If you start your career working with a pig the only way is up.   That has certainly been the case for Louise Gold, who first brought home the bacon by pulling Miss Piggy’s strings in The Muppet Show.    Gold later did voices on Spitting Image, but these days is better known as a singer, having just concluded two super-trouping years as Tanya in Mamma Mia.

Gold’s elegant evening, in which she is accompanied by dapper pianist Jason Carr, ties together these two discordant career strands with the emphasis on the music.   This is surely where Gold’s passion primarily resides.    The way she wraps her tongue around the increasingly complex rhymes in Cole Porter’s Can-Can, from caravan to Afghanistan to Anglican suggests true dedication.

The cabaret takes in a wide range of standards, embracing Porter and Sondheim via Noel Coward, Carole King and some customised Abba on recorder.

The mood varies from melancholic to comical, each segment punctuated by a polished Gold anecdote.    Having just confessed to appearing in a show where the cast outnumbered the audience, there is a likeable self-mocking ring to the rousing lyrical schadenfreude of Kander and Ebb’s I Told You So.

This is an eclectic little production, as smart as the shirt shops nearby.    A seasonal touch is provided by Carr’s jaunty bah humbug ditty Christmas is New Once More.    Towards the end Gold disappeared and returned with a youthful-looking Queen Elizabeth on her arm who delivered a sneak preview of the Christmas Speech.    I suspect it was the old latex Spitting Image incarnation.    Either that or botox has reached Buckingham Palace.

The best kind of cabarets are the ones that reveal a performer that you think you know well in a completely new light.

Louise Gold, a West End fixture for the last two decades at least, is not someone I ever thought of as subtle, let alone supple, performer.   I have always associated her instead with a voice that has the strident, foghorn quality and brassy belt of a British version of Ethel Merman and she has the tall, larger than life bearing to match – a big voice complementing an even bigger personality.

I therefore braced myself to be pinned to the back wall of this tiny venue for her solo cabaret but all of those preconceptions go out of the window when, under the direction of Nigel Plaskitt and accompanied by Jason Carr on piano, she reveals hitherto untapped resources of warmth and subtlety, light and shade.

When pitched accurately and matched to the right material there is even a lilting and lyrical loveliness to her vocal tone that will surprise.   Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? emerges as a haunting elegy to the tentativeness of romantic love.   She also connects beautifully with The Rainbow Connection and Sondheim’s Children Will Listen.

But Gold – whose eclectic career has also involved puppeteering on The Muppets and Spitting Image – also brought out the puppet effigy of The Queen for a completely different royal variety turn.   Kander and Ebb’s Class has never sounded like this, been funnier or more impertinent.

Next time Gold is in town, be sure to make an appointment.

Mark Shenton