|
The sleeve of the long-playing record, a coloured drawing
of the 'girl on a hill' surrounded by sheikhs, jiving teenagers
and a speeding white sports car, is a gem in itself. It is one
of the most irresistible ever to be published, and exudes the
exact atmosphere of its show. I suspect that Wildest Dreams has
much more content and beauty than many other Slade scores, even
if after the breadth of Free As Air it seemed at the time to
represent a diminution of his capabilities. Could it, after some
revision, be revived? Su Pollard in the Dorothy Reynolds role
of the eccentric aunt? John Barrowman on the heels of John Baddeley?
Meanwhile, those in search of the essence of a certain kind of
British musical theatre cannot afford to neglect this last gasp
of Slade-Reynolds magic.
Why, then, has Wildest Dreams been so consistently overlooked
or dismissed as not being worthy of consideration? Beyond Anna
Dawson, recruited after supporting roles in the team's Free As
Air (she understudied the female chorus) and Hooray For Daisy!,
there isn't a singer in sight. John Baddeley, a competent character
actor who has had a long career in radio drama but whose vocal
prowess doesn't extend beyond hitting the notes, will never be
confused with John Reardon. Reynolds and Mackay as the comedy
pair have no voices, either. But this lack of outstanding singing
talent in the cast is one of the distinguishing marks of a Slade-Reynolds
piece. They eschewed stars; it was always the show, even as the
series ran down, that took the light.
But it is seldom recognised that their work is essentially
thematic, following an argument that found its perfect last expression
in Wildest Dreams. An escape from reality was at the heart of
everything. In Salad Days, people find they can escape from the
humdrum demands of life in Britain in the mid-1950s by dancing
to a piano with magic properties, and the young couple at the
heart of the story flout convention by marrying first and falling
in love afterwards. In Free As Air, a rich young heiress flees
from London to the peace of a remote Channel island, a place
where she hopes to find 'Nothing But Sea And Sky', while the
island girl, Molly, longs to escape from the island to the social
life of the mainland until - at final curtain- she decides she
belongs to the island. >>> |
|
In Follow That Girl a Victorian miss attempts to escape her
pursuing ill-chosen suitors and the confining constrictions of
the age, and in Hooray For Daisy! English villagers break away
by staging a pantomime and climbing a beanstalk.
Finally, in Wildest Dreams, we have an absolute distillation
of all that has gone before. It is the smallest of the shows,
with only four roles with anything much to sing, and takes us
into the heartland of comfortable, upper middle-class rural Britain,
where the only 'views' held by its inhabitants seem to be of
the surrounding beauty (as expressed in 'The Days Go By'). But
these people dream. Carol Arden escapes the boredom of teenage
frustration by accepting an invitation to ride off in a sports
car with the usually meek composer Stephen Bent. She dreams of
being taken off into the desert on a white camel by a testosterone-proud
sheikh (Baddeley in robes of saffron). Her Aunt Harriet dreams
of a Private Lives-type romantic assignation in the frame of
the French windows with the meek Stephen Bent transformed into
a commanding lover, a moment delightfully caught in 'I'm Holding
My Breath'. (Strangely, most people I play this to seem to think
it is a straight number.) At a party, a pop singer croons about
love beyond his wildest dreams (providing a title song with piano
backing that sounds as if it was made up on the spot) in a show
that incorporates fantasy within the context of settled parochialism.
In fact, Wildest Dreams is so quaint as to be almost subversive:
one of the most successful attempts to introduce surrealism into
the British musical. It unsettled critics, who could only see
it as yet another effort by Slade and Reynolds to mine the vein
of light, unsophisticated comedy for which they had earned a
misunderstood reputation. The argument can always be made that
it is indeed the most inconsequential of entertainments, but
its solidity, its strangely haunting score, and its creation
of a firmly delineated social picture that will never completely
vanish, define it as an important achievement in British musical
theatre. And how could one expect newspaper critics to cope with
this? >>> |
