men in question – are as good as her word as she kicks off with Dylan’s sardonic “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word,” and then, as if to remind us that it’s all a bit more complex than that, Cohen’s amorous elegy “So Long Marianne.”

“What Happens to the Heart” (Cohen) is one of the highlights, as Jungr makes the words of the title shuttle between statement and question. While introducing the numbers, as you would a friend, she speaks of their place in her life as though they are not just companions but also fellow confessors. None more so than the evening’s title track “Forgetful Heart,” one of those songs in which Dylan is having nothing to do with complex imagery and, in disarming himself, does likewise to the listener. “I lay awake and listen to the sound of pain. The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there was a door.”

The other day, when Dylan turned eighty, there was (yet another) explosion of love for his enormous and forever-sung back catalogue. Back in the Sixties, when God and Bob were young, and Len’s voice was starting to plumb the
depths of passion’s canyons, a rallying mantra of, among others, students and feminists, was that the personal is political. Like the songs, it could be taken in a number of ways, and duly was.

Strange to see such an essentially live performance as this on Zoom. Like technically inferior if more personalised TV. Tantalising, better than nothing, likely shades of the new normal. What this evening of hard-lived classics, and their forever-Jungr singer, restate all these decades on is that the private is international. Or something like that.

5 Star Rating

Review by Alan Frank

Working with her longstanding collaborator Jenny Carr, Barb includes ‘Forgetful Heart’, ‘What Happens To The Heart’,
‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’, ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You’, ‘So Long Marianne’, ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’
and ‘Dance Me To The End of Love’ among more treasures.

Forgetful Heart: Dylan and Cohen and Love
Friday 18 June, 2021 at 7pm live from The Crazy Coqs

SOCIAL MEDIA
Twitter @barbjungr
Facebook OfficialBarbJungr
Instagram Barb Jungr
www.barbjungr.co.uk

Comments

  1. Avatar for Lorna DallasLorna Dallas says

    June 20, 2021 at 12:11 pm

    A totally absorbing evening by an artist who is totally committed to this material…and she more than draws us into her world. A great combination of two writers with the right singer to perform them! Brava, Barb!

Search for Tickets
A Streetcar Named Desire

Hang by Debbie Tucker Green at Tower Theatre

Spoiler Alert for this review! Members of the audience are given a visitor’s pass along with an information leaflet. The latter, to the best of my … [Read More...]

Review of One Minute at the King’s Head Theatre

Simon Stephens’ enigmatic play is about the disappearance of a little girl and its impact on those whose job is to find her, or who want to help or … [Read More...]

Charlotte and Theodore at Richmond Theatre

In this serious yet very amusing play, we meet Charlotte (Eve Ponsonby) and Theodore (Kris Marshall). Two dreamers - colleagues, lovers and husband … [Read More...]

Black Superhero at The Royal Court Theatre

A heady mix of Gayness; Blackness; and Superhero. Ness. And as in all good threesomes, there is inevitably a dominant strand. Here, regrettably, it's … [Read More...]

The Effect By Lucy Prebble at Bridewell Theatre

What is it that excites you about going to the theatre? For me, it can be different things. A certain play, an actor I admire, or a company I know is … [Read More...]

Copyright www.LondonTheatre1.com
By using our website you’re confirming that you’re happy to accept our use of cookies.
Privacy Policy & Cookies - Advertising - About Us - Newsletter - Contact Us