The Musical, Second Edition by Gänzl Kurt;Findlay Jamie; & Jamie Findlay

Author:Gänzl, Kurt;Findlay, Jamie; & Jamie Findlay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

If I’ve dealt with the shows of the British 1930s here under their stars rather than, as previously, under their writers or songwriters, it’s because during the 1930s songwriting in Britain was at rather a low ebb. The fashion for anything at all that was American resulted in not just the importation of shows and songs by some of the best American songwriters but also the importation of a number of very much less adept transatlantic musicians whose efforts at composing for the London stage did not produce anything remotely near the quality of the songs of their more talented countrymen. Alongside them, hometown H. B. Hedley, Jack Strachey, Billy Mayerl, Noel Gay, Joe Waller, and others turned out some jolly songs, some pretty songs, and some songs which caught for a little while, songs that were not always imitative, but mostly just good enough to become dance band fodder for a nonce after their shows had closed, before vanishing for eternity. “Got a Date with an Angel” and “She’s My Lovely” were exceptions rather than the rule. And so was the composer of that last song.

Vivian Ellis, who had been responsible for London’s biggest native musical comedy hit of the 1920s with Mr Cinders, wrote the songs for a dozen musicals and a number of revues during the 1930s, contributing to Stand Up and Sing and supplying all the songs for Hide and Seek, Running Riot, Under Your Hat, and another musical-comedy success, Jill Darling, a nimble bit of nonsense about a prohibitionist MP who gets drunk and who is replaced on the hustings by his double, and in which one of Ellis’s successful songs, “I’m on a See-Saw,” was introduced. In the face of the overwhelming trends of the time, Ellis’s songs maintained a pleasant, elegant ease which made the best of them the best of their time and place, and it was no surprise when he went on to compose the score for an altogether more substantial piece of musical theater which would be London’s most important homemade musical hit of the 1940s.

There was, of course, more substantial musical theater going on in the 1930s as well. The romantic musical had not been wholly abandoned amid the craze for dance-and-laughter shows, and, indeed, the decade was to see the birth of the most important series of romantic musicals to have come out of the London theater since the heyday of Daly’s Theatre.

The success of Bitter-Sweet naturally encouraged Noël Coward to venture further into the romantic theater, and during the 1930s he turned out two more pieces on similar lines: one for each of the Continent’s two greatest stars of the musical stage. Conversation Piece starred Yvonne Printemps. Coward the author wrote her a rôle in which she could slip into French as often as possible (for she spoke no English) as an alluring little French lass who is set up in Brighton by a penniless aristocratic adventurer in the hope that she will catch a rich husband who will support them both.

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