Katherine Jenkins must be getting her sea legs. She was singing on board P&O Cruises’ Oriana this week for the second time in a month.
What a performer, and what a voice! I should have expected no less from BBC Radio 2’s one-time Welsh Choir Girl of the Year, and the winner of two Classical Brit Awards. But she also has a delightfully friendly stage presence and is more beautiful – and taller – than her photographs suggest.
Those legs were sadly not on view as she shimmied onto the stage of Oriana’s Royal Court Theatre looking like a mermaid in a sparkling, figure-hugging full-length white dress and clutching a crystal-encrusted microphone.
For 45 minutes, she had the crowd eating out of her delicate hands as she ran through a familiar repertoire, opening with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, and closing with Time To Say Goodbye.
There were songs she had performed for the troops in Afghanistan – Somewhere Over The Rainbow – and the Chelsea Pensioners – A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.
Inevitably, the set included a couple of Andrew Lloyd Webber numbers – Pie Jesu, and Music of the Night from Phantom. “It’s usually sung by a tenor but why should they get all the best songs?” asked the mezzo soprano.
She wanted to sing Happy Birthday to a 90-year-old passenger but he declined to identify himself and the younger gentlemen who offered themselves as substitutes were gently let down.
It was all over far too soon. The audiences at her recent concerts in Cardiff and at the Royal Albert Hall probably got more than nine tunes, but they paid £100 or more each for their tickets; those of us on Oriana had paid only our cruise fare, and for that we got Bruges, Amsterdam, and all our meals as well. Not to mention a Freddie Mercury tribute act and other entertainment.
THE AUDIENCE at Katherine’s first show of the cruise were a little less fortunate. A rogue mussel at a restaurant in Bruges felled her piano accompanist and the singer hastily put together a set using backing tracks instead. No-one went away disappointed.
I don’t know where you get the idea that no-one in the first night’s audience was disappointed. We got only six songs after a late start to the show – not what we were expecting. Why couldn’t they have scheduled a substitute performance on Saturday when the ship was at sea? Would have been no hardship for P&O or Katherine Jenkins