Barb Jungr, Soho Theatre, London

Tangled up in Bob - one brave woman dares to mess with a legend

The British leg of Bob Dylan's latest European tour begins in just over a month's time, but by way of a side-order you should try Barb Jungr's show Every Grain of Sand in which the jazz singer performs cover versions of Dylan songs that range from the wonderful to the bizarrely misjudged but are never less than arresting.

You have to go back a long way for the most famous cover versions of Dylan – to The Byrds' "Mr Tambourine Man" (1965), and Peter, Paul and Mary's "Blowin' in the Wind", which was one of some 60 that appeared within two years of the song's emergence in 1962. As the Dylan legend grew, there was a sense in which other artists, like everybody else, dared not go near him. And with the man himself never tiring of bending his songs into new shapes, why bother?

Credit then to Jungr, a noted interpreter of Jacques Brel, for being brave enough to turn her attention to Dylan, whose vast output – at any rate the 500 or so official releases – she set herself the task of studying in a process that took all of 18 months. Her chosen few are on a new CD and form the basis of a show that has just completed a short residency in London before moving on to 14 venues around the country between mid-April and the end of June.

The revelation of Jungr's performance was in presenting Dylan as a musical figure closer to Kurt Weill and Stephen Sondheim than any contemporary from rock'n'pop. A cabaret artist's subversiveness marked Dylan out when he burst on to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, and what Jungr suggests is that he could have gone on to have a career on Broadway.

When you remember that among those who tried to take possession of "Blowin' in the Wind" was Marlene Dietrich, the idea that a sensual chanteuse such as Jungr might give Dylan the treatment is not so far-fetched. Jungr has a big voice with a tremendous expressive range, and she revelled in Dylan's wit and lyricism. However, with backing from piano, cello, double bass and percussion, she was at the mercy of some very odd arrangements. And the Victoria Wood-style chatter that interspered the numbers ran counter to the prevailing mood.

Jungr kicked off with that epic of intimacy "Tangled Up in Blue", mistaking its urgency for mere jauntiness and relieving one of Dylan's greatest achievements of all its pathos; the devotional beauty of "Every Grain of Sand", which Jungr took as the inspiration for her show, suffered a similar fate, as did "Forever Young". But then Jungr slowed things down to produce an exquisitely stark "What Good Am I?", a cry of despair from Dylan's 1989 album Oh Mercy, and an equally heart-rending "Not Dark Yet" from 1997's Time Out of Mind. There was a cracking "Things Have Changed", and Jungr was absolutely right for the sardonic Dylan of "Is Your Love in Vain?''. Resist the urge to shout "Judas!"

Details of Barb Jungr's 'Every Grain of Sand' tour are at www.barbjungr.com