- a musical grouped portrait of some of the firelighters
of cinema …
THE BIOGRAPH GIRL
Book by Warner Brown. Lyrics by Warner Brown and David Heneker
Music by David Heneker
Original London cast: Sheila White, Jane Hardy, Bruce Barry,
Kate Revill, Guy Siner, Ron Berglas. Musical director: Michael
Reed
SONGS: The Moving Picture Show; Working In Flickers; That's What
I Get All Day; The Moment I Close My Eyes; Every Lady Needs A
Master; I Just Wanted To Make Him Laugh; I Like To Be The Way
I Am In My Own Front Parlour; Beyond Babel; A David Griffith
Show; More Than A Man; The Industry; Gentle Fade; Nineteen Twenty-Five;
The Biograph Girl; One Of The Pioneers; Put It In The Tissue
Paper
- Harold Hobson found this 'a most excellent, delicate and
perceptive entertainment, with young players of talent so outstanding
that after fifty years of play going I was taken by delighted
surprise'. Warner Brown and David Heneker's little musical about
the early days of the cinema has never particularly excited me,
and on record it comes across as rather a grey and chilly affair,
with here and there something to lift the spirits. It premiered
at the Phoenix Theatre in November 1980 where, despite Hobson's
urging that 'I would ask all London to go and see it' London
stayed away and it was done with in 51 performances. It was conceived
as 'a nostalgic reminiscence of the silent movies seen through
the eyes of four famous figures', Mary Pickford and Lilian Gish,
the director D.W. Griffith and the studio boss Adolph Zukor.
The score is not in the forefront of Heneker's work. For Gish
(Kate Revill) there are a couple of soggy romantic ballads, 'Every
Lady Needs A Master' (hardly a sentiment to get an audience in
1980 sympathetically nodding) and 'More Than A Man'. D. W. Griffith
- sung stolidly but without much animation by Bruce Barry - is
given visionary stuff to sing including the hopefully epic sentiment
of 'Beyond Babel' in which he dreams of a film that will speak
to the world of universal tolerance. The liveliest numbers are
reserved for Sheila White as Mary Pickford, who gets to sing
the show's hit number 'Working In Flickers' (which has Heneker
firing on all cylinders). But too much of White's material is
second-rate. One of the finest moments of the evening came at
the last moment when, with the arrival of sound, the stars realise
their careers are at an end, and it is time to 'Put It In The
Tissue Paper'. Friendly, kindly and intermittently appealing
as The Biograph Girl is, it is patently uneven and often predictable.
For me, it is further handicapped by the casting of Miss White,
an artist whose charms I have always found elusive.
-
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