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On stage, Wildest Dreams proved Reynolds's abilities as a
comic actress, immortalised on the long-playing recording in
her duet with her (real-life) husband Angus Mackay, 'I'm Holding
My Breath'. As with all recordings of Slade's shows, the singing
is of variable quality. Dawson, in her only major recording,
has a fine air of gamin charm. Slade's score is not for the faint-hearted,
and its only concession to modernity (a rock'n'roll attempt at
a title number) is perhaps intentionally juvenile. Nevertheless,
the generous list of songs includes a magical duet that reeks
of summer days ('Girl On The Hill'), the irresistibly jaunty
'There's A Place I Know' and, an anthem to naiveté, Dawson's
musings on her surroundings when sitting in 'A Man's Room'. The
sentiments of this number, about a girl in awe of a man's world,
alone make the show difficult to revive today. I mean to say,
a song a young girl sings to a shoe?
I never imagined
Whenever we meet
A man has a bedtime
A man has to eat
And a man can escape
And his shoes are the shape
Of his feet
[and later]
Unseen and alone
He puts down a cup
And replaces a book
The wrong way up.
This is almost Proustian in its attention to the minutiae
of life. Could there be a more humdrum lyric? But the words deal
in specifics. It isn't so much a love song (even if sung to a
shoe) as a song of wonder, an entrée to sexual attraction.
This is fly-on-the wall stuff. It might pass as the nearest the
British musical ever gets to German expressionism. >>> |
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Ultimately, and I think it has never been recognised, Wildest
Dreams is a show that in its richest moments exudes a deep sense
of love. It is there in 'The Days Go By', in which life and death
are seen as fleeting moments beside the everlasting nature of
people's surroundings. That desperate sense of love has another
manifestation in 'When You're Not There', a song in the grand
tradition of such other Slade-Reynolds numbers as 'I'd Like To
Be Like You' (from Free as Air) and 'Two Fools' and 'The One
Who Isn't There' (both from Trelawny). The thesis of these songs
is that to be in love is to be totally transfixed on the object
of adoration. The lover needs to know what it is to be the other
person, to understand and inhabit that world (after all, that
is the key to 'A Man's Room'). Without the other person, there
is no reason for being. In 'When You're Not There' this could
hardly be more forcibly expressed
When you're not there
My life is bare
My work's a chore
And fun's a bore
I wonder what the daily round is for
When you're not there.
This is set to a gradually climbing melody that falls dramatically
in that final line. It gives the song a heart-rending quality
that marks Slade out as a composer of tremendous feeling. The
lovers agree that
I'm only half aware
When you're not there.
There couldn't be a more complete admission of love. They
are hopeless without one another. >>> |
