Obscure Videos: Two British Musicals
It turns out that this is a magic piano, with the power to make its listeners dance. It even causes a public disturbance, which brings it to the attention of the Minister of Pleasure and Pastime, one of Timothy's uncles. Timothy and Jane lose the piano, but retrieve it with the help of another uncle's flying saucer. At the end, their enchanted month is up, and Timothy and Jane are ready to begin their life together, passing the piano on to another new couple.
This is the simple but beguiling plot of Salad Days, one of the longest-running shows in the history of London musicals. It was written in six weeks and assembled as an end-of-season production for the Bristol Old Vic, with house composer Julian Slade contributing the music, and one of the company's actresses, Dorothy Reynolds, writing the book and lyrics.
The result was sufficiently entrancing to attract West End management, which took the show to the Vaudeville Theatre in London's Strand, where it opened on August 5, 1954, just a few months after the opening of another long-running West End musical, The Boy Friend. With Slade himself playing the pit piano for the first eighteen months of the run, Salad Days bested Chu Chin Chow to become the longest-running musical in British history, a record broken in the '60s by Oliver! Like The Boy Friend, Salad Days was considered a refreshing change from the bigger, brassier musicals imported from Broadway, with simplicity and charm key to its success.
Salad Days played 2,283 performances at the Vaudeville, but it had little luck in New York, where it was given a 1958 off-Broadway production in a Canadian staging at the Barbizon Plaza Theatre that ran only eighty performances Richard Easton played Timothy. A West End revival in 1976 with Irma La Douce Tony winner Elizabeth Seal ran 133 performances. There are three cast recordings, the '54 original, the '76 revival, and a fortieth-anniversary radio version.
A small-scale show, Salad Days was, in a couple of respects, the London equivalent of New York's The Fantasticks. Both shows featured a whimsical mute character. More significantly, both were about a pair of sheltered young people who are forced to confront the real world of responsibility, which in the case of Salad Days involves a tramp in a park with a magic piano the tramp turns out to be one of Timothy's uncles, the black sheep of the family.
For twenty years after their West End runs, Salad Days and The Boy Friend were the most produced shows in the English provinces. More recently, Salad Days has been cited as the show that inspired producer Cameron Mackintosh's love of musical theatre. And if Salad Days lacks some of the wit of The Boy Friend, its score is simple, tuneful, and irresistible. Slade and Reynolds went on to give the West End the musicals Free As Air, Follow That Girl, Wildest Dreams, and Hooray for Daisy, the first two with fine scores. Without Reynolds, Slade composed London's Vanity Fair and Trelawny, the latter an excellent score recently made available on CD. Like The Boy Friend's Sandy Wilson, though, Slade's first hit was his biggest.
On January 2, 1983, England's Yorkshire Television offered a new production of Salad Days that's a complete delight. True, the program runs only ninety mintues, so there are substantial cuts in the script, and two songs "The Things That Are Done By a Don" and "The Saucer Song" are dropped. But Slade himself did the adaptation, so everything essential is there.
Ian Richardson Marat/Sade, My Fair Lady '76, Trelawny plays Timothy's father and all four uncles, a tour de force that would not be possible on stage. Simon Green London Boy Friend '84, Follies '87 and Susan Beagley are Timothy and Jane, and Ann Beach West End Mame and On the Twentieth Century is Timothy's mother.
After the first scene, the entire production is set in the park, with various gazebos representing the different locations. Beautifully cast from top to bottom, this Salad Days perfectly sustains the droll, frothy spirit the piece requires. It ranks as one of the better TV reductions of a popular musical.
Quite obviously inspired by the international success of another Dickens-based British musical, Oliver!, the London musical Pickwick, based on Dickens' Pickwick Papers, had its world premiere at the Saville Theatre on July 4, 1963, where it ran for 694 performances.
As the show's book writer, Wolf Mankowitz, later wrote, "In Pickwick, Dickens created an image of British eccentricity at its best. He is the chairman of a club convened for the purpose of pursuing good fellowships and the most meaningless of pseudo-scientific pursuits."
The show was suggested to Mankowitz by its star, the rotund tenor-comic Harry Secombe, who was a perfect match for the title character. Secombe would go on to play Bumble in the film version of Oliver! The Pickwick lyrics were by Leslie Bricusse, who already had Stop the World-I Want to Get Off as a success on Broadway and in the West End, and the music was by Cyril Ornadel. Pickwick got Oliver!'s director Peter Coe and brilliant set designer Sean Kenny.
Because Secombe was such a lovely, operatic vocalist, the score could have a certain richness in the material for the title character. It was Secombe, of course, who sang the show's hit song, "If I Ruled the World," in a scene where Pickwick is mistaken for a Parliamentary candidate. In England, the song was in the top twenty pop hits for seventeen weeks. But it's a generally charming score, with a number of delights "Look Into Your Heart," "That's What I'd Like for Christmas" beyond "If I Ruled the World." As for Mankowitz's book, it had no real plot but was instead a series of episodes selected from the lengthy source novel.
Producer David Merrick, who had already imported Oliver!, Stop the World..., and Oh What a Lovely War from London, brought Pickwick to the 46th Street Theatre now the Richard Rodgers on October 4, 1965. The show lasted only fifty-six performances, but, because of a profitable pre-Broadway road tour, Pickwick wound up a fifty-six-performance hit.
Pickwick became Secombe's signature role, and in 1993, he starred in a thirtieth-anniversary revival of the musical at England's Chichester Festival, a production that transferred to London's Sadler's Wells Theatre. But twenty years earlier, Secombe had preserved the role in a BBC television production, with the part of Sam Weller played by Roy Castle, who had done it on Broadway. The cast of the television version also includes West End regulars Sheila White Dames at Sea, Little Me, Cheryl Kennedy The Boy Friend '67, and Julia Sutton currently singing "Feed the Birds" in London's Mary Poppins. The choreography is by Gillian Lynne The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Unlike the TV Salad Days, the Pickwick TV tape was televised in the U.S., a holiday program first airing on ABC on December 16, 1973. Running ninety minutes without commercials, it's a straightforward, fairly lavish studio production. Those familiar with the two Secombe cast recordings of Pickwick original and '93 revival will notice that five songs "Business Is Booming," "The Trouble with Women," "That's the Law," "Good Old Pickwick," "Do As You Would Be Done By" have been dropped to save time, and a couple of other songs have been shifted around.
Still, this is a generally satisfying account of a musical with little emotional content but a reasonable amount of charm.