London Pride
Me and My Girl
Birmingham Hippodrome, 1994
One of the things that makes Me and My Girl successful is that all its elements are so instantly recognisable. On the stage as in life we find chirpy cockneys, wonderful policemen, aloof aristocrats and the magnificent backdrop of the capital itself. Add to this a flow of cheerful melodies as irresistible as the Thames and there you have it – London as we so fondly imagine it to be. The sun has got his hat on, the monarch’s on the throne, all’s right with the world.
It's a myth of course, a myth as powerfully seductive as that of the Wild West, and just as false. But like any myth it has its roots firmly based in fact and it is primarily the influence of the Victorian era, its values and atmosphere, that underscores many successful London-based musicals. Gilbert and Sullivan, Victorians themselves, realised the potential of their capital and gave their public just what it wanted to hear. For every operetta they wrote set in Penzance or Venice there was another one which took place at the Tower or in the House of Lords.
Going back even further, John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) had been laid squarely in the seedy backstreets where the living was hard and crime a way of life. Interestingly enough, it is more often not the lower end of the social scale – if not the criminal classes themselves – that has tended to attract writers from beyond these shores, from Brecht to Sondheim, possibly because the earthier texture of life in the gutter provides maximum opportunity for drama played out by the most vivid personalities.
Gay’s work was a wide-ranging satirical piece using ballads and folk tunes of the day to illustrate the “fine moral tale” of the villainous MacHeath and his gang of highwaymen. Two hundred years later in The Threepenny Opera (1928), Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill replaced these ballads with street songs of their own devising, thus cleverly retaining the mass appeal of the original. The satire remained intact too. At the end of the tale their Mack the Knife, just like Gay’s MacHeath, is set to swing for his crimes as justice demands but, evil as he is, his death would end the play on a sour note. He has become a folk hero among those who can understand better than their “betters” how he became what he is and justice, as far as the people are concerned, means a reprieve. In both versions he gets it. The social conditions that made him remain unaltered but the point has been made.
The eponymous hero of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) is also a murderer, but his plight is more that of a tragic hero, driven mad by a lust for vengeance on a society where everyone at the bottom of the heap is a victim. To paraphrase a lyric or two, “Those crunching noises pervading the air are man devouring man, my dear”. In particular it is the brutalising effects of the new industrial age which provide the context here. People are seen to be no more than tiny cogs in the massive machinery of state, and London, to Sweeney, is like “a great black pit” where the innocent must suffer with the guilty.
Though dark, this view is by no means unique. Charles Dickens was a contemporary observer of the same social scene and had a thing or two of his own to say about the squalor of the life of his times. The term “Dickensian” has become a useful adjective to describe scenes of poverty and filth as well as those of good fellowship and Christmas cheer, so firmly did his books stamp their images into the national consciousness. It is hardly surprising, then, that the sheer variety of life he documented and the hugger-mugger mix of character and incident he portrayed have provided the bases for numerous films, plays and TV series. Writers of musicals, however, have more often than not preferred to view his works in soft focus, leaving the social comment to others while drawing their main inspiration from the larger-than-life characters and dramatic plots. Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960), for instance, took numerous liberties with the source material, but the result is such a glorious entertainment in its own right that only the most churlish purist could complain.
Bart’s first London-based musical had been Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (1960), a cheerfully amoral tale of gambling folk set in the Soho of the late fifties. The previous year he had collaborated with Laurie Johnson and Bernard Miles on Lock Up Your Daughters, a bawdy romp based on a Henry Fielding novel, containing such rollicking (and non-PC) numbers as ‘Red Wine and a Wench’ and ‘When Does the Ravishing Begin?’. But it was in tandem with Dickens that he finally made his name and his fortune. Oliver! ran for 2,600 performances and four of its sixteen songs reached the Top Twenty. It is one of those rare scores which seems not to contain a single weak number, and several have achieved the status of standards. ‘Who Will Buy?’ is like a great hymn to London itself, incorporating into a rousing crescendo the cries of the street vendors as they hawk their wares around the teeming streets.
Bart’s next musical Blitz! (1962) opened while his three previous shows were still doing good business and, although it ran for eighteen months, was deemed a disappointment compared to what had gone before. Noël Coward’s comment on it (“half as long as the original and twice as loud”) may give some indication as to why it has always been overshadowed by its classic predecessor.
Other Dickens-inspired shows include Pickwick (1963) and Scrooge (1970). The former, written by Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel, was a hit, and provided Harry Secombe with something most entertainers would give their eye-teeth for: a signature tune. In Sir Harry’s case the song was ‘If I Ruled the World’, full of warmth and generosity of spirit. Scrooge, written by Bricusse alone, was less successful, despite being made into a film starring Albert Finney. London under snow looks like a Christmas card and the story is one of Dickens’ best, or at least best known, but somehow the songs failed to make a life for themselves beyond the production.
Apart from Dickens, the other major literary figure to contribute – albeit unwittingly – to the London musical was George Bernard Shaw. In Pygmalion (1912) he presented a classic confrontation between the classes in a story that literally could not have taken place anywhere other than London: Covent Garden with its flower sellers is, or was, unique. In essence, the play is a caustic satire on the way our use of language perpetuates the class system. As Shaw wrote in his Preface to the original play, “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.” But Lerner and Loewe’s adaptation of it, My Fair Lady (1956), concentrates instead on the much more universally fascinating theme of boy meets girl – or, in this case, crusty old professor of phonetics meets “squashed cabbage leaf”, outcome: choral fireworks.
Again, with a score as ravishing as this, the bowdlerisation hardly matters. From the rapturous ‘On the Street Where You Live’ to the cosy ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’, from the exultant ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ to the elegant ‘Ascot Gavotte’, there are so many great songs to enjoy, it is obvious the changes were made for the best possible reasons.
Of the other British musicals that have used London as a setting, a further notable addition to the list would be Robert and Elizabeth (1964). This is unusual for being based for a change on true life, the love affair between Elizabeth Barrett and the poet Robert Browning, and this time the action takes place among the decorous drawing rooms of the prosperous middle classes. It is a love story between two individuals whereas Barnardo (1980) is a love story between one man and an entire underclass, in this case the homeless and orphaned boys of the city. In fact, this show is quoted in the Guinness Book of Theatre Facts and Feats as being the first known musical about a character who was, in real life, tone deaf. That fact, alas, remains its only claim to fame so far.
The streets of London may not be paved with gold, but for centuries they have been providing a rich seam of material for those prepared to dig beneath the surface. Extremes come together there, the best as well as the worst, and the collisions has given off enough sparks to light up some of the most exuberant and memorable musicals we have. Charming, lyrical, haunted or rousing, the greatest of them are popular in the very best sense of that much-maligned word and, Londoners or not, we can all take pride in them.
PS
Written in September 1994, this must be one of the earliest pieces I wrote for Proscenium, and I was happy to get the chance, because musicals set in or inspired by London have produced some of the best songs. ‘The Street Where You Live’ from My Fair Lady, for instance, is so good that Alan Jay Lerner even adapted his own line for the title of his autobiography.
It seems pretty obvious to me now that it was obvious even then that I knew a lot less about Gilbert and Sullivan than I did about more 20th-century fare. On the other hand, by the time I came to write the piece, I knew Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd off by heart, having seen the second night of the original West End run starring Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock, and then playing the Broadway double LP with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury virtually non-stop for weeks afterwards. At one point, trying to demonstrate the factory whistle sound in the opening number for a couple of friends, I damaged my throat. I can be something of a berk sometimes.