- SHIRLEY SANDS
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- It would have been good to hear more from this strong-voiced
but under-employed leading lady. She did two American musicals
in London, and that was that
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- Look at a photograph of Shirley Sands, and there is real
strength there. She looks like a lady who could have got wherever
she wanted to go, but I don't think she did. It is unlikely that
many people remember her today. She shared the same fate as her
co-star in one American musical - one chance and you're back
on the shelf.
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- She was a Londoner by birth, but removed herself from the
theatrical hub by living in Somerset, studying ballet in Taunton
and making her debut in a Bristol pantomime when she was twelve.
She grew from girlhood to womanhood through two more pantos in
Blackpool, and then got a job with a comic, Dave Morris, in the
chorus of an unpromisingly named touring revue Pull Up At Dave's.
It sounds pretty terrible (what used to be called low comedy)
but at least Sands was raised from the chorus to the show's soubrette.
More giddy heights were reached when, at sixteen, she was recruited
into the Royal Kiltie Juniors, and with these fearless juveniles
she toured extensively abroad. Again, she had got into the chorus,
but her special talents were spotted and before long she was
singing solos, conducted, and played the bagpipes and xylophone.
When she returned to England, she decided to stop working and
studied singing for a year.
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- Her London debut, and her first musical, was the American
Green-Comden-Styne show Bells Are Ringing at the Coliseum in
November 1957. She was only in the chorus, but when leading lady
Janet Blair left the cast and Julie Wilson took over, Sands became
her understudy. Perhaps she got to play the role a few times.
Wilson encouraged her stand-in to get cabaret work, still to
be had in abundance in London in the late 1950s. Sands began
working in TV, singing with the likes of Acker Bilk, Tommy Steele
and Ted Ray, establishing herself as one of that already dying
race, the band-singer. But Bells Are Ringing didn't lead immediately
to another musical - something of a mystery, because she had
a big, expansive voice and startling (some might say frightening)
good looks. Instead, she cabaret-toured the world, and in 1962
washed up in a summer season on Jersey.
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- Shirley Sands run through with
swords by James Mitchell in Carnival
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- Did she audition for the musical Carnival, produced in London
in 1963, or did Binkie Beaumont (the presiding genius of the
show's management H. M. Tennent) telephone to offer her the second
female lead? Did she fall or was she pushed? Carnival gave Sands
some good opportunities to show her stuff, notably in an amusing
duet about her unfaithful partner ('Humming'), and a duet with
the unfaithful partner ('It Was Always You') during which he
locked her in a box and put swords through her. In Sands' dramatic
reprise of the song she proved she could belt it out, but she
was never seen again in a musical, and Carnival was a disaster.
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- Perhaps she needed a better agent. In 1963 she was on the
books of Gaston and Andree, an ex-music hall act who had won
fame as 'living sculptures' - one of their noted items was 'Rebecca
at the Well'. The list of their clients doesn't inspire confidence.
They included the Skating Valentines, the Mambo Aces, Del and
Dorian, and, rather worryingly, 'Miss Fluffles'. In such company,
Miss Sands must have seemed the epitome of sophistication.
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- Select discography
- Carnival (Original London cast recording)
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