Pizzas and cabaret stop mixing

Pizza on the Park has, like the Pizza Express menu it serves, long donated a sum of money from each Veneziana pizza sold to the sinking fund (in every sense) for Venice, but perhaps it´s time to invent a pizza to help prop up the sinking world of London cabaret, where this venue on the south side of Hyde Park has long kept the flame of cabaret alive in London all on its own.

But now, as reported in The Stage this week, Pizza on the Park, too, has changed hands and is now in the hands of Pizza Express itself, not Peter Boizot who for so many years has presided over it even after he disposed of the rest of the original chain that he founded.

And in one of those typically cavalier acts for which global (or at least national) companies are famous for, it has immediately overruled the local traditions that have long sustained a particular venue, and closed it “for refurbishment” with immediate effect, letting down some 40 artists who had already been booked to appear there, including Fascinating Aida´s Adele Anderson (with her solo cabaret show) and New Yorkers KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler, in the next couple of weeks.

Whether or not it returns to hosting cabaret in the future is something we will have to wait and see. It would be both a great pity and a great relief if it abandoned cabaret; that seemingly paradoxical statement is because I have an inexorably love-hate relationship with this venue.

On the one hand, it was here that I first discovered the joys of cabaret in the mid to late 80s, when a succession of headline acts, from Maureen McGovern to Margaret Whiting, Julie Wilson, Andrea Marcovicci, Mary Cleere Haran, Annie Ross and the late Marion Montgomery and Hildegarde (who has also recently died) brought the best of New York cabaret to London. Here, too, I first saw someone whom I´m regard as a contemporary cabaret goddess, Ann Hampton Callaway, and she has regularly appeared here in the years since; but her relationship with the venue also reveals the many pitfalls of its management. Even as her star rose Stateside, Pizza on the Park was always so abysmal at publicising its riches that I once saw her play here to just 12 people. She has never returned since.

Yet also in its heydey, I saw Billy Stritch (a New York pianist-singer) who was then dating Liza Minnelli, and Liza was sat, chain-smoking throughout, at the next table to me. Stritch invited her onto the stage, and she dueted with him for a couple of numbers. I also saw Minnelli´s sister Lorna Luft appear here, and in one of the most singularly memorable cabaret experiences of my life there, they had neglected to tell her that, though there are two performances a night, the same audience stays for both, unlike in New York where each show is played to different audiences. So, as she launched into her second set, she began with the identical number that had opened her first show; then she went into the patter, that was the same again. We all sat and listened in respectful and mounting horror as she gave the same show twice over.

Pizza on the Park has also been important in promoting local artists, such as Barb Jungr who was the last artist I saw to appear there under the old regime last month. The expat Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, who now makes his home in New York, also regularly played here and I once heard him describe it as one of the best cabaret rooms he knew anywhere in the world. Yet he also lamented, as I constantly did, the behaviour of the audience there, too — and even wrote a song about it.

The trouble is that for many of the audience, the cabaret was — they seemed to think — a background accompaniment to their conversations. The venue never made any attempt to correct this misapprehension, and indeed I remember hushing talking waiters as frequently as patrons. The waiters, too, would make a habit of noisily clearing cutlery throughout the show.

Yet for all of these problems, I shall miss it if it´s gone. I shall even miss venue host and fixture, Simon Becker, who played more or less the identical repertoire as a warm up act in all the nearly 20 years I have been going there.