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1963 A rich variety of the good, bad and ugly was on view, and the British musical scored in all categories. Half a Sixpence was more than a personal triumph for its star, Tommy Steele - it was also a tuneful and mostly tasteful piece with a score from David Heneker that sounded like one of the best for years, even if its generous helping of Cockney capers did become tiresome. It also seemed to open the way to much more of the same thing in other shows. Pickwick, a piece of much less quality, was enormously helped to success by its star, Harry Secombe, but the score was depressingly poor, and the high jinks seemed very manufactured. The show generated a highly irritating song 'If I Ruled The World'. Fenella Fielding made another bid for stage stardom in So Much To Remember, cowritten by Fielding and Johnny Whyte, with music by Stanley Myers. The public stayed away. The cleverest British musical of the year was undoubtedly the Mermaid's Virtue in Danger, a delightful Restoration romp with a very fine score by Paul Dehn and James Bernard. The cast was excellent, too, including Patricia Routledge, Jane Wenham and Barrie Ingham, but the richness of the songs found little response. It seemed that intelligence in British musicals didn't pay off, when a trumpery piece such as Pickwick could go on to geriatric status. The collaboration of Peter Greenwell and Peter Wildeblood that had seemed so brilliantly promising in The Crooked Mile fizzled out in obscurity with a Russian piece, House of Cards, which was almost totally ignored and had a speedy West End death. The Man in the Moon was really a pantomime in modern disguise, starring Charlie Drake at the Palladium, but it did have a completely original score that didn't disgrace itself. Of the out-of-town musicals, Julian Slade's Nutmeg and Ginger, based on The Knight of the Burning Pestle, was typically charming, and at Farnham Bob Harris, the original Troppo of Salad Days, was given a production of his musical Our Boys. Theatre Workshop's What Goes Up stayed at Stratford. It was The Perils of Scobie Prilt, from Julian More and Monty Norman, that seemed more likely to get to London. Peter Brook directed a fascinating cast that included Nyree Dawn Porter, pop singer Mike Sarne, Cockney actor Arthur Mullard and Nigel Davenport, but there was no West End showing. Imported musicals didn't have complete success, either. Frank Loesser's brilliant satire on the world of big business, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was warmly received, and ran over a year with a superb, mostly British, cast. Beginning an even longer run, the Roman comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum didn't rely too much on its score; it didn't need to, with a cast of comics headed by Frankie Howerd, who enjoyed a huge revival of popularity in the starring role. The more solid and established fare of Rodgers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse had a disappointing run, despite a good British cast (among it Ronnie Corbett, Bob Monkhouse, Maggie Fitzgibbon, Denis Quilley and Lynn Kennington), and a circus piece, Carnival, imported in the hope of repeating a huge Broadway success, was a dismal failure when the British cast (with the exception of the male comedy lead) tackled it. It represented the only West End appearances for its female leads. Following the death of his collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers was his own lyricist for No Strings, another American show where the casting seemed to have slightly been done on the cheap. Nobody objected to it, or much cared for it. The hoot of the year was a disaster called Pocahontas in which the American Anita Gillette made her British debut. The score was recorded but the tapes were put in the vaults when the show collapsed in disarray after its first full week. Surprisingly, the Italian import Enrico was allowed to hang around for a couple of months. Revues carried on, sometimes responding to the new waves washing the shores and sometimes carrying on as if nothing had happened. Alan Melville and Charles Zwar's enterprising All Square belonged to the ostrich-in-the-sand school of revue, with an elegantly dressed opening and closing number, sketches and lampooning sequences (there was a pastiche of the Lionel Bart musical playing next door, Blitz!, called Blast!), but even its glorious star Beryl Reid couldn't make it stay. Cambridge Circus was a Cambridge University Footlights revue brought in in the wake of Beyond the Fringe. Much more of a welcome was extended to Peter Bridge's production Six of One, a brilliant concept that told, in semi-fictionalised form, the career of its star Dora Bryan. Miss Bryan proved as adorable as ever, and there was a long run. Much smaller and considerably less hopeful despite its asking-for-trouble title, Barry Cryer's revue See You Inside was full of good players, including Hugh Paddick, Jon Pertwee and Moyra Fraser, but the trick didn't work. |