EVA Cassidy is an enigma. Shy, afraid of going on stage, and reluctant to treat singing as a ‘business’, she never hit the high spotlight until ironically several years after she’d died aged just 33 in 1996.

With a voice which could take on the best at jazz, country, gospel and sometimes pop and hit the notes perfectly every time, she didn’t fit into a category making it difficult for record companies to offer her contracts because they didn’t know how to market her diversity.

Her life is now the subject of the Eva Cassidy Story, a musical ‘play’ written by Brian Langtry and which entertained the audience at The Waterside Theatre in Aylesbury.

It is an extraordinary story about a woman who spurned the success she could have had because she never felt good enough, despite having talent which knocked musical spots off her contemporaries.

Hollyoaks’ actress Sarah Jane Buckley took on the part of Eva with a powerful performance eclipsing the other performers. That was the point... Eva stood in nobody’s shadow either.

That is not to say that Maureen Nolan as Eva’s mother or Brian Fortuna as Eva’s brother, Dan, did not hold their own. They did. It is simply that the story is about Eva.

From the opening How can I Keep from Singing? To the song which Eva sang at her final gig at the renowned Blues Alley – What a Wonderful World – Sarah Jane Buckley belts out the numbers with gusto.

She also has an obvious respect for the original performances of Eva’s now hit songs, largely made famous originally through what was then Sir Terry Wogan’s show on BBC Radio 2.

The first of those to find airtime was the one most people will recall, a rendition of Judy Garland’s one-time people’s favourite, Somewhere over the Rainbow, which went to number one in the UK’s record chart.

This episodic play draws on snapshots of Eva’s life on which the various songs hinge – her reluctance to move from the comfortable junior school to junior high, a nightmare for her where she felt the other children would find her strange; her extreme shyness when asked to record in a studio to the point when she almost fails to turn up; and when she does a live recording at Blues Alley, but slams her own performance because she has a cold.

A constant perfectionist, it was said by people watching her live that the majority had tears in their eyes when she sang... it’s a play well worth seeing and hearing; sad too that such a singer should be lost to cancer at such a young age.

See it if you have the chance.

By Liz Collins