Kissing someone’s ass at the Proms….

It’s not usual at the Proms, of course, to hear lyrics like this: “Smile a rented smile/Fill someone’s glass/Kiss someone’s wife/Kiss someone’s ass/We do whatever pays the wages.” But then it’s not just those lyrics, from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s title song to Sunset Boulevard, that will have had Radio 3 audiences choking on their sherry (or tea or lager – let’s not categorise them too narrowly), but the fact that they were being sung by Michael Ball as part of Prom 58, the first-ever to be devoted entirely to a musical theatre performer to strut his stuff.

Of course, this is far from the only time that the musical theatre repertoire has been represented; a few years ago, an entire prom was devoted to a concert performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town, with a cast that included Broadway’s incandescent Audra McDonald, a performer who was subsequently a soloist for the last night of the Proms, too, so the classical credentials of good musical theatre talent have long been established.

But the Proms are usually about the art rather than the artists: we’ve not had solo showcases (yet) for Bryn Terfel or Renee Fleming, for instance, though both have of course appeared in Proms. But there the music came first, then their casting. Last night’s Prom seems to have begun the other way around, with Ball then left to choose his own repertoire as he saw fit.

And yes, he did break down barriers in the process, proving that he could more than hold his own, for instance, in the classical repertoire when he sang a Bizet duet with Alfie Boe (whom he recently co-starred with in the ENO’s ill-fated Kismet). But this was also, I’m sure, the first time that Frank Wildhorn and John Miles have been heard in the Proms, too, with their indescribably cheesy ‘This is the Moment’ (from Jekyll and Hyde) and ‘Music’ respectively, that threatened to turn the night into a Tom Jones Vegas concert.

Michael made several references to the criticisms that had been made of his appearance here, and in introducing a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (which he performed in two years ago with New York City Opera), he referred to his character’s song as poking fun at the pretentiousness of people who think that high art is the only art.

That got a round of applause, and it’s certainly to be welcomed that the Proms are expanding their audience and repertoire, with music here also from Queen and Carly Simon. And if this may well have been the first time that many in the audience had attended a Prom, it was my first for this year, too – I had booked also to go to the Cleo Laine concert celebrating her 80th birthday, but it clashed with the opening night for Grease, so I didn’t get there in the end.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the Proms would have served Ball better if they’d suggested a musical framework for the evening to give it context beyond his own big personality (and bigger hair); and it finally came to me when he did a sing-off medley between a Lloyd Webber and Sondheim love song (‘All I Ask of You’ from Phantom and ‘Loving You’ from Passion, respectively), which he prefaced by saying that he didn’t think one could choose between them. While Lloyd Webber was elsewhere well represented, too, with songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, the previously mentioned Sunset Boulevard, and Aspects of Love (Ball did his signature song from that show, ‘Love Changes Everything’, as an encore), and Sondheim came back with his lyrics to West Side Story’s ‘Something’s Coming’ (wrongly attributed in the programme running order to Arthur Laurents), it might have been a more musically cohesive evening, and a better tribute to the genre itself, to have spent the entire evening showcasing the work of these two titans of contemporary musical theatre.

Michael would have been the man to do it; he is now, unquestionably, the West End’s leading leading man – or soon-to-be woman (when he stars in Hairspray; as these pictures show, he looks something like a cross between Kim Criswell and Bette Midler). As it is, he merely confirmed last night what we already know: that both he and musical theatre are worth taking seriously.