CDs: Four from Sepia
As Wilson writes in the liner notes for the new release, the show was based on a real-life event, "the invasion from America of the so-called 'horror comics' which was threatening to corrupt our innocent children...and threatening the survival of traditional boys' magazines such as 'The Buccaneer'." The title magazine was a fictional, sturdy comic-book series beloved of British youth that is placed in jeopardy by an American who wants to take it over and transform it.
This may sound like an unpromising notion for a musical, and indeed the show's reception was muted when The Buccaneer had its premiere at the New Watergate, a tiny fringe theatre off the Strand, in '53. But with the West End and Broadway success of The Boy Friend, The Buccaneer was brought back in the fall of '55 for a London run at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, where it played 170 performances, then moved to the West End for a further month's run.
This time around, the critics, perhaps influenced by the success of The Boy Friend, were enthusiastic. "Who else but Wilson," asked Plays and Players, "could have written a musical about the running of a boys' magazine and made it seem almost as important as a conference on the control of atomic energy? There seems to be no limit to his capacity for writing a funny book, delightful lyrics, and gay music."
In his new notes, Wilson points out that The Buccaneer was not exactly his second musical, as it was written between the original, one-act version of The Boy Friend and its subsequent expansion to three acts. Playing a little boy in The Buccaneer was the grown-up and very distinctive comic actor Kenneth Williams, perhaps best known from the Carry On films.
The cast recording of The Buccaneer was made during the Hammersmith run, and reveals a bright score with a more full-bodied sound than the small-scale, tinkly London Boy Friend. The male romantic lead John Faassen has an attractive number warning young Montgomery Williams that "You'll Find Out" about love. But the best numbers were shared by Williams and his young American friend Pamela Tearle, "For Adults Only," "Oh, What a Beautiful Brain," and "Just Pals." And there's an amusing moment when Wilson parodies the sound of larger-scaled American musicals in a duet between the American Ronald Radd seeking to take over "The Buccaneer" and his daughter Tearle.
Sepia's Buccaneer CD comes with numerous bonuses, the first being a piano selection from the score. Then there's a rare, two-sided 78 offering all that was recorded from the 1957 Johannesburg, South Africa production of The Boy Friend. And then two other West End musicals are heard from. The first, Romance in Candlelight, opened the same month as the London Buccaneer, and was based on the play By Candlelight, which was also the source of Cole Porter's musical You Never Know. It lasted only fifty-three performances at the Piccadilly Theatre currently home to Guys and Dolls, and just four songs were recorded from it. But they're pleasant, and feature Sally Ann Howes, imported Frenchman Jacques Pils, and Patricia Burke.
The four Candlelight tracks are followed by Burke in her three big numbers from the 1943 London wartime hit The Lisbon Story, which concerned a French opera singer who helps a scientist escape with an important military secret. With music by American Sam Coslow, the romantic melodrama ran 492 performances and was even filmed, with Burke repeating her stage role.
The two biggest West End musical hits of the mid-'50s were Wilson's The Boy Friend and composer Julian Slade's Salad Days, the sweetly innocent tale of two university students who decide to marry but are first tested by being entrusted with the care of a magical piano that makes people dance. As with the Wilson show, Salad Days was the first and only major West End hit of Slade's career. But Slade also wrote excellent scores for Free As Air 1957 and Follow That Girl 1960, both with Salad Days lyricist-librettist Dorothy Reynolds, as well as for Trelawny 1972.
Salad Days was written as an end-of-season frolic for the Bristol Old Vic repertory company. It transferred from Bristol to London's Vaudeville Theatre in August, 1954, and remained there for 2,283 performances, breaking the record for the West End's longest-running musical at the time. The show was considered a refreshing change from the bigger, brassier musicals that were being imported from Broadway.
Salad Days failed in New York, where it got a 1958 off-Broadway mounting that lasted only eighty performances. But it was revived in London in 1976, and was produced on British television in 1983. Today it's perhaps best known as the show that inspired producer Cameron Mackintosh's love of musical theatre.
The Slade-Reynolds score is simple but irresistibly tuneful. All of it is appealing, especially the wistful duet for hero and heroine, "We Said We Wouldn't Look Back"; the heroine's solos, "I Sit in the Sun" and "The Time of My Life"; and the toe-tapping ensembles "Oh, Look at Me" and "We're Looking for a Piano." Soprano leading lady Eleanor Drew is the outstanding vocalist, and Reynolds herself is heard as the hero's mother.
Sepia's new CD features the original '54 London cast recording, and if it's not as complete as the '76 revival-cast recording or a fortieth-anniversary radio-cast CD, the original offers the most charming performance.
On Sepia's new Salad Days CD, the '54 cast album is followed by a selection from the score played at the piano by Slade himself, then a 1954 "vocal gems" selection with soloists, chorus, and orchestra. But the most valuable bonuses here are five numbers, seemingly taken from a radio broadcast, from The Duenna. This was originally a 1775 comic opera with libretto by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In 1954, Slade composed a new score for a Bristol revival, and the result also played London's Westminster Theatre. Heard in the selections are original cast members John Neville Lolita, My Love and Jane Wenham Virtue in Danger. And there's also a song from a Bristol Old Vic holiday musical by Slade, Christmas in King Street.
Vivian Ellis was the composer of notable West End musicals from the late '20s to the mid-'50s. His most memorable shows were Mr. Cinders and Bless the Bride. Must Close Saturday Records recently issued on CD the cast recordings of two other Ellis successes, Streamline and Jill Darling.
Now Sepia gives us the cast recording of the last major West End show that Ellis composed, The Water Gipsies 1955, with book and lyrics by A.P. Herbert. It was the story of sisters who live with their father on a barge on London's Thames river. The sisters were played by Pamela Charles the third Eliza Doolittle in the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady, following Sally Ann Howes and Dora Bryan, who inherited in London Carol Channing's two major roles, Lorelei and Dolly. Although The Water Gipsies was considered old-fashioned, it allowed Bryan to make a big personal hit, so big, in fact, that when she left the show due to pregnancy, The Water Gipsies declined and closed.
The Water Gipsies score is undistinguished but pleasant, with Bryan the one distinctive element. The new CD offers all of the original cast tracks, plus three tracks taken from a separate, studio-cast recording. The Water Gipsies is followed on the CD by Ellis songs in '20s and '30s recordings, then Ellis at the piano, playing selections from three of his other major titles, Big Ben, Tough at the Top, and And So to Bed.
The fourth and final new Sepia London-cast CD features the cast recording about twenty minutes of the 1955 West End revue The Jazz Train. Billed as "a musical dedication to the Negro people," the show was directed and devised by Mervyn Nelson, and traced the evolution of black American popular music.
Although the show was also billed as the "Broadway smash hit," it appears that the show had only played a nightclub in New York. It included some pre-existing music, even material from shows like Porgy and Bess and Carmen Jones, along with new songs by J.C. Johnson. Managing 111 performances at the Piccadilly Theatre, The Jazz Train introduced to London audiences that sassy American singer Bertice Reading, who, a few years later, would create the lead in Sandy Wilson's Valmouth. Grand as always, Reading is the main attraction of The Jazz Train.
The CD is filled out with recordings by Reading, followed by tracks of other black American singers who, like Reading, had major careers in England. They are Marie Bryant; the three Peters Sisters billed as "1000 Pounds of Harmony and Rhythm"; and the great Elisabeth Welch.