Julian Slade
Salad Days by Julian Slade
Norwich Theatre Royal, 1995
On the eve of its fortieth anniversary tour, we invited composer and co-author Julian Slade to look back on over four decades of Salad Days.
When is a final curtain not a final curtain? In the heyday of Salad Days’ run at the Vaudeville in1954, the show would end conventionally enough, but then, instead of trooping sedately out of the theatre, large sections of the audience would nightly swarm down to the orchestra pit and beg the pianist for an encore of two. Since that pianist also happened to be the composer of the show, and as generous as he was gifted, the fans were not disappointed. Art the age of twenty-four, Julian Slade found himself in the happy position of having written one of the most successful British musicals of all time.
Unfortunately, familiarity with the score was to prove problematical in the long run (and it was a very long run indeed, the longest of any show in the UK in the 1950s): “I kept losing the tempo,” the composer remembers now. “The actors used to come to me and say ‘Why did you play that so slow?’, or ‘Why did you play that so fast?’ And I would hardly know, because it was so familiar that I couldn’t quite keep track of it.”
Still, he and his collaborator Dorothy Reynolds, who was also performing in the show, stuck with it for two years before moving on to other projects like (Free As Air and Follow That Girl). Nobody knows where the original idea for Salad Days came from – “We never quite solved this. It came out of our conversation” – but obviously their working relationship was a very special one. Although Julian Slade writes a large proportion of his own lyrics these days, he believes that a collaborator is very useful and he still misses Dorothy Reynolds, who died in 1977, a great deal. “She provided something for me that was quite unique,” he says simply.
They had first worked together at the Bristol Old Vic where there had been no inkling Salad Days would become such a smash. For one thing, Julian Slade had not set out to become a musician at all. He had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge, ostensibly to read Classics, but what he really wanted to be was an actor. In fact, he spent so much time on stage that he turned to music almost as a form of relaxation. Among his juvenilia from this time were songs for the Cambridge Footlights, and the musical revues Bang Goes the Meringue and Lady May. Then in 1951, following graduation, his first important job was to provide the incidental music for The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Bristol Old Vic. “Since then I’ve written a great deal of music for Shakespeare, so in a sense you could say I’m classically trained, except I know I’m a musical comedy writer really.”
He had been brought up in the world of Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, and these, along with scraps of Gilbert and Sullivan remembered from childhood, were the main influences on his style at the time. “I didn’t consciously model myself on them,” he recalls, “but I hoped something would come out of me, which it eventually did, I suppose. You generate something within yourself to find a style of your own.” And the more he wrote, the more personal that style became. In his days at the Bristol Old Vic, he found he had an amazing facility to come up with one catchy tune after another. “They seemed to come from nowhere,” he admits frankly. “But I’m afraid I find it a bit more difficult now.” Asked whether, having written so many tunes in his time, it becomes more or less difficult to create a new melody, he replies, “I don’t think I copy other people very much, but it’s very easy to copy oneself. I have to check myself; ‘Oh yes, I wrote that at such and such a time.’” Salad Days still has the power to charm succeeding generations. Last year, for example, the author watched the latest crop of BOV Theatre School students performing it with tremendous verve, and thought the production absolutely wonderful.
Julian Slade’s involvement with the current production has included his presence at almost all the auditions so he has had a hand in the casting, and he has also attended rehearsals. He is enthusiastic about the whole enterprise. “Ned Sherrin is a wonderful director for this particular show,” he explains. “I think he and I understand each other and he understands Salad Days. Coming back to it after forty years I feel very fresh about it because I understand the music all over again and I can hear it in my mind the way it was originally.”
Over the years he has seen around 120 different productions of Salad Days in every part of the world. For such a quintessentially English show it has travelled exceptionally well – in most places. Australia, New Zealand and Canada have seen particularly successful productions, but more surprisingly perhaps the versions in Holland, Finland and Japan stick in the author’s memory too. “And the Brussels version done in French sounded absolutely gorgeous.” But it did not do so well in Paris. “I don’t think they like musicals in Paris very much,” the author confides. “They didn’t altogether like Les Misérables…” And in America it hovered between flop and success, despite receiving a very nice production. “It was just before British musicals took off in New York. Perhaps it was a bit before its time.”
Julian Slade is still writing and takes a continuing interest in the musical theatre scene. “I’ve seen virtually every original musical that’s been presented. All the Andrew Lloyd Webber shows and the Cameron Mackintosh shows. I really enjoy them all. I find them very impressive.” The director Ned Sherrin has, of course, been a great champion in this country of Stephen Sondheim, who is, according to Julian Slade, “A genius in his own right. He has brought drama and music together in a way that hasn’t been done since Puccini.” Slade himself currently has a couple of shows on the go (“one on the back burner and one on the front burner”), but the actual details of each are being kept firmly under wraps for the moment.
As for the $64,000 question “Is Salad Days your favourite show?” Julian Slade’s answer is a hearty chuckle. “That’s asking! Of course I’m very fond of Salad Days, naturally. It’s been a wonderful thing for me, it’s kept me going financially apart from anything else. I love Free As Air… Musically speaking, Salad Days is not my best show, I think it’s just one of the crowd. But it’s like having children – some work out and some don’t.”
