- putting some upper class snobs to music… a sort of
a musical about rather too many girls called Mitford …
THE MITFORD GIRLS
Book and lyrics by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin
Music by Peter Greenwell
Original Broadway cast: Patricia Hodge, Lucy Fenwick, Julia Sutton,
Patricia Michael, Colette Gleeson, Gay Soper, Oz Clarke. Musical
director: John Owen Edwards
SONGS: Imagination; Why Do People Fall In Love?; Why Fall For
Love?; The Controversial; I'll Fall In Love; Think Of Being Rich;
Find Your Partner And Dance; Why Love?; Strange Forces; Travelling
Light [the show also included several interpolated songs]
- Audiences at the Chichester Festival Theatre may have been
on the edge of their seats at this retelling of the story of
the six Mitford girls, but it failed to rouse much interest when
it opened at the Globe Theatre in 1981, never becoming a hit
through its three-month run. It ruined its chances of being taken
seriously as a musical by using too many well-known songs by
other hands (including Vivian Ellis's 'Other People's Babies',
the Lerner-Hoffman-Goodhart 'Gangway' made famous by Jessie Matthews,
and Weill and Anderson's 'September Song') to spice up the evening.
The resulting experience was nothing more than a mish-mash. Peter
Greenwell wrote some new songs, too many of which seemed to be
about the possibilities of falling in love, that didn't pose
much competition to the established favourites. Greenwell's songs
may be new, but they are not fresh. In the theatre, the eye tired
of the permanent skeletal set and the heart wearied at the antics
of the socially ambitious sextette. On record, we can enjoy the
interesting collection of musical leading ladies gathered for
the occasion, among whom Patricia Hodge (whose talent for the
genre has been almost completely overlooked), the glacially accurate
Patricia Michael and good old faithful Julia Sutton, occasionally
raucous, excel. The show needed a stronger male interest than
that provided by Oz Clarke, playing a variety of parts, but the
ladies hog the stage. The sadness is that Greenwell's career
in musical theatre, which had blossomed through the 1950s from
Twenty Minutes South to The Crooked Mile, came to this sorry
end.
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