Bill Bailey: Summer Larks, Covent Garden, review: an aptly Wagnerian performance from the Strictly winner

On Monday, Bill Bailey performed the first stand-up comedy gig at the Royal Opera House in its 156-year history. It was a curious spectacle, this self-proclaimed “poundshop Gandalf” sticking out his tongue on the very stage where Fonteyn once twirled and Callas warbled. Perhaps there’d been a booking mix-up: “Is Placido Domingo appearing at the Banana Cabaret in Balham tonight?” he wondered aloud.

I know what you’re thinking: how did this great national institution, this by-word for brilliance in the fields of music and dance, end up slumming it at the Opera House? After all, Bailey’s last performance was to a crowd of perhaps 20,000 at Latitude Festival. But he might be the only comedian there is who’s at home in both settings: half rock’n’roll roadie, half pipe-chewing professor of musicology.

If the 56-year-old was already one of the leading comic lights of his generation – as any fan of Black Books will tell you – this past year marked his ascent to the firmament. A disco-ball dangling above the Covent Garden stage hinted at how it happened: Bailey will have recruited plenty of new admirers from the 13 million who watched him win Strictly Come Dancing in December.

His new level of fame has brought surprises. Unexpectedly becoming “tabloid fodder” inspires the funniest routine of this show’s first half – involving a llama, a bottle of whisky and a scheme to exploit the redtops’ hunger for tales of slebs’ misadventures.

Bailey’s show Summer Larks is a Wagnerian performance, in that it really gets going more than two hours after curtain-up with some impressive singing in German. In a classic bit of Baileyan keyboard tinkering, he moves You Are My Sunshine from a major to a minor key, croons it in the style of Bob Dylan, and finally rejigs in German as a Weimar-flavoured cabaret number.

The road to reach that point is somewhat meandering. Much of the material will be familiar to anyone who caught his excellent West End run in 2018; this show is, in essence, that one, indulgently stretched to the best part of three hours, the padding coming in the stand-up sections between musical routines. The high points remain high, but there are longueurs.

Call me greedy, but in a venue with world-class acoustics I’d have liked more music. Bailey’s Tom Waits-style Old MacDonald is one of the cleverest things he’s written – and the only moment he properly bursts into song in the first 90 minutes (aside from two brief jingles about diagnostics, and a singalong to California Dreamin’). As if to make up for lost time, the final section squeezes in blues guitar, death metal cowbells and a sincere, jokeless aria from soprano Florence Hvorostovsky, making a cameo just for the hell of it.

Bailey may soon scratch the musical itch on an even larger stage: he has said he’d be “happy to throw my hat in the ring” to represent Britain at Eurovision. On this form, winning over the song contest’s 180 million viewers should be a doddle.

Until Aug 8. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk