1961

Of the new British musicals, the first collaboration of Leslie Bricusse and actor Anthony Newley (who also starred as an Everyman character caled Littlechap), gave signs that there might be new developments. In fact, Stop the World - I Want to Get Off proved the most bearable of their works, with a strong score and a format that was at once simple and striking. Afterwards, the team tended to repeat themselves to less effect, and Newley became more difficult to take as a performer. The show ran a year, and then succeeded on Broadway. The other productions were a disappointment. Belle, a skilful retelling of the story of Dr Crippen and his (supposed) murder of his wife, Cora, and his love affair with Ethel Le Neve, had much to commend it. With a clever use of the show-within-a-show device, a cast of veteran musical actors and a score that stayed just on the side of music-hall pastiche, the piece should have had a great success, but there was a sense of outrage at the subject matter. Belle didn't survive the criticism. The last of the Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds musicals, Wildest Dreams had a slim storyline and one of the most parochial atmospheres of the team's work. It seemed an extraordinary occurrence in the West End of 1961, but there were moments of beauty for those prepared to appreciate them. Critically dismissed, the public didn't take the show up either, and the writers moved on to separate careers. Slade himself directed a new production of his more welcome Salad Days, presented for a Christmas season. We're Just Not Practical at Stratford East and a musical version of Jane Eyre at Windsor didn't move on. Revue flourished. There was demand enough to keep a lively example of it called On the Brighter Side going for almost six months, but the show probably deserved even longer. Its material was good, and the cast, including Ronnie Barker, Stanley Baxter and Betty Marsden, first-class. A follow-up to the successful Pieces of Eight, One Over the Eight again had the advantage of Kenneth Williams and some intelligent stuff in it. It ran a year. Rather more old-fashioned but topical was one of the final Peter Myers-stable revues, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, but the sketches suggested such pieces were running out of steam. Millicent Martin, Joan Sims and Ronnie Stevens starred. On the Avenue, another smart little revue, didn't linger, and another, Out of My Mind couldn't manage to get beyond Hammersmith. The revue of the season was Beyond the Fringe in which four young men, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, stormed to immediate stardom. The cast of four and its new approach to comedic material was more writing on the wall for the future of the little revue. It was significant, too, that the show had almost no musical content. American musicals did not lessen their grip. A symbolic, small-scale musical about man's relationship with the elements and the puzzling facts of love, The Fantasticks was destined for a phenomenally long run on Broadway (at the time of writing it is still playing) but was off in London after a few weeks. Peter Gilmore and Stephanie Voss, two of the most agreeable young players in British musicals of the period, did their best. Bye, Bye Birdie was amusing enough, but the production - made up of mostly British players with its original New York leading lady, Chita Rivera - didn't really establish itself. Casting was even more of a problem with Do Re Mi. It had never been the best work of either its composer Jule Styne or its librettists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, but in America it had stormed its way to success via the outstanding personalities of its stars, Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker. London got Max Bygraves and Maggie Fitzgibbon, who seemed unable to do anything with it. The trick of combining American and British stars was worked better in The Music Man. Sadly, London didn't get the chance to see Robert Preston as the con-man Professor Harold Hill teaching innocent Iowa the benefits of 'Seventy-Six Trombones'; the part was played by the less exciting Van Johnson, but he did get a British actress, Patricia Lambert, to play opposite, and Miss Lambert could hardly have been bettered. The Music Man had a decent run of a year. Eclipsing all its American companions, Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music had a lacklustre cast mostly made up of unknowns, as if the producers were not in the least troubled about how the show would turn out. It ran and ran.

 

RETURN TO YEAR BY YEAR