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1957 A fascinating year for admirers of the British musical. There was an air of general disappointment surrounding Free as Air, the Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds musical that followed Salad Days, but the score was Slade at his best. The show ran a year. Everything else was commercially a long way behind. Zuleika, a literate and charming version of Max Beerbohm's novella, provided one of the most alluring of prospects, but was bedevilled by casting problems. Its composer never ventured another London score. Harmony Close made it to Hammersmith and proved a noisy, modern but mostly rather vapid enterprise with some nice company members but a score from Ronnie Cass that didn't sound very bothered to impress. A 'Victorian' comedy, Meet Me by Moonlight, had oodles of charm and a some delightful songs of the period, with Jeremy Brett as the young romantic interest, but didn't really qualify as a musical. From Bristol came a Swiss piece, Oh! My Papa!, in a production that its original Bristol director claimed he couldn't recognise. It had a notorious first night at the Garrick, and expired after a few weeks, leaving only Eddie Calvert to blow out the title song on his golden trumpet. Peter Greenwell wrote the music to Gordon Snell's libretto for Antarctica, intended as a companion piece to the previous year's one-act The Three Caskets. It had a cast of Players Theatre favourites including Marion Grimaldi, Julia Sutton and Bernard Cribbins, but it wasn't seen again. The American hit was Damn Yankees, the second show by the authors of The Pajama Game. Although there was some dissension about the play's worth, it had a healthy run with a cast that included Betty Paul, Bill Kerr and Ivor Emmanuel. Janet Blair played the lead in the Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green Bells are Ringing. She made a poor susbstitute for Broadway's Judy Holliday, and the stage of the Coliseum didn't look very hospitable for so mid-size a show. America, surprisingly, contributed the biggest clinker of the year in The Crystal Heart, a show that had already flopped (with a different cast) in New York. Gladys Cooper starred in the London production, which was all but laughed off the stage - a sad fate for one of the most beguiling of shows of the period, with an extraordinary score. The world of intimate revue received at once a shot in the arm and a knock-back with the enormous success of At the Drop of a Hat, when managements realised they might as well dispense with difficult and costly actors and pricey backcloths and get the writers to simply perform the stuff themselves on a bare stage. Unfortunately, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann used the occasion to throw out most of their true 'revue' material in favour of a host of parlour songs, but there was no denying their huge popularity with middle-class British audiences. A quirky revue by Bamber Gascoigne, Share my Lettuce, had a style all its own, and was a rare opportunity to see Maggie Smith trying out the genre opposite its leading man Kenneth Williams. Throughout the show, each cast member was identified by their own colour of costume. From Ireland came Milo O'Shea in a revue that roused some interest, The Dublin Pike Follies, but it didn't transfer from Hammersmith. |