Lady Windermere Sings
Based on Oscar Wilde's frequently revived 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan, After the Ball was Coward's final musical written for the West End. Director-composer-lyricist-star Coward would go on to write two more musicals directly for Broadway, Sail Away 1961 and The Girl Who Came to Supper 1963. Sail Away would also play London, but Girl would not. Coward also directed Broadway's High Spirits, written by others although based on a Coward play.
With the exception of the 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet, most of Coward's West End musicals were disappointments. After the Ball would be the third of three consecutive unsuccessful Coward musicals in London, the two previous entries being the Mary Martin/Drury Lane show Pacific 1860 1946 and the brassier, Broadway-style Ace of Clubs 1950, a CD of which was released earlier this year.
With After the Ball, Coward was again featuring a good deal of operetta material, but it was his first musical based on the work of another writer. The Girl Who Came to Supper would be the second. Set among the high society of Victorian London, After the Ball's heroine is Lady Windermere, who wishes to remain true to her husband of two years but learns that he has been giving his attentions to a mysterious older woman. The suspected "other woman" is the infamous widow Mrs. Erlynne, who once gave in to the desire for an extramarital affair, and who turns out to be none other than the mother of Lady Windermere. The mother helps save her daughter's reputation without revealing her identity.
For Coward, a show that started off with brilliant promise turned into a sizable let-down. In January of 1954, just before production began on the show, he wrote in his diary that After the Ball "is very good indeed," with "some of the best lyrics I have ever written." But by the time he saw the show at the beginning of its thirteen-week tryout tour, he described it as "a disappointment," noting an "absence of style in the direction" by major ballet dancer-choreographer Robert Helpmann the films The Red Shoes and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the latter as the Childcatcher. Coward went on to note that "if the show opened in London as it is, it wouldn't run a week."
As the tryout continued, After the Ball was extensively retooled, with Coward observing, "I am forced to admit that the more Coward we can get into the script and the more Wilde we can eliminate, the happier we shall all be."
Much of the reworking had to do with Coward's choice of star. The role of Mrs. Erlynne had been written for Mary Ellis, the operetta diva who had created the title role in the Broadway hit Rose Marie 1924 and had starred in Ivor Novello's hit London musicals Glamorous Night 1935 and The Dancing Years 1939.
Because Ellis had been hired to play her, the part of Mrs. Erlynne was unduly enlarged. Also built up was the supporting role of Australian half-aborigine Mr. Hopper, because it was being played by Coward's lover, Graham Payn, who had also had principal roles in Pacific 1860 and Ace of Clubs.
Building up these two characters tended to distort the shape of Wilde's original play. Worse, the tryout revealed that Ellis's voice had deteriorated, so much of her music had to be left on the road. By May of '54, Coward was telling his diary, "I am terribly disappointed....the whole project has been sabotaged by Mary not being able to sing it." In June, he wrote, "The fact that about a third of the score has had to be cut will mitigate against its success...it is a bit lopsided."
Operetta stars Vanessa Lee leading lady of Novello's final hit, King's Rhapsody and Peter Graves were Lord and Lady Windermere when After the Ball finally opened at London's Globe Theatre on June 10, 1954. By the time of its arrival in the West End, the show's two acts had been expanded to three, an unusual division for a musical that was also being observed by the simultaneously running London hit The Boy Friend.
As tended to be the case with much of Coward's late work, reviews were mixed to negative. The Stage observed: "Coward does not run with Wilde in particularly comfortable harness. The modern dramatist's audacious sophistication...clashes sharply with the thick sentiment and pompous platitudes of the tale about the compromising fan." Punch maintained that, "One of Noel Coward's difficulties in turning Lady Windermere's Fan into a musical comedy is that, not unnaturally, he finds the Victorian period funny, so that, although he uses some of Wilde's epigrams in addition to his own, he cannot escape a spoiling note of burlesque."
Years later, director Helpmann seemed to concur with the latter assessment: "It was like having two funny people at a dinner party. Everything that Noel sent up Wilde was sentimental about, and everything that Wilde sent up Noel was sentimental about. It was two different points of view and it didn't work. It could never have worked."
After the Ball closed after a modest run of 188 performances. It would seem that operetta was as dead in London as it was in New York. And Coward's work was made to seem even more out of fashion by the far slicker brand of musical that was regularly imported to the West End from Broadway.
To be designed and directed by Tony Walton, the Irish Repertory Theatre production of After the Ball will feature editing and additional material by Barry Day. Contrary to advance publicity, this is not the American premiere of After the Ball. In 1955, the show received an "in-the-round" summer-stock mounting at St. John Terrell's Music Circus in Lambertville, New Jersey.
After the Ball was the first Coward musical that got a full-length-LP cast album, released by Philips. If it's a curiosity, it also has much that's enjoyable; Coward was not wrong about the quality of the lyrics, and the melodies are also intriguing.
There are charming choruses in the opening number, "Oh, What a Century It's Been," and the catchiest item, "London at Night," the latter the only song in the score that was of use to Coward in his subsequent cabaret performances.
There's an appealing, early love duet for the Windermeres, "I Knew That You Would Be My Love." Lady Windermere has three solos, the lovely waltz "Sweet Day," and the ambitious "Clear Bright Morning" and "Aria," the latter the closest Coward ever came to opera.
Ellis sings sweetly if carefully in Mrs. Erlyne's two numbers, which aren't memorable. Of his three songs, Payn's best item is "Faraway Land."
Character comedienne Irene Browne, who would also appear on Broadway in The Girl Who Came to Supper, talks her way through the amusing "Something on a Tray." But the sharpest number is a trio for some cynical wives, wondering "Why Is It the Woman Who Pays?"
Because actor Shamus Locke was under contract to another recording company, the cast album omits the numbers "Stay on the Side of the Angels," "I Offer You My Heart" sung by Lord Darlington, the man with whom Lady Windermere almost strays. The Irish Repertory Theatre production should allow these numbers to be heard for the first time in fifty years.