Masterclass, Vaudeville - review

If Daly's name calls to mind only Cagney & Lacey (for which, by the way, she won four Emmys), prepare to be dazzled. At 65 she is more than a decade older than Callas was when she died, but it doesn't matter. Daly is imperious and sometimes woundingly funny as this queenly, flawed, swaggering artist who thrilled the world of opera with her raw and vivid singing.

Terrence McNally's play is less majestic. It's a clever yet rather vulgar and overly sentimental homage to the great diva, in which the brush strokes are broad. McNally has penned speeches that are more like arias. Callas apart, the characters are much too thinly drawn. But it works as a star vehicle.

The action takes place in an auditorium at New York's Juilliard School in the early Seventies.

Callas, retired from the stage, is sharing her knowledge of operatic performance with a succession of hopeful, nervous students.

The first (Dianne Pilkington) is toothy and naive, the second a cocky tenor with a voice of victorious clarity (Garrett Sorenson), and the third a spiky mezzo-soprano (Naomi O'Connell) who is in no mood to be trifled with. Their efforts are picked to pieces. As Callas passes on her wisdom, in a style that's dramatic and often acerbic, the shadows turn into vignettes from her past.

You don't need to be familiar with the numerous ins and outs of Callas's career to appreciate the pathos of this. We see her tortured relationship with her lover Aristotle Onassis. Rivalries are revisited. The smell of success wafts past her flared nostrils.

As the flashbacks clunk and whir, we hear Callas's generous, incisive tones. It is the voice of the original recordings; Daly barely has to sing at all, yet we are convinced that somewhere inside her the ashes of a once blazing talent continue to smoulder. Full of little interactions with the audience and moments we're expected to answer with applause, Master Class is the most knowing, bombastic kind of Broadway show. But, crucially, Stephen Wadsworth's production gives Daly room to captivate, and she consistently does just that.

Until April 28 (0844 412 4663).

Masterclass
Vaudeville
404 Strand
WC2R 0NH