| RETURN |
|
|
|
|
1956 The great British musical success of the year was undoubtedly Grab Me a Gondola, an unsophisticated but lively piece guying the antics of a Hollywood film actress (Joan Heal). A young company won over the public and helped the show to a long run. Nothing else came near it in the commercial stakes. Jubilee Girl involved Fenella Fielding and Maureen Quinney in a musical by Robin Fordyce and David Rogers that seemed to some critics to be a blown-up intimate revue. Six weeks saw it out. Two other shows had even shorter runs. There was a piece of Scots whimsy out of J. M. Barrie's The Little Minister from the ageing impresario and writer Jack Waller, who used some of the music of his dead collaborator, Joe Tunbridge, to patch together a score. Wild Grows the Heather was a Frankenstein's monster of styles, and found no favour. Jean Kent and Peter Byrne barely had time to take their coats off before She Smiled at Me collapsed. A Cicely Courtneidge vehicle, Star Maker, lasted out a short tour and folded. More promising were two fringe musicals. The Three Caskets was a one-act operetta by the composer of Twenty Minutes South, Peter Greenwell. Staged at the Players, it never got into the West End, even when Greenwell wrote a companion piece for it (Antarctica) to make up a full evening. A different fate awaited Chrysanthemum, which would turn up in a revised production, and with a starrier cast, in London two years later. The Comedy of Errors, with music by Julian Slade, played at the Arts. Originally written for a television production, the operetta was here directed by Lionel Harris with a cast that included Patricia Routledge, Jane Wenham, Bernard Cribbins and James Maxwell. At Oxford, The Comedy of Errors appeared as a 'musical comedy' devised by Peter Wood with music by David King. A 'music fantasy' by Ronald Bullock, Cloudcuckooland had a run at the New Lindsey, and at the ADC in Cambridge there was a 'musical frivolity' by John Davidson (the same Davidson who subsequently played small roles in Julian Slade musicals?) called Cocktail Styx. From America came Fanny, Harold Rome's adaptation of Maurice Pagnol's trilogy, but it was far from ideally cast. It had two of the most mis-matched men of the period - Robert Morley and Ian Wallace. The show didn't take off. Plain and Fancy, about the goings-on in an Amish community, was not top-drawer Broadway either, and had a limited appeal, but its score was pleasant enough. In revue, For Amusement Only was another commercial success for Peter Myers and his co-writers, its run even approaching that of the Crazy Gang's These Foolish Kings. A tiny revue called Trevallion was swallowed whole at the Palace. United Notions with Tommy Trinder had a brief stay. A Flanders-Swann revue, Fresh Airs, was directed by Laurier Lister and had a cast that included some of the favourites of Airs on a Shoestring. It was Cranks that proved small-scale revue still had real life in it, and could be re-invented. The invention of the choreographer John Cranko, the show had a fine score by John Addison, and helped the careers of two of its cast of four, Annie Ross and Anthony Newley. Its success with the public was limited; audiences seemed nervous of so off-beat and at times disturbing entertainment. |