THE BARN PRESENTS: THE MUSIC OF DOMINIC POWELL****

 

By Imogen

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQjlp2Zlbc&t=42s

Available until: Indefinitely

The Barn Presents… concerts don’t always have great music. Each concert is all about a composer no one has ever heard of but they have some big West End stars to sing them. So if you’re missing the West End stars the concerts are great to watch.

This week’s composer was Dominic Powell and I was like who? But he’s really good. His songs are so catchy and emotional and if his new musical Cases ever opens I will insist on being taken to see it. Dominic can even sing, he sang one of his songs and it wasn’t easy at all, it was very wordy and I could imagine an inferior singer totally tripping over his words which is always hilarious but Dominic knew what he was doing.

The singers in this concert included West End Royalty! Literally. Maiya Quansah-Breed played Catherine Parr in Six and Courtney Stapleton covered and played every single Queen and is now covering the two main female roles in Dear Evan Hansen. Waylon Jacobs was a standby Aaron Burr in Hamilton and cover Simba in The Lion King and covered three roles in Memphis. I’d obviously heard of most of the others too because I know the West End. So this concert was an hour of my time well spent.

Maiya is just so lovely. I would like to sing with her one day, maybe in Six. I’m definitely a Katherine Howard except I’ve had more boyfriends than she has. Maiya sang her song Heightened very beautifully and very emotionally, she so needs to sing the 3 Es who are obviously Eliza, Elphaba and Eponine.

Courtney was brilliant too, she has a big range and can sing anything but Crazy showcased the lower part of her range which is very rich and still very feminine. She could sing the 3 Es too, if you can sing all the Six queens you can basically sing anything, the songs all have such a different style and character.

Waylon is another one with a versatile voice which is one of the reasons I like him, he is also very hot. He sang Hoi Polloi really softly and gently and like sincerely. And although the others aren’t such big stars they did a really good job too. Katie Ramshaw who sang Shining Star needs to support her top notes a bit more to give them more resonance, she was so right not to belt them but she does have the ability to float the high notes and even when they were held back a bit they still sounded very beautiful, she’s definitely someone who could end up singing all the roles I want. I also liked the love duet Lie With You which was sung by Bradley Judge and Emily Chesterton, it worked surprisingly well for a love duet on Zoom and I could see they’d tried really hard to create a romantic connection. I liked the whole concert but I can’t mention everybody because no one has time to read a long review.