- The Crooked Mile - Part 1
-
- 'You look through the bars
And tell yourself that one day
You'll fly away
Fly far away
Up through the stars
As free as the wind you'll be
As free as the air
But deep down inside you
You know you belong right there'
(from 'Free')
-
- Book and lyrics by Peter Wildeblood
Music by Peter Greenwell
Opened at the Cambridge Theatre 10 September 1959, closing on
30 January 1960 after 164 performances
- - In an ideal world, there would be a series of booklets
on individual British musicals in the same manner as the admirable
series on individual films published by the British Film Institute.
There are some obvious candidates. You wouldn't need much padding
to write 10,00 words on Oliver! or King's Rhapsody or Half A
Sixpence or The Boy Friend or Valmouth or Salad Days. But any
decent editor would make certain that one of the first shows
to get such treatment would be an almost forgotten flop: The
Crooked Mile. It doesn't get mentioned in Sheridan Morley's survey
of British musicals Spread A Little Happiness (but Mr Morley
has never been notable for original thought, and seems incapable
of shedding new light on old received opinions) and even gets
missed from Kurt Ganzl's sometimes excellent book on musical
theatre recordings. Like so much else of the period, it was put
aside, even by one of its lesser stars, John Larsen, who didn't
bother to list it in his credits when he later toured as John
Hanson's understudy. It wasn't even as if Mr Larsen had much
else to boast about. He probably didn't think The Crooked Mile
was worth mentioning. And so The Crooked Mile gets shunted even
further from our recollection.
- But the fact is that The Crooked Mile is probably a masterpiece.
It deserves to be remembered as a classic. It needs revival.
Here is the grandest, noblest, most ambitious and most moving
British musical of the 1950s. And we can afford to forget it?
-
- How did The Crooked Mile come to be written?
-
Peter Wildeblood at the time
of The Crooked Mile
|
Through a collision in the Crush Bar at the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden. During the interval one of the directors of the
Players Theatre in Villiers Street met Peter Wildeblood and asked
if he would be interested in writing a show with the Players'
resident musical director Peter Greenwell, whose Twenty Minutes
South (with libretto by Maurice Browning) had been seen at the
St Martin's Theatre in 1955. The two men met. Wildeblood wanted
to write a piece about Soho, and turned to his recent book West
End People, for inspiration. He sketched out a story and with
Greenwell wrote one song. They presented their package to the
Players Theatre management, and the show was commissioned. It
was two years in the making. |
Peter Greenwell in 1996
 The
lowlier environs of London were a fashionable milieux for the
British musical in the l950s - Expresso Bongo, Make Me An Offer,
Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'be and - later - Johnny the Priest
and the awful Instant Marriage - and in Wildeblood Soho had a
profound, observant and sympathetic observer. It is Wildeblood's
skill that makes The Crooked Mile so flavoursome, with a Damon
Runyon-like survey of his characters. What could be more Runyonesque
than the list of prostitutes that Wildeblood gives us?: Delicious
Daisy, Creeping Jenny, Busy Lizzie, Black Eye'd Susan, Rambling
Rose, Welsh Poppy and (surely approved by the Wolfenden Committee
of some years later) Indoor Ivy. |
- But Wildeblood attempts something darker than we could find
in Runyon, shades that Frank Loesser didn't get into Guys and
Dolls, in the character of the Carver, eerily played by Elwyn
Brook-Jones. He is a pimp, and violent with it. There is an immediate
poetic justice in the fact that his right hand man is called
Weed. Wildeblood
 looks
into the poky corners of Soho in a way that Expresso Bongo didn't,
and Greenwell's music gives the necessary gravitas.
-
- But, asked the Theatre World's 'Looker-On' in 1959, why did
Wildeblood go for a Soho musical? 'Looker-On', paraphrasing his
interviewee's words, explained:
- 'Because Mr Wildeblood wanted to write about the contemporary
scene and he has a theory that ordinary everyday folk "don't
work" when they break into song. According to him, characters
in a musical must be exotic or removed in time and place. They
must belong to another period or be set abroad. Even so, Mr Wildeblood
still wanted this first musical to be about people of today,
living in this country.'
-
- Wildeblood told 'Looker-On' that 'Soho is the only kind of
contemporary myth we have. One can afford to be realistic about
Soho and still produce unusual characters and an environment
quite out of the ordinary.'
-
 This
is interesting. It's clear that he intends The Crooked Mile as
heightened drama, its characters exaggerated but rooted in reality,
and it is that mythological approach that lifts the show at every
turn. And Looker-On insisted that 'Mr Wildeblood is tired of
conventional musicals written round romantic juveniles. Being
far more interested in character than plot, he gave the leads
in The Crooked Mile to experienced character players … to
whom the younger generation in the story play second fiddle.'
-
- The first night of the show was almost wildly acclaimed.
The Overture received no less than an ovation (no wonder, for
there is nothing like it in British musical theatre). At last,
here was a British musical that sounded serious and superbly
professional. It sounded distinct and proud of itself, something
to be reckoned with. The British musical had taken on a majesty,
vibrant and overpowering and demanding to be taken notice of.
The rapture continued at curtain fall, but Greenwell recalls
that the first night excitement was never recaptured at subsequent
performances. The business dwindled and the show closed after
four and a half months.
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