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Michael Aldridge
 
Never the handsome leading man, Michael Aldridge was best in character roles, and played a good number of them in Salad Days. He went on to other shows, not always by Julian Slade, and ended his musical shenanigans in a rare disaster by Andrew Lloyd Webber
 
His is not a name that we would immediately remember in the same breath as British musicals, but Michael Aldridge did his bit. He was born in Glastonbury, Somerset on 9 September 1920 and educated in Norfolk, at Gresham's School in Holt.
 
 
Millicent Martin gazing at our Michael wearing a silly hat in State of Emergency
 
His career was at first over just as it started. He played at the Palace Theatre, Watford in Terence Rattigan's play French Without Tears in August 1939, not the most propitious timing. It was September 1946 before he could pick up his career, appearing in another straight play, gloomily titled This Way To The Tomb, at the Garrick Theatre. After establishing himself in repertory, he came to the Old Vic in 1949, playing an assortment of classical roles, and his life in musicals didn't start until 1954.
 
It should never have begun, because he wasn't in the original Bristol Old Vic production of Salad Days. When the show unexpectedly transferred to London, he was brought into the company, and stayed with it at the Vaudeville Theatre for the best part of three years, playing what seem in retrospect to have been somewhat thankless roles (a dour Minister of Pleasure and Pastime; Mr Dawes; Police Inspector and (the best comedy part) the camp Ambrose. He didn't get anything to sing beyond some bits and pieces, most of the numbers going to James Cairncross, the 'other' character actor on a Salad Days contract. Come to think of it, Aldridge was never offered much to sing in any of the shows he did. No one was going to mistake him for Howard Keel.
 
 
Aldridge (centre) pontificates in Free As Air with (left) Roy Godfrey and (right) Howard Goorney
 
When he did leave Salad Days in 1957 it was to go into the follow-up Slade-Reynolds show, Free As Air. He may have been misled, as was the rest of the cast, by the tremendous success of the pre-London tour, for when the production opened at the Savoy Theatre in June, it was generally agree d that something hadn't quite worked. Nevertheless, it was Slade's best work. As Lord Paul Posthumous Aldridge had a fair part in the proceedings, but nothing to sing except some more bits and pieces, even if these contained possibly the best number of the evening, 'Let The Grass Grow', done as a trio. There was a year's run to be had out of Free As Air, and Aldridge returned to straight theatre, working consistently without becoming a star.
 
Musicals had to wait until May 1962 when he played James O'Shaughnessy in State of Emergency at the Pembroke Theatre, Coventry. It was no reflection on the piece that shortly after this the theatre closed down. A satire on the United Nations organisation, the show was set in a Latin-American republic, with Aldridge as a U.N. representative. Others mixed up in it were Millicent Martin, playing the representative's wife, and Roberta D'Esti (memorably the heroine of The Wayward Way). Theatre World soberly reported that 'Mr Alridge had most of the work, appearing alternately before the Assembly and in the Republic'. There didn't seem much chance of stardom with notices like that. During the proceedings, Mr Aldridge had to wear a very silly hat.
 
State of Emergency had only just shut up shop when another one came along - in fact, another Slade show, Vanity Fair. Now adrift from his regular writing partner Dorothy Reynolds, Slade and his collaborators couldn't convince critics that their idea had worked. Aldridge, cast as the loathsome Lord Steyne had an ungrateful and unsympathetic (in all senses) role, in which there was little chance of making an impression, and he had nothing much to sing, principally some lines in one of the more successful numbers 'How To Live Well On Nothing a Year'. Vanity Fair closed down in a few weeks. In 1972, he was cast as Lockit in a production of The Beggar's Opera at Chichester, fulfilling an almost-essential part of every musical actor's brief (i.e. play in a revival of The Beggar's Opera).
 
The best, and perhaps the worst, happened in 1975, when Aldridge landed the title role in the much-heralded Alan Ayckbourn-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical from P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves. He had nothing much worthwhile to do in this one, either, even if his role was over the marquee, and the score didn't offer him anything worth having. Closing rapidly after a critical thumbs down, the show was many years later revived in another form by the writers. It didn't matter to Aldridge, because his days in musicals were done.
 
There was a long career in films, on stage and television, including a stint in the long-running BBC TV series Last Of The Summer Wine in which he memorably played Seymour Utterthwaite, joining the established company on the programme in 1985. When Michael Aldridge died in early 1994 the Times obituary seemed to strike the right note when it remembered that 'In everything he did, if never a big name, he was a professional to his fingertips'.
 
Selected Discography
Original cast recordings of
Salad Days
Free as Air
Jeeves
 
 

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