Aiming for true melodrama, Jack Lukeman supplied the melos, while drama was co-ordinated by Barabbas theatre director Raymond Keane. With Jack L's flamboyant theatrics, musical theatre seems a superb idea. Keane too finds kindred contact between Jack's last album, The Universe, and his own wonderful stage show, Dog. But despite moments of perfect harmony, frequently the two elements seemed at cross-purposes.
In a chair shaped like a cupped palm, Jack L was hampered by minimal props and restrictive lighting. At the centre of a black set, dressed in black, playing a black guitar, he was more vanishing point than focal point, with Rooftop Lullaby lost beneath a disconcerting blackout.
It soon transpired that, without narrative, The Little Universe Show is more a series of staged music videos than musical theatre. After a hesitant start, the show relaxed into an understated So Far Gone and a delightful Don't Fall in Love, with Marc Aubele's melotron-esque keys underscoring the up-tempo forlornness.
A flailing mimetic performance of Jacques Brel's Amsterdam was the highlight, chased with a cane-twirling rendition of his Jacky. Spurred on by this success, Lukeman showed his true colours against a twinkling star backdrop. Merging bass baritone with crowd-pleasing physical gags, the Athy crooner was a giddy hybrid of Scott Walker and Michael Barrymore.
With a greater affinity for music hall than theatre ("Theatre is supposed to be posh," he mock-scolded a heckler), L invited audience members onstage to accompany him on Little Man, resembling a sequence from The Generation Game.
At his most gloriously unrestrained, dressed like a satyr with a feather-boa tail, he urged the audience to collective orgasm at the end of a pumping Ode to Ed Wood. At the concert's climax the audience roared as though the earth had truly moved.
