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1955 Although it was beginning to glide through a Golden Age, the British musical endured a year of short runs. Modesty cloaked whatever thrust its head above the parapet. The final Vivian Ellis - A. P. Herbert collaboration, The Water Gipsies, was a pleasantly ambling everyday story of canal folk enlivened by Dora Bryan. The score was strongly rustic, as if the composers wanted audiences to take deep breaths of fresh air. The approach was catching. Wild Thyme was another 'fresh-air' show, with music by Donald Swann and a book by Philip Guard, about a prima donna who falls in love with a railway porter. Geoffrey Wright, the prolific composer of so much intimate revue music (and of the song 'Transatlantic Lullaby'), finally wrote a score for a musical that reached London, but The Burning Boat, a very small-scale piece about an unsuccessful love affair in a sleepy English seaside town during a music festival, didn't succeed. The Buccaneer found a wider audience, confirming Sandy Wilson's reputation as an intelligent writer of British musicals. It also began making a star of Kenneth Williams in his only stage musical. Eric Maschwitz was still coming up with the goods, now with a musical on the life of Dvorak that made use of the composer's music. Strongly cast and sporting some good lyrics and musical arrangements, Summer Song was tasteful and even beautiful, but not to the public's liking. The second Maschwitz effort of the year was the much less successful Romance in Candlelight. Nobody - except, possibly, the cast - took it seriously. Based on a hoary old comedy that people had stopped laughing at years before, it starred the erstwhile leading lady of Summer Song, Sally Ann Howes There was a disappointing run, too, for the appealing A Girl Called Jo, a musical from the Peter Myers stable based on the novels of Louisa M. Alcott. The show was skilfully assembled and had the advantage of Joan Heal as Jo, Marion Grimaldi, Denis Quilley and a host of excellent players. Less splendid but equally interesting was Twenty Minutes South, another little show sent in from the Players Theatre. It marked the West End debut of a promising young composer, Peter Greenwell and his librettist Maurice Browning. They did for English suburbia what Betty Comden and Adolph Green had done for New York, but the show was too hybrid for the public taste. Straight from the Edwardian nursery came a little Vivian Ellis musical for children, Listen to the Wind, strong evidence of Ellis's fixation with innocent fare; it had a pretty score. Curiously, two different adaptations of the old comedy Caste (both retained the original title) opened on the same night at Worthing and Windsor. The Worthing version would reach London the next year as the disastrous She Smiled at Me. John Morley's May Fever had Anona Winn and an early appearance by Eileen Gourlay at a club theatre. Other small fringe musicals included Love is News and Soho So What? The surprise hit of the year, a revue called La Plume de ma Tante, ran longer than all the British musicals of the season laid end to end. Binnie Hale's farewell to the musical stage in The Punch Revue went almost unnoticed, and was soon packed away. From Here and There was an attempt at mixing English and American material. Directed by a master of the revue form, Laurier Lister, it didn't impress. Ahead of its time, the 'cavalcade of negro song and dance' Jazz Train had Edric Connor, Bertice Reading and the always undervalued Isabelle Lucas to brag about, but it couldn't gain a hold. The variety revue had much more luck, notably Such is Life with Al Read, Shirley Bassey and Jack Tripp, and Meet Me on the Corner, in which Max Bygraves was partnered by an ingenue who would never fulfil her promise in the British musical, Louie Ramsay. Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper went vaguely Parisian for a Folies Bergeres revue, Paris by Night. American musicals represented all the blockbusters. Full of Eastern promise came the visually and musically opulent Kismet. The Pajama Game, a work packed with excellent songs, bore all the marks of youthful enthusiasm but was slightly hampered by having Edmund Hockridge as its romantic lead. Joy Nichols and Max Wall joined in, and the show ran for eighteen months. Wonderful Town was not made quite so welcome. Pat Kirkwood and Shani Wallis translated the transatlantic style to the British equivalent. When Kirkwood vanished towards the end of the run her place was taken by her seventeen year old understudy Judy (later Judith) Bruce, who kept the curtain up until the show closed. |