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1966 A year bedevilled by short runs and critical brickbats, the only successful British musical was a surprise: Come Spy With Me, a clever little vehicle for the female impersonator Danny La Rue. Supported by Barbara Windsor and a cast of British veterans, Bryan Blackburn's show - even if it didn't have much of a score - proved that British musicals could still work. But a sense of what the British musical should be was still mystifying. Come Spy With Me lasted just over a year. The Match Girls arrived in London, led by a spunky leading performance from Vivienne Martin as the leader of the striking factory workers at the Bryant and May matchworks. The creation of Bill Owen and Tony Russell, this was something quite new in British musicals, with a striking jazz-orientated score and a strongly choreographic production by Gillian Lynne. It, too, suffered from too many Cockney bumps-a-daisy numbers, but it had much to commend it. None of it was enough to get a run. Later in the year, another musical on the same theme came along in Strike a Light! Beyond bringing back Jean Carson back to London, it had the benefit of Evelyn Laye and John Fraser in other leading roles. More colourful and less gloomy than The Match Girls it had an even shorter run. Jean Carson sang a song from the show on British television to help the thing along, but Strike a Light! had closed the night before. Brought into London by Bernard Delfont as a personal favour to its composer and star, Joey Joey was a brilliantly attractive account of the life of the Regency clown Joseph Grimaldi. Vivienne Martin played opposite Moody, for whom the show's collapse was a real blow. The creators of Robert and Elizabeth followed it with a relentlessly 'modern' piece about the GCE examinations, On the Level. It was a show manufactured for London at its most swinging, but the score, although ambitious, was a bit of a mess. It closed quickly and heavily in the red. Harold Fielding concocted another coach-party pleaser in a musical about Harry Houdini, but Man of Magic didn't hold together, and had an incompetent score from Wilfred Wylam. It was a chance for stardom for Stuart Damon as Houdini and Judith Bruce as his wife Bess but, despite a production that incorporated some of Houdini's scariest illusions, this 'musical fantasy' was added to the year's failures. It was all hunting pink for Jorrocks, a piece taken from the novels of Surtees with a towering central performance by Joss Ackland as the vulgar but big-hearted hero of the title. David Heneker's songs were often very appealing, and there was good work from the principals (among them Thelma Ruby, Paul Eddington and Cheryl Kennedy) but the usual Cockney capers muddied the waters a little. Anyway, the public didn't seem ready for a musical about fox-hunting. The extinction of revue seemed imminent. A Ben Bagley inspired example, The Decline and Fall of the Entire World as Seen Through the Eyes of Cole Porter had the longest title and the shortest of runs. Another attempt at interesting London in university comedians, Four Degrees Over was a four-hander that entertained for a couple of months. Those wishing to see the strange combination of Larry Adler and Libby Morris were well catered for in a thing called Ad-Lib. Barbra Streisand was briefly in town to star in Bob Merrill and Jule Styne's excellent Funny Girl. Maternity leave threatened her continuance in the role, which was taken over at various performances with startling effect by an unknown actress called Lisa Shane. The show closed speedily when Streisand packed up and went home. |