From the London opening of Oklahoma in 1947 until the age of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s, stage musicals were regarded as an almost exclusively American art-form. Sometime after their opening on Broadway, the best of them transferred to London’s West End. Over half the musicals you have ever heard of and continue to see revived and performed in local operatic societies originated during this period — Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, The Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, The Music Man, The King and I, The Sound of Music and Cabaret to name some of the more famous. But there were many others, such as Wonderful Town, Bye, Bye Birdie, Damn Yankees, Bells Are Ringing, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, that are less well known and were not quite so successful but all American and almost as good.
Those of us who were alive and conscious in the 1950s waited in excited anticipation for the next Broadway musical to open in London. Friends with American connections made themselves popular by importing the long-playing record, so we all knew the songs of South Pacific and My Fair Lady before the first night.
Of course, British musicals co-existed with the American giants but with the exceptions of Lionel Bart’s Oliver and Tommy Steele’s personal triumph in Half a Sixpence, they seemed to operate on a much gentler, less ambitious, sometimes almost amateurish scale. The Boy Friend was a big small success and Salad Days was regarded by many as a breath of fresh air in contrast to the huge, brassy, super-professional shows from America. I remember with some pleasure John Mills doing a little soft-shoe shuffle in the musical version of The Good Companions, Joss Ackland blowing his hunting horn and slapping his thighs in Jorrocks; and Harry Secombe as Pickwick, proclaiming what he would do ‘If I Ruled the World’. But none of these British contenders, whether commercially successful or not, was competing in the same class as the American imports.
Adrian Wright’s book, West End Broadway, gives an amusing and well-researched account of all the Broadway musicals that came to London between 1939 and 1972. He lists those that failed as well as those that succeeded and, just as interesting, those that attracted big audiences on Broadway but never crossed the Atlantic — Tenderloin, for instance, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harwick’s first hit, Redhead by Albert Hague and Dorothy Fields, set in Jack the Ripper’s London, Irving Berlin’s Miss Liberty, Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings and, most surprising, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Meredith Wilson’s second big hit after The Music Man.
Some arrived in London several years after closing on Broadway and what particularly seems to interest Wright are the changes that were made for the West End.More often than not, British actors replaced Americans, yet few new British musical stars emerged. Edmond Hockridge and Elizabeth Seal are two that come to mind but neither made it to the big time. Wright says nothing about the power of British Equity, which, in its cause of ferociously protecting jobs for British actors, successfully blocked Americans from coming over to repeat the roles they had made their own on Broadway.
Wright’s book contains an apparently never-ending list of musicals, to some of which he devotes several pages and to some a few lines. Where appropriate he includes interesting facts about the producer, composer, lyricist and stars, sometimes giving us their entire track records. His judgments on each production tend to be wittily cynical or obliquely approving, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether he is giving his own opinion or that of contemporary critics or the public reaction at the time. He gives no clue to when he has actually seen a specific show, when he has merely studied the recording or when his view has been formed through research.
Every now and again, however, he comes out from behind his protective shield and makes his opinions abundantly clear. For instance, in spite of their exceptional popularity, he is unimpressed by the later works of Rogers and Hammerstein and thinks South Pacific overrated. I only hope he is not judging it on Joshua Logan’s film, which is surely the worst adaptation of a great musical in the history of cinema.
He finds Camelot much too long and its widely-praised lyrics ‘trite’. On the other hand, he thinks the little-known Fanny, with music and lyrics by Harold Rome, adapted from the trilogy by Marcel Pagnol, much underrated, and blames its London failure on the absurd casting of Robert Morley and Ian Wallace as two shopkeepers from Marseilles. If the score was so good, though, I wonder why the film version with the much more appropriate Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer in the leads had nearly all the songs cut out.
He is a great admirer of Jerry Herman and waxes lyrical about Hello, Dolly, which I remember as dull until Dolly makes her spectacular re-entrance with the title song near the end. I find myself in agreement, though, in his admiration for Frank Loesser, composer and lyricist of Guys and Dolls and particularly his How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, surely one of the funniest musicals ever written.
With affectionate relish, he sometimes cannot resist occasional wry comments, pointing out innate absurdities. One example, from The Sound of Music is when the Abbess at the convent sings a reprise of Maria’s selection of ‘Favourite Things’. Surely, he asks, to make it real, Hammerstein should have provided the Abbess with her own list? It’s a deceit that goes unnoticed except by those who attend the present-day sing-along showings of the film in appropriate costume. ‘If the Mother Abbess had had her own list of favourites, it would have widened the choice, forcing fewer people to go dressed as a brown paper package tied up with string’.
My other reservation to Wright’s mostly excellent book is his insistence on providing an explanation for all the musicals that failed in London. He seems to give too much weight to the opinions of the up-market theatre critics of the time, such as Milton Shulman and Bernard Levin. Theatre critics, then as now, are notoriously bad at judging musicals. They are looking for wit, intelligent storytelling and a certain profundity in the subject matter. But these qualities, although desirable, are not the most important things for a musical. Its primary objective is to engage the emotions, not the intellect. To be successful, it must move you, elate you, make you feel happy or dazzle you with its energy and technical brilliance. And, of course, as Andrew Lloyd Webber knows only too well, it helps to have one or two instantly memorable songs.
With the help of quotes from contemporary theatre critics, Wright explains away the flops as being due to unsuitable subject matter or being too American for British taste. But surely the British flocked to American musicals precisely because they were American. With the possible exception of a future comedy about the Holocaust, the subject matter will never be the main reason for a musical’s failure. Some can even succeed with no plot at all, as demonstrated by Lloyd Webber’s Cats or Sondheim’s Company. Musicals fail through lack of sufficient musical talent or, more often, when a producer cannot get his abundant talents to gel into a coherent whole, finding himself with a production that fails to fly.
Although I suspect our taste and judgments on individual musicals often differ, Adrian Wright is consistently entertaining, and West End Broadway, being so comprehensive, is an essential reference book for anyone who loves musicals.
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