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Follow That Girl - Part 4
 
A View From The Gods
 
'Icarus' looks down on Follow That Girl
 
There is something melancholy about Follow That Girl, but melancholia has always been at the heart of the music Julian Slade has composed. How often has that music been described as 'tinkling'? - wrongly so, for there is an underlying profundity at work. It is there in the yearning sadness of Jane's haunting 'The Time of my Life' in Salad Days, with its determination to face 'Summer and sunshine and falling in love', and it is glimpsed clearly through her other song 'I Sit in the Sun' and in her duet with Tim 'We Said We Wouldn't Look Back'. (All these are songs obsessed with the passing of time.) Melancholia lends a sad sweetness to much that is best in Slade's Free as Air: listen to Gillian Lewis singing 'Nothing but Sea and Sky', or 'I'd Like To Be Like You' (the expression of a longing to be somebody else), or, even more heart-rending, Patricia Bredin singing 'Terhou'. But Follow That Girl at first seems a strange repository for such depths of feeling, an ingredient of the composer's talent that has been critically ignored. At a distance of forty years, as viewed from the gods, all sorts of qualities still shine around Follow That Girl. It is so much more than a Victorian romp, apparently - if its critics are to be believed - stranded somewhere between musical comedy proper and revue, and its freshness still holds.

James Cairncross confronted in the London Aquarium by Susan Hampshire's English beauty.

It is almost certainly the most stylish of Slade and Reynolds's work: a patina of high style is always in evidence, matched in the original production by Hutchinson Scott's designs which seem to react naturally to Slade's sense of atmosphere. The theatrical sureness is strong, but it is the look of Follow That Girl that stays as firmly in the mind, distinguishing it from anything else the team ever wrote. That visual impact is embodied in the crucial casting of Susan Hampshire as the show's heroine, Victoria Gilchrist. It doesn't matter that Hampshire makes some pretty odd noises in the songs, for she has very little to do musically. Perhaps this is surprising after Eleanor Drew's highly articulate contribution as the heroine of Salad Days (she gets to be in almost all the best numbers), and in Slade's next show, Free as Air, we have the welcome luxury of two heroines, Patricia Bredin and Gillian Lewis, both of whom have ample stretches of the score. But Hampshire is in the direct line of the Slade heroines who looked perfect. They didn't look fit for Damn Yankees or Annie Get Your Gun: they were never going to get a lead at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. No - they waited politely for a Julian Slade musical. That line of heroines began really with Gillian Lewis in Free as Air and ended (in the writers' final show Wildest Dreams) with Anna Dawson. All three possessed an extraordinary Englishness of feature and bearing and voice that seems absolutely to have vanished from the theatre, perhaps from the world itself.
 
 
Hutchinson Scott's set design for Act I, Scene 2 of Follow That Girl
 
Sustained Pastiche
The period setting of Follow That Girl stresses and fixes the beauty of Slade's music, but with the bite that comes from setting a period musical within a modern setting, the story told in flashback by two young hopefuls, Victoria and Tom, eager to know what lies ahead for them. The body of the play within a play becomes a sustained pastiche. It lacks nothing in flavour, threaded by a consistent artificiality that is well sustained. It is one of Slade's tricks that he can bring a modern sound to everything that needs it here (as in Tom's ballad 'Lovely Meeting You at Last') with no danger of clashing with the Victorian feel. Yet this most modest of musicals has nothing rumbustious about it. It doesn't attempt to raise the roof as the writers had in Salad Days with 'We're Looking for a Piano'. It has bright moments, but it doesn't strain to excite us. Nothing here lifts you out of your seat; the material is subtle, almost subdued. Throughout, the mood is settled and often reflective, with a confident charm that never weakens. Its main songs, beyond the hero's title number, belong to the middle-aged couples.
 
James Cairncross and Patricia Routledge perform a parlour-duet that emphasises the pit-falls of that forgotten art of duetting ('Waiting for our Daughter'). More importantly, Newton Blick and Marion Grimaldi have three central duets: 'I'm Away' (an abandoned polka, rather Bohemian, in Battersea Park), 'Shopping in Kensington' and, with Grimaldi taking over the song, 'Solitary Stranger'. The lyrics are nimble and witty, the tunes delightful, and here and there (certainly in 'Shopping in Kensington' and 'Solitary Stranger') melancholia is again at work. Voiced here by the middle-aged, the philosophies that thread these songs are made the more poignant.
 
James Cairncross and Patricia Routledge sing 'Waiting For Our Daughter'
 
Slade's shaping of this music is always deft, with tightly constructed melodies. When the plot seems to halt for a blatant 'revue' number, we have little gems such as 'Three Victorian Mermaids' and (when the story pulls back to the present day - 'Taken for a Ride' - in which Victoria enjoys a hazardous journey across London by public transport). There are, of course, less inspired moments. The first act finale 'Song and Dance' uses the double-chorus technique Slade employed with more success for the first act closer of Salad Days, 'Out of Breath', but on stage the number probably worked better than it does on the handsomely recorded original cast recording. And what is it in Gilmore and Hampshire's duet, 'One, Two, Three, One' (written many years earlier by Slade) that makes it so sad? Is it because, at the root of Slade's expression of young lovers finding their happiness, something dark creeps in? At the moment when true love is realised, the fragility of the emotion is pronounced in a manner that is Slade's own; it is a happy song made unhappy. It is something no other British composer of the period could have achieved. Icarus compares it to the overblown emotional outbursts that represent so much of our modern musical theatre, and Icarus feels that Slade's approach is the less bogus.
 
Philip Martell's extraordinary orchestration for six players (prominent among them two pianos) is friendly, homely and in harmony with the shifting moods of a score that is full of sun and not a little shadow. Perhaps, too, Martell perceived the longing that underpins this gentle score. The view from the gods fades, and in memory Follow That Girl has a fond place.

Icarus

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