Murder, Mystery and Mayhem

Reviewing recordings of British and American musicals that dealt with different sorts of chaos…

Belle , Blitz! , The Fields of Ambrosia , Jack The Ripper , Mutiny! , The Mystery of Edwin Drood , Parade , Prettybelle , Sherlock Holmes , Somethings Afoot , Two Cities

BELLE, or The Ballad of Doctor Crippen

Book by Wolf Mankowitz, based on a play by Beverley Cross

Music and lyrics by Monty Norman

Original London cast: George Benson, Davy Kaye, Virginia Vernon, Jerry Desmonde, Rose Hill, Nicolette Roeg. Musical director: Monty Norman

SONGS: The Ballad Of Dr Crippen [intermittent throughout score]; Fifty Years Ago; Mister Lasherwood And Mighty Mick; Bird Of Paradise; Meet Me At The Strand; You Are Mine; Colonies; The Devil’s Bandsman; Pills, Pills, Pills; Ain’t It A Shame; Song Of Our Future; Belle; Lovely London; The Bravest Of Men; A Pint Of Wallop; Fairy Godmother; Waltzing With You; I Can’t Stop Singing; Coldwater, Michigan; Don’t Ever Leave Me; Policeman’s Song; The Dit-Dit Song; The Minstrel Show

Send up a prayer for poor, murdered Belle, probably Monty Norman’s masterpiece. Vilified when she opened at the Strand Theatre in May 1961, she lasted a mere 44 performances before her consignment to oblivion. The presiding sensibility seemed unable to accept a musical that was at once a lively account of the notorious Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen murder case and an affectionate musical pastiche of Edwardian music-hall, employing the ‘show-within-a-show’ technique to frame its chilling story. There was a feeling at the time that a lack of taste was at work; the fact that Ethel le Neve, Crippen’s mistress, was still alive, did not help matters. Years later, we are left with one of the most outstanding recordings of any British show, the only disappointment being that the sleeve gives no indication of the show’s clever play-within-a-play plot. Linked by a recurring ‘ballad’ theme sung by Jerry Desmonde, the piece nevertheless unfolds neatly as each number evokes a music-hall atmosphere, enhanced by a wonderfully period (intentionally second-rate) pit band, its parts orchestrated by Harry Robinson and musically directed by the composer. The performances are exemplary, notably George Benson (making a rare appearance in a musical) as the beleaguered doctor, a blowsy and out-of-tune Rose Hill as his talentless wife singing the excruciating ‘Bird of Paradise’, and Virginia Vernon bringing her old-fashioned, vibrating soprano to the role of Ethel. She is fetching and semi-operatic in ‘You Are Mine’ (love among the dentist’s tools of Crippen’s surgery) and the amusingly persistent ‘I Can’t Stop Singing’. There is an absurdly heightened passion in Ethel and Crippen’s brief but soaring ‘Song Of Our Future’, for a moment almost Wagnerian in its torment, that couldn’t belong to any other musical. The tireless Nicolette Roeg has a fine time adding soubrette’s oomph to her exhortation to ‘Meet Me At The Strand’, and when Norman’s score moves into darker tones with the arrest of Dr Crippen aboard the SS Montrose, it manages to be genuinely moving. Along the way, there is the delectable ‘Dit-Dit Song’ as the company celebrates the invention of Marconi’s telegraph, all too soon to be the instrument of Crippen’s downfall. Ultimately, this is a musical probably too intelligent to be popular, too darkly witty, too parodic, but its neglect is a minor tragedy of British theatre.

BLITZ!

Book by Lionel Bart and Joan Maitland

Music and lyrics by Lionel Bart

Original London cast: Amelia Bayntun, Bob Grant, Grazina Frame; Graham James; Thomas Kempinski; Toni Palmer; Edward Caddick; Bernard Stone, Anna Tzelniker, [recording only: Vera Lynn]. Musical director: Marcus Dods

SONGS: Our Hotel; Tell Him – Tell Her; I Want To Whisper Something; The Day After Tomorrow; We’re Going To The Country; Another Morning; Who’s This Geezer Hitler?; Be What You Wanna Be; As Long As This Is England; Opposites; Bake A Cake; Leave It To The Ladies; Far Away; Petticoat lane; Down The Lane; So Tell Me; Mums And Dads; Who Wants To Settle Down?; Is This Gonna Be A Wedding?; Duty Calls

The reputation of Lionel Bart’s successor to the phenomenally successful Oliver! has not weathered especially well. When it opened at the Adelphi Theatre in May 1962, Blitz! inspired Pauline Grant (the somewhat breathless author of so many sleeve notes of the 1950s and 1960s) to claim that it was ‘a breathtaking theatrical adventure which restores spectacle to British musicals on a huge imaginative scale’. The spectacle (Sean Kenny’s mammoth sets of war-torn London) was indeed breathtaking and contributed hugely to the show’s success. Bart’s story – the exploits of the Blitztein family, presided over by a fierce matriach, as they endured the blitz – and Bart’s score didn’t excite as much, but drew enough interest for 568 performances. But surely Bart’s score has been unfairly neglected? There were still shreds of the Weill-like flavour in his songs, with a feeling for period and place and person, and there were rollicking good numbers, alongside a fair amount of dross (listen to a terrible song called ‘As Long As This Is England’). Amelia Bayntun came from nowhere to play Mrs Blitztein and seems to have back there when the run finished. As on stage, she is the backbone of the thing, dominant in the argumentative ‘Tell Him – Tell Her’ (one of the show’s cleverest moments, with Bart building his characters throughout), barnstorming in the blazingly triumphant ‘Who’s This Geezer Hitler?’ and thrillingly starry in her second act aria ‘So Tell Me’. By any standards, this is a great performance. And much else of the score seems to me to be brilliant. Could there be a more grittily defiant hymn for the beleaguered East Enders than ‘Another Morning’? In fact, the delights here seem endless: the evocation of childhood pavement games in ‘Mums And Dads’ (listen to that wonderful final orchestral swell from Marcus Dods’ expansive orchestra) and Grazina Frame, in her one starring role as the blinded Blitztein daughter, singing the simple but moving ‘Far Away’, and joining the attractively voiced Graham James for one of the only really happy songs in the show ‘Opposites’. In ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ Bart (or somebody) had the idea of asking Vera Lynn to record a number to be played each night on stage; it is as if ‘Force’s Favourites’ lives again, and words and music sound absolutely authentic. The sound of a British Sunday is caught to perfection. But this is a recording (one of Norman Newell’s finest) with countless pleasures. There is a moment at the very end of ‘Duty Calls!’ that never fails to stir with its vivid sense of theatre. The sound is good, even though the errant woodwind makes some odd noises.

THE FIELDS OF AMBROSIA

Book and lyrics by Joel Higgins, based on an original screenplay by Garrie Bateson

Music by Martin Silvestri

Original London cast: Joel Higgins, Christine Andreas, Marc Joseph, Michael Fenton Stevens, Mark Heenehan, Roger Leach, Cliff Brayshaw, Peter Gallagher, Henry Webster, Morgan Deare, Kevin Rooney. Musical director: Mark Warman

SONGS: Ball And Chain; Hubbub; The Fields Of Ambrosia; How Could This Happen?; Nuthin’; Who Are You?; Reasonable Man; Step Right Up; Too Bad; That Rat Is Dead; Hungry; Continental Sunday; Alone; The Card Game; The Gallows; Do It For Me; All In This Together; The Getaway; The Breakout

Failures aren’t what they were. The trouble is, there are far too few of them. In the year 2000, the cast-iron flop will be hard to come by, because producers won’t risk the venture, because the theatres that used to put up with a show for a couple of weeks are filled for years with immovable musicals by foreigners with unpronounceable names. There used to be bumper years for London flops. Taking anything below 250 performances as qualifying, the season between June 1961 and May 1962 reveals a lengthy tally of musicals and revues that didn’t clean up at the box-office: Belle (43), Do Re Mi (169), The Fantasticks (44), King Kong (85), The Lord Chamberlain Regrets (220), Not To Worry? (12), On The Avenue (14), On The Brighter Side (182), Scapa (52), A Thurber Carnival (27) and Wildest Dreams (76). Happy days, when the choice of what people might pay to see was much wider and more stimulating than it is today. But, even as late as 1996, a work very much out of the mainstream of the gargantuan long-runners could take the stage, and flop magnificently. When The Fields of Ambrosia opened at the Aldwych Theatre that February, the critics were beside themselves. The Evening Standard called it ‘morally unappealing … disgusting and titillating’. The Daily Telegraph thought it was ‘as if everyone has had any sense of good taste, or indeed morality, surgically removed.’ Perhaps critics were not ready for a musical about the electric chair. Their American colleagues had good things to say about it when it showed in New Jersey prior to its London appearance, and this excellent, very full, recording of the score reveals a work of much beauty and tremendous character. Joel Higgins wrote book and lyrics and starred as Jonas Candide, one-time con-man and now travelling executioner, who in 1918 is sent to dispatch a condemned brother and sister. Candide manages (after a couple of tries) to eradicate the brother, but he takes a fancy to the sister, Gretchen, and manages to defer her execution. He makes love to her, and plans her escape, but she is shot and, at final curtain, Candide finds himself in his own chair awaiting execution. The student executioner, Candide’s protégé, pulls the switch too hard and blows the place up. In heaven, Candide and Gretchen waltz serenely in each other’s arms. This might be a black comedy, but there is a heart here too, largely because of Higgins’s remarkable performance as Candide. He somehow manages to make the not-too-bright executioner appealing and vulnerable, qualities brilliantly evoked in the early title song which Candide uses to reassure his clients about the Elysian happiness they are heading for. This is an award-winning performance if ever there was one. He is lucky in his leading lady, Christine Andreas, who brings a marvellous presence to the cursed and scheming Gretchen, and a voice that cries with pain. Between them, they have most of the best of this sometimes terrific score – how can such work have been so dismissed? Martin Silvestri’s music bristles with good ideas and memorable melodies, with at least four stand-out songs, dressed perfectly in Harold Wheeler’s orchestrations. There is a painfully touching duet for Candide and Gretchen in ‘Too Bad’, with its abundance of orchestral swells giving it added potency, and another – happier – duet in a dream of New Orleans, ‘Continental Sunday’. Both numbers deserve to be played wherever show music is spoken of seriously. There is much more, too: Candide’s explanation of how he came to fry people in ‘Step Right Up’ (equivalent to Professor Harold Hill’s gabbled history in The Music Man’s ‘Ya Got Trouble’), Gretchen’s equivalent confession of her murderous progress in ‘Who Are You?’, and a biographical horror story from Candide’s assistant, the pathetic Jimmy (Mark Joseph) in ‘Alone’. ‘Fry me while I’m hot,’ screams Candide at the end of the show, and of his life, as the strains of the lovely title song fade into a massive explosion, to be replaced by singing violins and a last great orchestral climax. This extravagant, stark, darkly beautiful piece was off after 23 performances. Of course, it sounds dreadful and unpromising, but this is probably a lost masterpiece. The recorded sound is first-rate.

JACK THE RIPPER, one of the very last musical plays to originate at the Players Theatre - the organisation that gave the world The Boy Friend, Twenty Minutes South, The Crooked Mile and Johnny the Priest among others - opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in September 1974. With book and lyrics by Ron Pember and Denis De Marne and music by Pember, this game little show drew largely negative reviews.

It was nevertheless a score that had many good things in it, and two songs at least that linger in the memory - 'Goodbye Day' and 'Step Across the River'. The score was professionally recorded by the original cast, but the recording has never been published. The songs that we are missing include performances from the following artists: Terese Stevens (Marie) [see also under Unsung Heroines: Where are they now?], Eleanor McCready (Lizzie), Howard Southern (Montague Druitt), Linda Rushby (Polly Anne Nicholls), Christine Edmonds (Martha Tabram), Charles West (Police-Sergeant Coles)

Saturday Night (Polly, Marie and Company)
Sing Sing (Chairman, Druitt and Company)
I'm The Girl You All Know (Marie and Ensemble)
God Bless (Company)
Goodbye Day (Marie and the Girls)
What a Life (The Gang and the Girls)
Love (Marie)
Ripper's Going To Get You (Annie and the Gang)
Charlie and Queenie (Lizzie, Chairman and Ensemble)
Half a Dozen Points (Marie)
There's a Boat Coming In (Ensemble)
There Ain't Any Work Today (Chairman and Ensemble)
Look At Her (Ensemble)
Suspects (Martha and the Gang)
Policeman's Chorus (Police-Sergeant Coles and Constables)
Step Across The River (Marie and Lizzie)
Montage (Druitt and Company)

MUTINY!

Book by Richard Crane. Lyrics by Richard Crane and David Essex

Music by David Essex

Original London cast: David Essex, Frank Finlay, Shaun Curry, Neville Jason, David Oakley, Anthony Johncock, Simon Packham, Patrick Clancy, Frank Olegario, Nicola Blackman, Sinitta Renet. Musical director: Paul Maguire

SONGS: Prologue; New World; Friends; The Storm; Failed Cape Horn; Saucy Sal; The Lash; Welcome; War Dance; Tahiti; Breadfruit; Will You Come Back; Hell; Freedom; Falling Angels Riding; Bligh’s Speech; I’ll Go No More A-Roving

David Essex co-wrote the lyrics, composed its music and played Fletcher Christian in this retelling of goings-on aboard HMS Bounty. It opened at the Piccadilly Theatre in July 1985, survived indifferent notices and stayed 526 performances without qualifying as a genuine hit. Admirers of the talented Essex will probably want it, but there’s a temptation to see it as Essex’s equivalent to Cliff Richards’s Heathcliffe. The score is becalmed in some of its sea-shanties and now and then pieces that sound like folk songs, but it soon goes aground (it’s very difficult not to make one’s swipes at this show nautical) in a plot that has Frank Finlay’s villainous Bligh progressing from sounding slightly round the bend to well out of his head. He sounds more Captain Hook than Lieutenant Bligh. Stopping off at Tahiti, where the music sounds just as the British would think Tahitian music should sound, Essex and a local dusky maiden (Sinitta Renet) sing a duet about Tahiti that is incredibly weak for the lovers’ big moment. The breakdown in the relationship between Fletcher and Bligh forces Essex to spend the rest of the score in soulful mood; disappointing for them both, especially as the two had sworn always to be friends in a song that promised ‘I’ll try to materialise the vision in your eyes.’ The sounds the record offers up are often glorious, but this isn’t a meaty score. It fizzles out curiously at its final number. Essex has many qualities, and it may be that he would make a good Fletcher Christian, probably in someone else’s musical.

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

Book music and lyrics by Rupert Holmes, suggested by the novel by Charles Dickens

Original Broadway cast: Betty Buckley, Cleo Laine, George Rose, Patti Cohenour, Howard McGillin, Stephen Glavin, George N. Martin, John Herrara, Jana Schneider, Joe Grifasi. Musical director: Michael Starobin

SONGS: There You Are; A Man Could Go Quite Mad; Two Kinsmen; Moonfall; The Wages Of Sin; Both Sides Of The Coin; Perfect Strangers; No Good Can Come From Bad; Never The Luck; The Name Of Love; Settling Up The Score; Off To The Races; Don’t Quit While You’re Ahead; The Garden Path To Hell; A Word From Your Chairman; Out On A Limerick (Various); Murderer’s Confession (Various); The Writing On The Wall

‘The Solve-It-Yourself Broadway Musical’ did not please London when it premiered at the Savoy Theatre in May 1987. It suffered from questionable casting (Ernie Wise and Lulu in leading roles) and was off after a brief stay, with no recording. Fortunately, the Broadway cast (December 1985, 608 performances) has the style and panache necessary to bring Rupert Holmes’ affectionate musical adaptation of the final Dickens novel to life. Perhaps Holmes’s achievement is to create his own flavoursome evocation of Victoriana, sometimes with a distinct echo of the music hall, and to make it work in a modern context. Compared to the lamentable ‘period’ material provided for many other much more successful musicals, The Mystery of Edwin Drood almost shines with authenticity. Much of the score is carefully attuned to the complex plot (which Dickens, through death, avoided sorting), with lyrics that mean little beyond the confines of their context. This points to an integrity that is thoroughly reflected in the quality of Holmes’s composition, carried through in his own very fine orchestrations. None of the songs have survived beyond the show, despite the loveliness of such pieces as ‘Moonfall’ (an exquisite performance from Patti Cohenour, who briefly took over the role of Rosa Bud in the London production, thereby displaying to the British cast how it should all have been done), and ‘Perfect Strangers’ (Cohenour duetting with Betty Buckley as Edwin Drood). Throughout, Holmes propels the story forward with dramatic flair, tailoring his material to each character. Cleo Laine shows as the dubious Princess Puffer what a loss she was to British musicals, whether enjoying the witty lyric of her introductory ‘The Wages Of Sin’ (with its final appeal to the audience to join in), or describing the scenery of ‘The Garden Path To Hell’. ‘Don’t Quite While You’re Ahead’, an almost Jerry Herman-like high-stepping number, has an immediate appeal in one of the few numbers that do not cling to the plot, but it is the curtain number, ‘The Writing On The Wall’, performed by Buckley, that takes the palm. Here, the fusion of lyric and music is thrilling indeed, bringing the show to a triumphant and deeply moving conclusion. With so much to offer, the mystery may not be Edwin Drood’s but rather why British audiences did not warm to it. I suspect that Holmes’s intricate effort was too much effort for its audiences, which were disinterested when asked (as they were at every performance) to nominate a murderer from the many suspects. The disc offers all the musical explanations of the final solution, so those wanting to make a profession of solving Dickens’ puzzle need look no further.

PARADE

Book by Alfred Uhry; co-conceived by Harold Prince

Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown

Original American cast: Brent Carver, Carolee Carmello, Kirk McDonald, Jessica Molaskey, Rufus Bonds Jr, John Hickok, Evan Pappas, Jeff Edgerton, Don Chastain, Christy Carlson Romano, Ray Aranha, Brooke Sunny Moriber, Randy Redd, Abbi Hutcherson, Emily Klein, Robin Skye, John Leslie Wolfe, Herndon Lackey, J. C. Montgomery, Angela Lockett, Rob Ashford, Will Gartshore, Bill Szobody. Musical director: Eric Stern

SONGS: The Old Red Hills Of Home; The Dream Of Atlanta; How Can I Call This Home; The Picture Show; Leo At Work/What Am I Waiting For?; I Am Trying To Remember; Big News!; Funeral: There Is A Fountain/ It Don’t Make Sense; Real Big News; You Don’t Know This Man; The Trial: People Of Atlanta; Twenty Miles From Marietta; Frankie’s Testimony; The Factory Girls/ Come Up To My Office; My Child Will Forgive Me; That’s What He Said; Leo’s Statement: It’s Hard To Speak My Heart; Summation And Cakewalk; A Rumblin’ And A Rollin’; Do It Alone; Pretty Music; Letter To The Governor; This Is Not Over Yet; Blues: Feel The Rain Fall; Where Will You Stand When The Flood Comes?; All The Wasted Time; Sh’ma

Anyone interested in the future of musical theatre will want to celebrate the occasion of Parade. It may be worrying that it could only find itself a short fixed American run at the prestigious Lincoln Theatre in December 1998 rather than producers who were willing to chance it on a Broadway soaked in poperettas of the Andrew Lloyd Webber school. But this first full theatre score from the young Jason Robert Brown marks a significant arrival, one that must surely flourish and develop into a major talent; as Clive Barnes noted in the New York Post ‘Parade is a defining moment in Broadway musical theatre’. The show’s musical director, Eric Stern, agreed to do it after hearing the opening Prologue, ‘The Old Red Hills Of Home’. Few would not be hooked by it, with its young, hopeful soldier full of patriotic fervour for his homeland echoed years later by his older, crippled self, before the ensemble adds its powerful voice to the original sentiment. The events on which the musical is based could not be darker. In 1913, Leo Frank, an unhappy Jew living in inhospitable Atlanta, is accused of strangling a young factory girl. His wife Lucille – whose relationship with Frank has become unsatisfactory – mounts a campaign to save him. His death sentence is commuted, but the mob takes Frank from prison and hangs him. Brown’s score showed a maturity unusual among the writers of the period: his music can do anything it needs to in a work that is at once highly complex and accessible. The device of the regular passing band is sparingly used to highlight the prejudices that colour this terrible story. Brown’s judgement of theatrical tempo deserves study. The dynamic of the music accompanying the victim’s pathetic funeral (‘It Don’t Make Sense’) spreads and grows from a sentimental wail to an outpouring of viciousness. The paltry remembrances of the little girl’s friends are painful to hear – painful because they are so trite, because her life lost was a life that had no future. The triumph of evil over good can be overpoweringly powerful, as at the end of the first act, when the jury’s guilty verdict is horrifyingly transformed into a mad cakewalk. The sureness of Brown’s idea strikes home - a score that can achieve this has greatness in its grasp. In fact, Brown is equally good at conveying the racial nastiness of his characters as he is with the traumatic affect on Frank and his wife. In these roles, Brent Carver and Carolee Carmello sound exactly as they should, but everyone here yields a first-rate performance. This front rank recording, made the day after the production closed, persuades us that Parade may indeed be a highly significant show.

PRETTYBELLE

Book and lyrics by Bob Merrill, adapted from the novel by Jean Arnold

Music by Jule Styne

Original pre-Broadway cast: Angela Lansbury, Mark Dawson, Peter Lombard, Bert Michaels, Michael Jason. Musical director: Milton Rosenstock

SONGS: Prettybelle; Manic Depressives; You Ain’t Hurtin’ Your Ole Lady None; You Never Looked Better; To A Small Degree; Back From The Great Beyond; How Could I Know?; I Never Did Imagine; In The Japanese Gardens; Individual Thing; I Met A Man; God’s Garden; The No-Tell Motel; I’m In A Tree; When I’m Drunk I’m Beautiful

There seems to be almost a conspiracy of silence around Bob Merrill and Jule Styne’s Prettybelle. Authoritative lists of Styne’s work often fail to recognise it. Jack Everly’s comprehensive recording of Styne’s overtures does not include or mention it. Lansbury’s biographical listings often avoid it. The Gramophone’s guide to musicals only lists it as one of Styne’s also-rans. In fact, Prettybelle’s producers pulled the plug on it after a Boston try-out in February 1971, cancelling its Broadway opening. The show would then have been completely lost to us, but in 1982 members of the original cast reassembled to record this most intriguing of Styne’s scores. As Peter Filichia in his first-class notes remarks ‘Styne was 65 at the time, Merrill was 50 – but they wrote with the vigour and unconventionality of younger men’. Yet this piece’s neglect is shameful. Why? There is no doubt that Prettybelle’s vastly uncomfortable subject matter killed it. Prettybelle Sweet is a manic depressive alcoholic schizophrenic in a Southern asylum, here telling her life story and her discovery of the benefits of ‘therapeutic rape’ after the death of a loathsome husband (he comes back to life). It was all too close to the truth about the human condition, a musical that did not hide its pain, notably in an opening number for Lansbury ‘Manic Depressives’ and a closing song for her that must have clinched the show’s distastefulness for many of the smart patrons, ‘When I’m Drunk I’m Beautiful’. Lansbury’s towering performance as Prettybelle is a testament to her status as one of Broadway’s finest leading ladies: she has ten numbers here, ranging from the almost unbearably touching ‘I’m In A Tree’ to two typically pulsing Styne songs ‘How Could I Know What Was Going On?’ (when she discovers her husband has persecuted blacks) and ‘I Met A Man’ with its perfectly wonderful Merrill lyric. And was ever the feeling of inadequate love caught better than in ‘To A Small Degree’? The various men have little to do, but do it very well (including a lovely, guitar accompanied title song from Michael Jason), and the gentlest of contributions from Peter Lombard singing the delicate ‘Individual Thing’, once intended for the score of Funny Girl. The wonder of this recording is that it never sounds like a reconstituted Frankenstein of a show that closed a decade earlier. The orchestra is fantastic, and the gathered chorus exemplary in all their contributions (listen to the uproarious ‘Back From The Great Beyond’ and the second act opener, ‘God’s Garden’ where ensemble and musicians combine to gorgeous effect). But audiences could not accept Prettybelle’s extraordinarily perceptive and revealing portrait of a certain type of sad and abused American woman. They rejected a daring masterpiece of their musical theatre. It lives on in this outstanding disc, even if the sound isn’t of the very finest.

SHERLOCK HOLMES

Book, music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, based on characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle

Original London cast: Ron Moody, Liz Robertson, Derek Waring, Julia Sutton, Roger Llewellyn, Eileen Battye, Colin Bennett, Terry Williams, James Francis-Johnston. Musical director: Ian Fraser

SONGS: Sherlock Holmes; Without Him There Can Be No Me; London Is London; Vendetta; Anything You Want To Know; Her Face; Men Like You; A Lousy Life; I Shall Find Her; No Reason; Halcyon Days; Down The Apples ‘N’ Pears; He’s Back; A Million Years Ago – Or Was It Yesterday?; The Best Of You, The Best Of Me

Audiences and critics sensibly rejected this attempt to set the most famous occupants of Baker Street musically capering through the West End in 1989. It is difficult to decide what Sherlock Holmes does most badly, but then it is the work of Leslie Bricusse – almost certainly the least talented of the British composers of musical theatre (a laurel probably shared with Cyril Ornadel) – whose achievements seldom rise above banality. Bringing Conan Doyle’s immortal detective to life, characterisation, music and lyrics are pretty desperate, with Ron Moody seriously miscast in the title role. Not for a moment does he suggest anything of the rare qualities of dear old Sherlock. Opposite him, as the daughter of Holmes’s arch-enemy Professor Moriaty, is Liz Robertson. She is short-changed as a heroine, having only one solo that turns out to be a reprise of one of Holmes’s pieces, but hers is not a voice to fall in love with. She is never convincing. Perhaps she and Moody should not be blamed, for they are obliged to sing such embarrassing stuff, including a dire and anachronistically disastrous duet ‘Men Like You’ and (poor Moody) a love song, ‘No Reason’, that beggars belief. It seems that if there is a possible rhyme to hand, Bricusse can never resist it. Derek Waring makes a dog-dull Watson, and delivers an excruciating duet with an old club bore, ‘Halcyon Days’ – the sort of number that puts people off musicals for ever: it should never have got beyond the composer’s piano. Julia Sutton is a strong-lunged Mrs Hudson, releasing an amazing number of decibels in her account of ‘A Lousy Life’, but words and music (the song goes on forever) are in bad need of an editor. The ensemble is frequently wheeled in to work up a frenzy as in the noisy ‘London Is London’ (the sort of song that thinks by repeating itself it must eventually work itself into the audience’s consciousness) or, posing as the relentlessly pert Baker Street Irregulars, ‘Anything You Want To Know’. Come to think of it, this is exactly the sort of British musical that gives the genre a bad name, despite the sleeve’s promise of ‘intellectual and entertaining cat-and-mouse games’. Intellectual indeed! Dishonesty in musicals always shows through.

SOMETHING'S AFOOT was an adaptation of Agatha Christie's famous old play Ten Little Niggers - always performed today under the more politically correct title of Ten Little Indians. Curiously, when this little American curiosity played its first performance before London at the Norwich Theatre Royal in June 1977, the fact that it was adapted from anything had been completely overlooked in the programme credits. Perhaps there had been problems with the Christie estate. The show opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the summer of 1977, directed and choreographed by Tony Tanner. It was a terrific fun piece, with a rare opportunity to appreciate the delights of diminutive Sheila Bernette, in tweeds and brogues, as the Miss Marple-like Miss Tweed. It was a part tailor-made for her. The rest of the cast was fascinating, too, and included Ruth Madoc as Lettie, Sally Smith as Hope Langdon, Robert Dorning as Dr Grayburn, Joyce Grant as Lady Grace Manley-Prowe, Peter Bayliss as Colonel Gillweather, Martin Smith as Geoffrey, Dudley Stevens as Nigel Rancour, and Peter Rutherford as Flint. A remarkable cast list! With Bernette, Bayliss and Grant on hand, there was never a doubt that the comedy would be played to the hilt and beyond. Among the understudies was Wendy Bowman [see also Unsung Heroines: Where are they now?]

The book, music and lyrics were by James McDonald, David Vos and Robert Gerlach, with additional music by Ed Linderman. It was a very physical production, with some clever and amusing stage-managed 'deaths' involving moving scenery and crashing chandeliers. Alas, there is no recording. The songs we are missing are as follows:

A Marvellous Weekend (Company)
Something's Afoot (Company)
Carry On (Miss Tweed and Ladies)
I Don't Know Why I Trust You (But I Do) (Hope and Geoffrey)
The Man With The Ginger Moustache (Lady Grace)
Suspicious (Company)
The Legal Heir (Nigel)
You Fell Out Of The Sky (Hope)
Dinghy (Lettie, Flint)
I Owe It All (to Agatha Christie) (Miss Tweed, Hope, Geoffrey)
New Day (Hope, Geoffrey)

It was a curious piece, with a score that was possibly quite insubstantial, and a company that - as each character was killed off - shrank as the evening progressed. Is it possible the show was ever recorded? Did somebody take a tape recorder along to the Ambassador's Theatre and under cover of darkness switch on? Was there a demo recording?

TWO CITIES

Book and lyrics by Jeff Wayne, based on Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’

Music by Jerry Wayne

Original London cast: Edward Woodward, Elizabeth Power, Kevin Colson, Nicolette Roeg, Leon Greene, Blake Butler. Musical director: Ian Macpherson

SONGS: The Best Of Times; Tender Love And Patience; Independent Man; What Would You Do; Look Alike; And Lucie Is Her Name; Golden-Haired Doll; Suddenly; The Time Is Now; The Machine Of Doctor Guillotine; Two Different People; Only A Fool; Will We Ever Meet Again?; Knitting Song; Long Ago; It’s A Far, Far Better Thing

Read and wonder! In his enthusiastic sleeve note, Ralph Harvey claims that ‘Two Cities may well become a standard in the world of musical theatre.’ Originally slated, years before its emergence, to star Keith Michell as Sydney Carton and Margaret Burton as Marie Antoinette, the Waynes’s attempt at another Dickensian musical reached London starring Edward Woodward (as Carton), without a sign of the operatic Miss Burton, and with a cast of British dependables who could do little to disguise the appalling material handed to them. Anachronistic and derivative at every turn, Two Cities showed an uncanny knack of avoiding no pitfalls and embracing any commonplace, culminating in a truly terrible number for Woodward as he climbed the scaffold to the strains of the cunningly titled ‘It’s A Far, Far Better Thing’. Woodward sounds as if he is taking it all far, far too seriously, when it is actually a far, far worse thing… Elizabeth Power sounds sweet enough as Lucy (a role Anna Dawson auditioned for), with strong support from Kevin Colson. Woodward’s Nelson Eddy tones make for a curiously solid Carton, but the score does offer a few dim compensations, among them Power’s predictable solos and a lively ‘The Machine Of Doctor Guillotine’ for the screaming groupies of Mme Defarge (an under-employed Nicolette Roeg, brought in to replace the originally cast Marie Burke, who may have thought it better to stay at home and catch up on some chores). There is also the ‘Knitting Song’, a stirring item in a mainly mundane score. For stoic grandeur, Colson and Power’s duet ‘Two Different People’ is everything we expect it would be, as is the Waynes’s ingenuous bid for a hit in the throbbing but basic ‘Only A Fool’. Mistaken attempts at humour occasionally break in, notably in the witless introductory number for Carton, ‘Independent Man’. There is something inherently awful about the whole enterprise (44 performances at the Palace Theatre, opened February 1969) and it is not sympathetically recorded here, with grafted-on ‘pop’ acoustics for Woodward’s big solo.

How pleasant it would be to be able to review recordings of two other interesting musicals - one British, one American - that delighted in mystery, mayhem and (dealing now in multiples) murder. Unfortunately, neither JACK THE RIPPER or SOMETHING'S AFOOT have available recordings.

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