Raising Hell at the Herald Theatre

Helen Medlyn sure can sell a song, but she also knows how to let beauty bloom.

Helen Medlyn and Penny Dodd's latest cull of classics and curiosities is their niftiest yet. Seven years after their first collaboration, Hell on Heels, their current tribute to hellraisers, from Purcell's Dido to Dorothy Parker's Little Old Lady in Lavender Silk, runs the full gamut of emotions.

To say the show has been expertly curated could make it sound merely worthy; but it is much more than that.

Unexpected connections are made at every turn, with astonishingly resourceful lighting from Vera Thomas.

After Medlyn has fired off Una voce poco fa, up close and wicked, Rossini's heroine becomes sister-in-song to Sondheim's Petra the Maid, as the mezzo swerves from whimsical to whiplash in The Miller's Son.

A sultry take on Poulenc's Hotel ("I don't want to work, I want to smoke," the singer laments, in languorous French) reveals a composer as happy to be in cabaret as in the concert hall.

Leonard Bernstein's party pieces, My Name is Barbara and I Hate Music, so often stymied by staid sopranos, get just the zing they need.

Somewhere, I swear it, Medlyn has a big carpet-bag chock-full of accents.

Stanley Holloway's tones in The Lion and Albert have been described as "Lancashire meets Yorkshire on a train to Essex" and Medlyn has it to the last pancake-flat vowel.

She is hilariously common when Sondheim's Mrs Lovett dreams about seaside retirement and all misanthropic twang when Annie's Miss Hannigan dishes out her hate paean to Little Girls.

Medlyn sure can sell a song, but she also knows how to let beauty bloom. On previous dates she won us over with Jerome Kern and Debussy, sung straight; this time around the standouts are a moving In-Between (Judy Garland at her most up-close and sentimental) and a triumphant trip to the enchanted land of Gordon Jenkins' This is all I ask.

The sheer skill of this singer, dispatching 26 songs in 75 minutes, is staggering. So too is Penny Dodd's piano, giving velvet caresses where called for, while effortlessly spiking the livelier numbers with just the right stride and swing.

With only five performances to go, this is not to be missed. Medlyn, Dodd and hell are an enticing combination.

Review

*What: Raising Hell
*Where: Herald Theatre