Early on in the 1941 film Blues in the Night, there’s a moment of unforced wonder in which the titular blues song gets warbled in a St Louis jail by a wistful black prisoner. He’s in a crowded cell but he’s all alone, singing his broken heart out – and the (white) heroes, in a neighbouring cell, rise up, in awe: “That’s the real misery, ain’t it boys?” exclaims jazz pianist Jigger. “That’s the real lowdown New Orleans blues.”
It wasn’t the ‘real’ blues, actually; the song was written by those ‘Tin Pan Alley’ giants Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer – the composer and lyricist whose umpteen credits elsewhere include The Wizard of Oz (Arlen) and Moon River (Mercer). Yet it felt true, got hailed as one of the all-time great blues songs. It transfixed Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney – among the first people to whom it was played (“the greatest thing I’ve ever heard,” Rooney said) – and it will transfix you when you hear it at the Kiln theatre, where it provides the overall title to a compilation show first seen in the US in 1982.
There are a lot of things you can say against this oddly structured revue, some of them said at its premiere and echoed when the show cropped up in London five years later. Assigning simple labels to a quartet of lost souls – the Lady, the Woman, the Girl, the Man – and convening them in a late Thirties Chicago hotel, with a bar to drift into and threadbare rooms for the women to retreat to and croon in, hardly makes for deep dramatic cohesion.
