Summoning Sondheim proves séances can be fun at Camden Fringe 2024 at the Museum of Comedy
“A spark to pierce the dark”
Grace O’Keefe and Jordana Belaiche have been doing the rounds for a good few months now with their show Summoning Sondheim, presented by The Queens of Cups. It’s close to the campest of cabarets you could imagine and most definitely for musical theatre fans only, given how niche it gets when it comes to celebrating its subject, the late, feted Stephen Joshua Sondheim.
The set-up is simple enough, the pair playing musical theatre students who want to summon the spirit of the composer in order to get the answer to how to compose a great musical. What follows is an interesting mix of ripping the piss out of the world of musical theatre and the people who obsess over it but also a clear-eyed look at how male-dominated it has long been.
Through a mix of parody songs and Sondheim originals, this is a world full of self-referential, inside jokes that would leave a newcomer high and dry (but would anyone book for a show of this name without knowing any Sondheim?) but if you know, you know, and there’s a lot to know here that is often laugh-out-loud funny and occasionally, really quite moving.
Audience participation works well, the arrival of the medium is really well done, and there’s an infectiousness to the enthusiasm of both O’Keefe and Belaiche that proves hard to resist.
