"Wonderfully opinionated, outrageously frank, and always sensible"

.

Yes, that was me. I suppose it still is ... but in 1991 book reviewers had balls (and column space). I guess this is one of my favourite notices of my all-time, so thank you Charis Gray ...

I had no intention of writing a book of 'opinions'. I was, and am, an historian. My business is Facts. But my editor at the -- then joyful -- firm of Basil Blackwell had begun a series of books about recordings. I think it had started with Country Music, or Folk Music on Record. He knew that Ian and I had an unparalelled collection of musical-theatre recordings, so he asked ... and there went the next umpteen months of my life: listening to records. How many My Fair Ladys? How many Die lustige Witwes ... how many dreadful vanity discs ...

It was an odd time in the world of the 'record'. The 'vinyl' recording of all our youthful passions had just been (temporarily?) superseded by the CD. So, although I didn't realise it, I was arriving at the end of an era, and more or less, writing its epitaph. I frantically tried to get up-to-date at the last moment, and included CD references ... I shouldn't have. This is a history and summary of musical theatre recordngs on vinyl. And if I reissue it, that is what it will be called.

I may reissue it. It has, amazingly, been one of my most popular books. I (and my editor) expected, quite honestly, when it came out, a torrent of scorn mail from musical-theatre ultra-devotees who didn't agree with my choices. You know the type of 'ultras' I mean. Hand on heart, I had NOT ONE. Though I did hear of one gentleman in Baltimore who swished his copy back to the bookshop, complaining that I failed to mention some part-record of Roberta. 

The exercise, alas, had its downside. After so many months of listening to end-to-end show recordings (the many shelves of the records concerned are now enshrined at Harvard's Theatre Library), I became glutted. For years thereafter, I could not listen to a show disc. Even now, I find it hard. But I had done my task, and, unbelievably, two decades later, I still get messages from folk who have read and enjoyed the book ... that's reward enough ...

Goodness, what else is in this folder. Many memories, I think ...

BATTLING THE TURKEY, or fighting drug dependency ...

.

Yes, me.

And no; I haven’t been sniffing heroin or drinking cocaine … but if what I am going through now is the same thing that folk trying to wean themselves off such drugs suffer, I understand and pity their their plight.

It is HELL.

So, how did I get to be in this position?

Nine years ago, next month, I suffered a stroke. I fought my way back to a reasonable physical state – my right hand refused to recover, and is pretty useless (although it looks quite normal), my right leg is weak. No more mountain climbing. If I go out in the dark, the wet, or on unfamiliar underfoot ground, I need a walking stick. My face is almost back to ‘normal’.

The only treatment of any successful consequence that I underwent was regular acupuncture. Physiotherapy as practiced here gave me a frozen shoulder, and nobody seemed to know what to do to help. I suppose once a stroke has occurred, it has occurred, and all you can do is try to mitigate the effects. Well, I tried for a while … even several months regular gym work in Berlin … now it has all become too hard, and other ageing processes are kicking in as well … 

And now this …

When I went to my doctor, for the first time after the stroke, he, not unexpectedly, rejiggled my pill intake. Nothing major, just blood-pressure thingies and cholesterol thingies … and a new one. Citalopram. A what? An anti-depressant? Me? The least depressive person in the colony! He explained that the drug was not only an anti-depressant, but had other post-stroke benefits. So, I took it, and all was well. I took it for nine years.

This winter, in Australia, I suffered from bad oedema and problematic water-retention. Grotesquely inflated ankles. Vast weight gain (25 kilos). On my return to Rangiora, I hied me to the GP (a new one) once more. She fiddled with the medicaments again and wow! The ankles returned to their pristine size. I was full of joy: there was nothing wrong with me! So I said ‘surely I don’t need this citalopram any more, nine years on ...’. We started to wean me off … gradually … one week, one month .. gone!

All was going, seemingly, fine. Then, one day, some people working on our property reneged on the important (to me) arrangements I had made, and they had agreed to, for the coming months: throwing my whole life-timetable, my plans for my eagerly looked-forward-to comfort-time, out of kilter. And I exploded. I shouted, I shrieked … it was as if someone had pulled out a stopper and let every bit of anger, hurt and fury out of me. I was aggressive, defensive (I am SICK of being taken advantage of! I am not going to be nice, easygoing Kurt any more!). For the past weeks I have been fighting these feelings … trying to control them, for the sake of those around me … with less success, I think, rather than more … even though Paul is soothing and rationalising my boiling heart and brain, with good sense and science, from far-off Germany …

As I sit here, now, writing this, in the blessed peace and total calm of my little office, I can feel something huge pressing, rising up in my chest. I shall scream … Don’t come near me …! Stop that noise! SHUT UP! I don't want to see ANYONE ... HEAR anyone ..

I remember, once, many years ago, Ian telling me of a friend, the well-known Australian author Alan Moorhead (The White Nile etc), who had suffered a stroke. Maybe there was no citalopram in those days. He became a ‘monster’, with a total personality change. Is this what is happening to me, or will this dreadful situation ease off? Can I brave my way through it?

Or will I have to start taking the bloody drug again? I desperately don’t want to ... but I can’t live like this. How could anybody …?


PS Thank you, those folks who have directed me to https://www.verywellmind.com › ... › Depression › Treatment › Medication. I may be a bit slow on my recovery, as I may have been a little fast in my exit, but it is good to know that I am not condemned to this ghastly state for life.

An American Musical Comedy: 1886

.
I stumbled on this, earlier in the week ..

It's a programme for the Theatre in Toledo, Ohio for the last week of May 1886. A quick glance down the names involved showed very few that rang a bell. If you don't count The Mikado, Adonis, Ned Harrigan et al whose works were plundered for what passed as a score for the entertainment. Just .. yes, surely .. Joseph Arthur, credited with being the author of the piece, is surely the same fellow who later wrote the hilarious melodrama Blue Jeans ... you know the one: 'and the buzz saw crept ever closer, and ..' (end of reel).

I haven't delved very deeply into the folk involved in this semi-legitimate form of 'musical comedy' entertainment, except when tracking the career of Australo-Canadian Willie B Gill -- the author of Adonis -- for my biography of said Willie in the Forgotten Stars series

so I thought, lets dig a little into this unfamilar portion of musical theatre history. Three days later: Oh, good heavens, what a muddle ... I will not be digging there again.  What a hotch-potch of tuppeny-ha'penny entertainments passed for coherent shows in nineteenth century America. Incoherent they were, consisting of movable parts of chat (little or no plot), borrowed songs, fall-about, Dutch, Irish and Nigger Minstrel comedy played by an often quickly changing cast ... nothing but a variety bill (nothing so structured as a Minstrel Show!) ...

Let us look at A Cold Day. The programme from Toledo is from year two of the title's peregrinations. You can see that the artists involved had snaffled numbers from The Mikado, Adonis, The Leather Patch and May Loftus's repertoire, for the musical part of the show. This particular week. But when A Cold Day had started it would have been different. Each artiste simply did his or her turn. And in between .. there weren't even dancing girls to bring on. But an entertainment bearing the name A Cold Day, or The Laplanders, in its various shapes and forms, would wander round America for something like a decade in shrunken versions ..

So. The title. It seems to have had something to do with a politician or advertising. Theatrically, it made its first appearance in lateish 1884, when provincial minstrel, comic and song-and-dance man Frank Girard (b Brooklyn 7 July 1840; d 1 November 1900), whose claim to fame was having been saved from a shipwreck, advertised that he was to tour, with Frank Wills and Charles Burke, a piece under that title written by Charles Gayler (d Brooklyn 28 May 1892), one of the better current writers of the sort of entertainments, farce-comedies, musical-comedy-melodramas which flooded American theatres. Around the same time, Mr Girard also announced that he and Burke were going to tour a piece called Two Old Cronies by F G Maeder. Then their backer (probably at the thought of what he hat himself in for) died. So Two Old Cronies was off. I see it finally came out a few years down the track (2 September 1887, played by the Wills family!)

. 

Then A Cold Day was announced again, but this time Gayler's name was not mentioned. When it went on the road on what seems to have been 5 January 1885 at Williamsburg, the credit (?) for its authorship was given to 'Mr Joseph Arthur'. It was apparently not the same Cold Day credited to Gayler. Mr Arthur had had a piece called A Plot - a Play briefyl produced at the Third Avenue Theatre, to hand, and in need of a title ($1000 reward), so the Third Avenue play snitched the previously announced title, and away they went ..

Mr Arthur. He was Mr Arthur H Smith (b c 1849; d 20 February 1905) from Indiana. Father had been a methodist preacher until he gave up preaching to become and agent for an Insurance Company, elder brother George was a store clerk, 'Joseph' worked as a conductor on the railways. However, he had stagestruck notions, and in his early twenties he begn working in any branch of the theatre that would have him. He penned a piece entitled Colorado played by Fayette Welch, he joined the Hicks Georgia Minstrels, he advertised as 'author and songwriter', promoted himself as a female impersonator (Widow Coldslaw in Our Eating House) in which capacity he joined up, in 1878, with Frank Wills to play a sketch in which he was Brother Tom in Petticoats. At some stage, he claimed to have sung comic opera in Britain, voyaged to India and the East, got divorced, penned The Nightmare, played in a forepiece with Willie Edouin's company at London's Avenue Theatre ... and then came A Cold Day. But he finally hit paydirt when his melodramas The Still Alarm and the oh-so-burlesqueable Blue Jeans proved to the taste of a certain 'popular' public. But that was not yet. Arthur actually made it to the pages of Gerald Bordman's American Theatre ... although Gerry didn't pick up that A Play - a Plot was the same 'comic musical conglomerie' as A Cold Day. .. so I guess that firms up his place in American theatre history.

Next: the 'play' or 'conglomerie'. Gerry says that the original was about 'a comic photographer who snaps a picture of a passing trolley, just as the trolley is jolted to a halt, throwing some young girls into the laps of strange gentlemen'. Well, there IS a photographer in the dramatis personae, so maybe that was the very skinny original skeleton of the show. Oh! Graunccccch! subtitle 'The Laplanders'. Anyhow, the show was 'reconstructed' after a few months, and a review affirmed 'there is no plot -- it is unnecessary. It is written to make you laugh.' Others confirmed 'the singing and specialities made it a success', 'many new and taking specialities were introduced'.

Apart from Girard and Burke (another of the minstrelling-comico brethren) and Frank M Wills (ditto) -- Burke and Wills together - an alarming teaming for Australians! -- I don't know exactly who was in the original cast of either A Play or A Cold Day. Richard Norton's encyclopaedic work blanks the show, undoubtedly with reason, and I have found no other playbill or clue till, after visits to Boston and Easton Pa,  when the show stopped as 14th Street Theatre, NYC, 26th January, for its one week of imprimatur. The three girls are listed as being played by Hattie Arnold, a solid comic opera soprano, the well-known Fanny Wentworth and a Lizzie Hight. It is also recorded that the 'play' lasted 2 1/2 hours. And look, here is an ambitious ad from the trades, following New York! Miss Wentworth gone, already, to be replaced by the durable soubrette, Gracie Emmet and her ?brother with their speciality 'The Emmet Guards'..

By April, Girard and Burke had jumped ship, all sorts of other speshs had taken longer or shorter turns in the 'cast', the management had changed ... but the piece, in some sort of shape (and with a seemingly reduced cast) rumbled on ...

Wills seems to have lasted the longest at the head of affairs, but, by 1886, he had been joined by one Mr Perkins D Fisher (b Smyrna, Delaware, c 1860?; d 12 September 1930). Mr Fisher, son of a German immigrant, had started with grand ideas in te theatre. As an amateur he gave New York his Othello. But he went on to appear in the Boston musical Sancho Pedro, and then he and his nice bartione voice found themselves a starring role in farce-comedy. Mr Fisher had a fine, long, career in minstrelsy and variety's soft middle-belly, latterly in an act with this wife.

The rest of the cast in our playbill (except for Mr Hugh Angler and E Fisher, whom I know not at all) were solid touring players, and included two married couples: Warren W Ashley from Dickson, Ill, and soubrette Marie Heath, of Gatesburg, Knox; and Frank D Nelson from Erie and vocalist Essie Barton, who was starring in minor comic operas into the 20th century.  I suppose Nellie Sheldon was the wife of the better-known A H Sheldon. George Murray 'the noisy Dutchman' seems to have alternated between Germanica and blackface.

The week at Toledo played 'to crowded houses', the 'recostruction' seems to have pleased, and the reduced cast (9-10), travelling in a railways car, where they all slept and ate and whatever together, covered America, leaving little in the way of memories behind them, but making a reasonably honest (I doubt they paid any royalties!) living ...

Life in the musical theatre wasn't all Les Cloches de Corneville and Erminie ...

PS Specialists in this field, if there are any, please send me any corrections or improvement that may be needed ... I'm hastening back to an area where I am more at home ...!

1994: when Yours Truly was worth half-a-page in "The Times"

.
My study/library is starting to look nicely bare. If the folk who say they want certain things, and then don't come for them, or send postage, would do so .. it would be even better. But I'm getting there ...

However, sometimes I find little bits among the stacks that ... well, yes, I've decided that I can throw them away. Because I'll put them on here, and then I don't need pages of yellowing paper, in thrice-used folders ...

The folder that I investigates, today, originally held father's papers on the Federated Mountain Clubs of New Zealand. In the 1990s, after his death, it got recycled ... well, a folder cost $1, and in those days we weren't into throwing away a dollar's worth. And today, probably for the first time this century, I opened it ... and at the top of the stuff inside was this

2 May 1994. I share a rubrique with Ayrton Senna, Dusty Springfield, Lord Monty de Beaulieu, Michael Palin ... I giggled as I realised I probably got the best write-up of any of us (well, you don't count post-mortem eulogies) and, so, I posted this picture on facebook ...

I liked the sub-editor's blurb 'succeeded where others have failed' (I hope Wikipedia caught that!). It was perfectly true, but youngish, unknownish writers don't usually get allowed such an accolade, especially in The Times ... 

Well, of course, the next item in the file was nothing else but page 29. And the article on my book filled half a page. Even Senna only got a quarter of a page. And the dreaded Churchill is reduced to a bulldog thumbnail!  Half a page of The Times is too big to fit my scanner, so I photographed it and hope it is lisible...

When you write a large book, on a subject so large that no one has ever taken the time to research it coherently and properly (from primary sources), you are ripe for the slings and arrows of those self-appointed 'experts' on the subject, or parts of the subject, who have been 'going to write that book', for decades, but ... well, somehow didn't and couldn't. I was lucky. I had the most knowledgeable of the genuinely knowledgeable of these fellows, Andrew Lamb, on my team, soon followed by Sheridan Morley. Poor, dear Mander and Mitchison were a bit piqued ... but, what!

This review was by Benny Green. Anyone old enough to remember the later 20th century in London theatre will remember Benny Green. He was the guy who radio or TV dragged out, mostly, when there was something musical-theatreish to be commented on. He'd tried his hand at the odd show himself. He didn't pretend to be an expert, but until Sheridan and A J Lerner hoisted their historical flags (and we wont even mention that hysterical fake, Mark Steyn) it was mostly Benny. I think we may have met once, but my memory is not great these days. Anyway, he it was that The Times, not unreasonably, selected to review me and mine.

Well, good one you, Benny. It's a thoroughly sensible write-up. Yes, its peppered with a thick dose of the little semi-fictional anecdotes that you loved to tell, and with the errors you helped perpetuate (Clifford Grey never went near a bobsled, it was a homonym; Edgar Smith was NOT HB's brother, you spelled Deslys wrongly ..) but, well, I've straightened them out, and you're dead .... .  I do have a quibble with the Times picture editor: why illustrate a piece on the history of the musical theatre, which specifically excludes flops, with a vast snap from a (deservedly) egregious failure which was NOT one of the 300 illustrations in the book? Did they know, perhaps, that I had cast that flop. Which is another story that I will tell, one day ...

Oh look, the next one is a piece by Clive Hirschorn, another of the more enthusiastic musical-theatre men of the time ...

Chuckle. Some nice quotes to be culled from there. I like 'massive hit'. But, er, Clive, I never could dance. And I don't think we ever met. Shame.

'But all that', to quote a musical, the name of which I now forget, 'was a very long time ago'. In the days of real journalism in the arts ...

Strangely, it wasn't, actually, my heyday. Although I became, with my 'beautiful voice', for a while, very BBC-able. Stories to tell there, as well.

As Benny suggested I should, in 2001, I brought out a 3-volumed, hugely improved, beautifully produced version of the Encyclopaedia, from the enormously author-friendly Schirmer (USA) ... but alas, the third edition didn't happen. My lovely, friendly, respectful, easy-to-work-with publishers (hello! Richard Carlin!) were taken over by a multi-national giant which, now, doesn't even respond to my letters. I contacted not a person (blocked) but their - believe it! -- Australian website last year. I am still waiting for a reply. Oh, and for several years of royalties. So. Do I go solo, reclaim the copyright to the text, and go elsewhere for the 21st century edition .... or do I just give up. I mean, copyright in the text ...?  I hear my voice and see my texts (complete with typos) on websites from Shenzen to South Dakota. Even on wikipedia, whose sub-authors are often too coy to admit that they've filched my work holus-bolus. That's fine by me. At least, if they pinch from me, they are getting it correct!!!!!!

Which brings me to another thought. A couple of years ago, I brought out another Big Book. Victorian Vocalists. 

It was published by Taylor and Francis, who had signally failed, by vast overpricing, bad merchandising, and general incomptence to sell a series (edited by yours truly) of biographies by England's, America's and Australasia's best musical-theatre scholars. Like those books, this one got not one single review .. much less half a page in The Times. No, not even one of those, oh-too-frequent modern 'reviews' by some nonentity who clearly has not read the book. Nothing.

I get the feeling the failure is not mine. The publishing and journalistic world, simply, have changed. I am in no way intending to be vain (look at my waistline!), but having been labelled as the world's Numero Uno, wouldn't you expect that I would be asked to review new works in the field? Nope. Hardly ever. Last year .. um ... thrice. But out of those three, I found a gem! Bravo Mirambeau!

Well, cocktail time. Put Dad's file back on the shelf ... ah! that's what it is! It's my (late) proud parents' folder. They saved all these clippings, just as they saved the ephemera of my school and teenage music triumphs and every letter I wrote home once I left New Zealand in 1968. I don't dare get into those ...

Cocktail.

Jack Strachey: a lost piece of music?

.
Many years ago, my old and aged friend, Trafford Whitelock, was going through the traditional move down from 'house' into 'room'. As we do, and as I am now doing, he emptied the shelves, cartons, drawers holding the ephemera of his life in showbusiness, and consigned them to the rubbish bin. I salvaged a box of music -- printed and manuscript -- mostly by Australian songwriters, that had been sent to him in his BBC days, evidently in the hope that he would find for them a spot on a radio programme. Well, you know ...

St Paul de Vence 1990. In Room One of the British Musical Theatre Collection

Years later, came my turn to auto-divest. My gigantic British Musical Theatre collection was sold to a Benefactor of Harvard University, various bundles of stuff were gifted to folk who longed for them, other things were abandoned on the way, as I moved from England to France to New Zealand ... but somehow Traffy's songsheets survived on my shelves. They made it to the second-to-last major 'cut'.

No. I didn't burn them. I donated them. Which is, in some cases, and with some instituitions, is almost worse. I have a feeling that this case was one. A decade or more ago, the Music Section of the New Zealand National Library was in the hands of a widely knowledgeable and very nice chappie named Roger Flury. We got to know each other socially, a little, workwise a lot, and I bemoaned the sad decline of National Library. I told him the story of how it had refused my archive (the one which is now in Harvard) because it had 'no Maori content'. Well, it was round that time when Maori was becoming 'fashionable' and PC, and every frantically-liberal, middle-class hostess of either sex had to possess a few phrases to throw, languidly, into his or her conversation. Roger exploded. If I had anything Aus-NZ I wanted to donate to HIS department, it would be accepted gratefully.

So Traffy's music went, with my bound volume of Lyster Opera Company libretti and I forget what else of Australasian interest or origin, to the NZNL, after all. Lord knows where it is now. Roger is gone. The Music department probably too. And my next major bundle of give-away goodies, as a result, headed not to Wellington, but, this month, to Santa Barbara. America has a less insular and less racist view of history. Even unimportant old music and theatre history.

But ... today I found one of Traffy's bits that somehow fell through the throw-out net ... Here it is, with its attached (with a rusty paperclip) note.

So, dating from 1955...

Jack would have been rather 'out of fashion' by then .. which is probably why he was printing and touting his music himself, to old mates ... but he'd had a good career ..

STRACHEY, Jack [STRACHEY, John Francis] (b London, 25 September 1894; d Brighton, 27 May 1972). Composer for a handful of the dancing musicals of the London 1920s.

 An education at Marlborough and Oxford University led Jack Strachey to an early career as a pianist in seaside concert parties before he won his first London credits as the composer of revue material for such shows as The Punch Bowl, Charlot's Revue and The Nine O'Clock Revue. He entered the musical theatre in the early days of the craze for dance-and-comedy shows, sharing the musical credit on Laddie Cliff's early musicals Dear Little Billie and Lady Luck and then, along with H B Hedley, Stanley Lupino et al under the pretendedly American umbrella-name of `Hal Brody', on the highly successful So This is Love and Love Lies.

 He continued to write principally material for revue (Shake Your Feet, The Bow Wows, Charlot's Masquerade, The Chelsea Follies, The Savoy Follies, Spread it Abroad, All Wave, Moonshine, Swinging the Gate, Apple Sauce, New Ambassadors Revue, Sky High, Sweet and Low, Flying Colours, The Boltons Revue, Pay the Piper etc) and had his most notable single song hit with ‘These Foolish Things’.

 Two decades after his last West End dance-and-laughter musical, Strachey returned to the musical stage with a rather different type of score for the costume operetta Belinda Fair (131 performances) which, although not disgraced, did not find the same success as those light-footed shows of the 1920s.

1925 Dear Little Billie (w H B Hedley/Desmond Carter/Firth Shephard) Shaftesbury Theatre 25 August

1926 Lady Letty (w Ernest Longstaffe/Sydney Blow, Douglas Hoare) Empire Theatre, Glasgow 18 January

1927 Lady Luck (w Hedley/Carter/Shepard) Carlton Theatre 27 April

1928 So This is Love (w Hedley et al/Carter/Stanley Lupino, Arthur Rigby) Winter Garden Theatre 25 April

1929 Love Lies (w Hedley et al/Carter/Lupino, Rigby) Gaiety Theatre 20 March

1932 The Compulsory Wife (w Carter, Collie Knox/C Bailey Hick) Theatre Royal, Bath 1 April

1949 Belinda Fair (Eric Maschwitz, Gilbert Lennox) Saville Theatre 25 March. 

Well, here comes the next 'cut' ... for I'm not giving one more thing to the 'racist' New Zealand Library (and not only is this not 'Po kare kare ana', it's not even by an Australasian ...) ... so, home it or bin it ...

STOP PRESS

At this stage in the story, an unexpected limo glid down our drive. I put this article on hold, and went to investigate. It was Richard, NZ's top theatre musical director, bringing a keyboard or two for the use of our next house guest, who has a musical to compose over the month of January. We chatted over a nice cup of tea and  I told him about the piece I was writing today ... and showed him the music. I cannot 'read' music, by eye, and I can no longer play, with my four remaining operative fingers, so I had no idea whether the piece was of quality or just a bit of twiddling...

Richard discovers Jack

Richard has gone home with the music-sheet and its accompanying letter. He says it is 'interesting', 'of quality' and 'worth saving'. Chuckle, maybe it will turn up in a 1940s-50s play one day. Again.

Happy ending! Now, that leaves only a few thousand items to re-home ..

Mr Grundy, or a playwright's life is not an easy one ...

.
The tidy-classify-chuck-and burn routine goes on ....

Where, and how, did I accumulate all this stuff, in the 1970s and 1980s, with my very limited resources and an almost inexistant wage-packet ...

I suppose that a lot of it simply wasn't wanted ... or more likely, understood ..

Here's today's little find. A letter written by Sydney Grundy (1848-1914), the highly successful English adaptor of such French pieces as Les Petits Oiseaux (as A Pair of Spectacles) and La Femme de glace (as Esther Sandraz), as well as Meilhac and Millaud's book to the succesful musical comedy La Cosaque. Well, you can look him up.

Sydney Grundy: could such a nice young man write a feelthy play?

In April 1887 Grundy adapted another, and thooughly successful, French play, by the brilliant team of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. La Petite Marquise had been produced at the Théâtre des Variétés starring Jose Dupuis and Céline Chaumont and the comedian Baron, 13 February 1874, and acclaimed as a 'petit chef d'oeuvre'. It ran, played yound and round the French-speaking world, was revived, revived again, and Mr Grundy decided to English it. With the assistance of Mr Joseph Mackay.

But lo! the British censor, in spite of the fact that nobody in the play actually beds anyone, found the little story far too Feelthy French for the virtuous middle British classes (the upper classes simply popped over to Paris) and refused to license The Novel Reader. So Mr Grundy (1882) staged what pretended to be a private matinée for his friends, with Claude Marius in the star role, and some slight alterations. At the curtain, little Lydia Cowell, who had played the leading lady's role, stepped forward and asked the assemblage 'Do you consider it so very awful?'. She was greeted with cheers. 

This 'performance of an unlicensed play', however, was not calculated to please authority, and, while Grundy moved on to other successes, and in spite of the war of words that followed, The Novel Reader was not produced in London. Not in English, anyway. French play seasons were popular and regular, and  La Petite Marquise duly made its way to London's Royalty Theatre in 1886, with Noblet and Mlle Magnier featured. And ... the censor forbade it! Journalistic ink flowed like the sillons that abreuve with sang ..  The Era, England's best (but buyable) theatre paper, devoted a whole editorial to the event (6 February 1886) ... 'a filthy play'.

The unbowdlerised La Petite Marquise

But Grundy did not give up. He fiddled with his text a little more, changed the title to May and December, and tried again. On 25 April 1887, the new version was given at a matinee at Gilbert Farquhar's Criterion Theatre. And this is where our letter comes in. The press credited Mr Farquhar as 'producer'. The matinee was paid for by the authors. At the cost of a whacking 95 pounds sterling.

The Prince of Wales came to the show, and the reviews found nothing to object to. Mr Pigot could hardly accuse the royal family of being perverted by the feelthy French .. so ...

The Era recanted, asserting that the 'objectionable feautres' had been removed, and all made conventionally good-is-rewarded and evil-punished (about the most boring tenent in dramatic history!). Other reviews were more perspicacious ...

And the 'well-attended' matinee, royalty or not, made a loss of fifteen percent on its capitalisation...

May and December (the title shows the reorientation of the original story) was finally given a London run, sixteen years after its acclaimed Paris premiere, in 1890 at the Comedy Theatre, with Rose Norreys as the now thoroughly conventional heroine. It was too little, too late, too bowdlerised, too Britishly boring ...

Grundy went on the write the libretto for Arthur Sullivan's vaguely comic and wholly un-French opera Haddon Hall ... had he installed a little of the spirit of La Petite Marquise and The Novel Reader therein, they might have had a wow of a hit ... a playwright's life is not an easy one! But there were more hits to come for this adept playwright ...

So, there we are. My letter is, I would say, a nice piece of documentation for anybody writing one of those things called a thesis, on the subject of theatrical censorship in the C19th theatre.

Pour another glass, Kurt. Put the 130 year-old letter back in its slip-case till someone shows interest in it. And see what's next in the folio...

About two metres from my left elbow is an original playscript of La Petite Marquise. I'm sure I read it forty years ago, but I didn't connect it to my letter. But I've promised myself Beethoven Nine this evening. And some of our old harness-racing wins on ancient video and those old things called CDs ...

"If I once start looking behind me .."

.
It's New Year's Eve in New Zealand ... soon it will be 2020 ...  Not so long ago, so it seems, it was New Year's Eve 2010, and I was blogging serenely, sitting in exactly the same chair, in exactly the same room, wearing exactly the same teeth and slightly more hair ...

https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2009/12/year-2010.html

In some ways, it seems that not much has changed. In others ... well ...

This dawn of a decade, it isn't 29 degrees, the shimmering is coming not from sunshine, but from a delicate and delightful drizzle, for which we are very grateful ...
Wendy isn't in the garden, for once. She's nursing a broken bone in her ankle ...

And I am way past carpentry and painting, these days, as I reach toward the three-quarter century mark ..
But the Victorian chest, in all its ancient glory, sits underneath our television set ...

Gerolstein itself has changed a bit. Winds, earthquakes and other Acts of God (who, nonetheless does not pay our insurance premia) have swept away a large proportion of our trees since 2010 ... Wendy's gardening skills have produced some glorious gardens, the peacocks have moved in en masse -- and are now in the process of being (mostly) moved OUT -- and the horse population has whittled gradually down to just a few old friends. Yes, twenty-one year-old Boofie (6 wins), twenty-five year-old Sally and her son, Mikie (1 win), are still here, all shiny and fit, a decade on. Duchess and D'Arcy have gone to the Great Green Paddock in the Clouds, while Elena didn't dream hard enough (1 win) and has moved on to friends, leaving behind a handsome and speedy son, Mr B, who, alas, inherited mamma's breathing problems. As for baby Douchelette, after winning two races, she was retired and is now the 10 year-old mother of a beautiful little girl named Emily ...

Emily (1) and Kurt (73). Waist-measurements about equal.

The grande-dame of our 2020 horsey empire, however, is Wilma (5 wins). She doesn't look that much older or fatter now, at twenty-three, than she did ten years ago. I, on the other hand, though even at 63  I was (see below) still quite sylphlike, am (see above) now 30 percent heavier and larger, and not at all the same shape as I was of yore ...

2009: Wilma (aged 13) and Kurt (63)

Then there are little Rocky who didn't make the grade, and dear, huge, Johnny (son of Sally) who never made the races because of a leg defect, and of course, there are these two ....

When we were merely kittens (aged 8)

Minnie and ChiQi have put up with each other (and us) for some eighteen years. ChiQi, the sullen thoroughbred, has kept her form admirably

Teenage calendar girl: 'I'm younger than Marilyn Monroe was...'

Minnie, the one-time wildkitty, has, like me, 'pris de poids' and prefers the couch or the fire rug to any activity which involves effort ... and, when ChiQi feels a little elderly, she joins in. At a distance.

Their patch is a jealously guarded one, and the two further 'orphans of the storm' who have joined them at Gerolstein, during the decade, do not take the risk of encountering the Queens of the Couch on their own territory (38 Maguires Rd).

Sox 42 Maguires Rd

Weekitty 38a Maguires Rd

Outdoors, the cherry-blossom tree bears blossom no longer

But a couple of years ago Wendy planted a wee sprig of wisteria at its base, and the vine is slowly twining its way up the dead trunk ... one day we shall have purple blossoms where once there were pink ...

Wisteria will grow ... wait another decade!

The roses still bloom at Gerolstein ... and yes, one of them is an original from when we moved in, nearly twenty years ago ..

the tropicanna has bloomed overnight to welcome the new decade ..

So ... into it we go! 2020, eh.

When I was a little lad, in the pre-TV cum crackly-radio era, brother John and I each had a prized 'board'. A piece of some sort of varnished hardwood on which we could rest, on our knees, the pieces of writing paper which held the first scribblings of two boys destined, later, to be somewhat known in the world of writing. On my board, I remember inscribing the date, as other children did on their school-desk. 60 odd years on, I'm pretty sure I still remember it: 25 July 1958. Over the interminable months of childhood, I watched that date, and thought 'when I'm old, I and my board will remember this ...'. Alas, when I returned from University, I found that my 'board' was gone. Mother didn't understand ... she'd kept all sorts of things from our childhood. Too much, really. Some of it is here, in a cupboard at Gerolstein, to this day. But my board, and John's, were gone ...  I guess I was supposed to have graduated to a desk ...

Goodness, why do memories and thoughts like this come suddenly back on occasions like the eve of a new decade ...

Dear Diary ...

And oh! The rain has stopped, the sun has come out ... omen felix!!!!

Hoppy, the invalid peacock who is staying

New flowers, old memories ... Alberobello jug 1977

Dinner and a Show ... my night out for 2019

.

PRELUDE

Once upon a time, I used to go to the theatre a hundred times and more a year. But those days are gone. Of course, the fact that, nowadays, I share my time between Sefton, New Zealand (nearest theatre town: Christchurch), and Yamba NSW (nearest theatre town: er ....) rather than London and Berlin, is, if not exactly responsible for my C21st lack of theatrical enterprise and enthusiasm, certainly supportive of it.

But, still, ten years ago, I used to make the best of what Christchurch had to, intermittently, offer. One or two shows per year at the professional Court Theatre (but no touring productions or opera), the productions of the often very good NASDA students, even the occasional musical by the Christchurch amateurs. They don't call themselves the Operatic anymore: it's Showbiz. The change in name goes with a change in attitude which doesn't rightly suit me, any more than their sad nowadays choice of shows.

So, you will understand that, now, I very rarely go to Christchurch theatre at all. And, yes, the main reason is the dreary choice of shows produced. Do I want to see Les Misérables yet again? Do I want to see the ghastly Miss Saigon? Do I want to see amateurs attempting Wicked or Evita? I hope never, ever again to see a Disney show: plastic beyond belief! Mary Poppins? what a mess the rewriters made of that! Legally Blonde? Perhaps the worst and shriekingest piece of trash I've been subjected to in the last decade. And, as much as I enjoyed the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar in the 60s, and the first performances of Cats in the 80s, why need I go to see those shows, yet again, now? In recent years, we have been given nothing new, nothing remotely original or interesting, from either professionals or amateurs ...  Showbiz and the Court had to leave it to NASDA to produce such as Spring Awakening and Once on this Island ... both highly enjoyable pieces, which were theatrically new to me ... as well as the glorious The Music Man, Sweet Charity and, once upon a splendidly adventurous time, even pieces such as the intelligent City of Angels and the brand new and brilliant Far from the Madding Crowd ... before they, too, slumped back into Hair, the incompetent Curtains and Beauty and the Beast .. sigh, it'll be Rent next, and lower than that (except for pop pasticcio) you cannot, in my opinion, go.

Gayle Spence as Bathsheba in NASDA's Far from the Madding Crowd

The Court Theatre habitually stages a musical piece at Christmas, and I, in past years, habitually took it in. In the last years, I have attended but thrice. I simply did not want to see a mucked-up Mikado, the painful Legally Blonde, an umpteenth Jesus Christ Superstar ... I went, only, to an enoyably lively version of Grease (oddly, I'd never before seen it on stage), that unsupportably awful, botched version of Mary Poppins, and to see a favourite student of mine play Roxie Hart in Chicago. She played it superbly, and the production was the best I've ever seen in Christchurch. So, it can be done ...

Nomi Cohen as Roxie Hart

Anyway, all that is preface to my saying: this year I am going to the Court Christmas show. Yes! So what are they doing to drag me from my cosy home, my bacon-and-egg pie and chardonnay, and the bf's new CD (https://www.hankinsonmusic.com), for seven hours in the city? The answer: the 1990 British National Theatre version of The Wind in the Willows. I shall report back in the morn.

THE MORNING AFTER

I had a very nice night out. My dear friend, Richard, collected me in his wonderful electric limo, and we drove to ... the airport? For a pre-theatre dinner. The dinner turned out to be the first success of the evening. I can't remember when I last dined in a chain restaurant. Berni Inn, Scarborough, 1968? This one is called Lone Star (Spitfire) and I know of it because its owner also owns most of New Zealand's harness-racing horses. The menu was meaty and hearty, and Dolly Parton sang 'Jolene' while you were having a pee in the startlingly glamorous rest rooms. I ordered lamb, Richard a ribeye, and some garlic bread. We got a loaf. Honestly. But a simply delicious loaf. We devoured it entire. Bugger what was to come. Well, what came was a glorious piece of oven-lamb, with mashed potato ... made me think of the dear old Katz Orange in Berlin. Of course, it was huge ... but I wasn't leaving a skurrick, and with the help of a pint of pretty fair export Guinness, I made it to the end of the largest meal I have eaten in ages. After a quick reprise of Dolly Parton, we bulged contentedly out of the restaurant ($123 for two) ...

We were rather early for the theatre, so Richard took me for a small tour around the remnants of Christchurch. Remnants is right. I, who lived five years in the heart of Christchurch, only recognised two or three places. The lovely old brick post office, the revamped Theatre Royal, the river, of course ... Christchurch, as I knew it, is gone, and I don't much care for the concrete boxes and car retail yards that are replacing it. The topless Anglican Cathedral, I was glad to hear, is being obliterated; the lovely Catholic Cathedral, alas, also; both to be relocated (doubtless in concrete and glass boxes) on one of the endless blocks of now bulldozed nothingness ...

I was glad to get to the theatre, where there was life and warmth and a buzz noticeably lacking elsewhere. And it brought all sorts of emotions rushing back to be sitting in a theatre auditorium for the first time in two years ...

THE SHOW

It must be nigh on seventy years since I read The Wind in the Willows. And I think I saw a stage version at Farnham rep in the 1980s. So I am not too hot at giving chapter and verse on the text. But amongst the familiar (to me) episodes and lines, I am pretty sure that there were new elements in Alan Bennett's dramatisation. Maybe not, maybe I've just forgotten some bits. There are, indeed, some bits that are forgettable. Just as their are some bits that are delicious.

Oh. A quick sidetrack to say this is not 'a musical', as such. It is a play with three or four sung bits and a lot of incidental music. Fifty-three pieces so I was told. At the National, apparently, it had a full scale live orchestra. Whether in the pit, or with euphonium and cor anglais playing squirrels, I do not know. Here, the entire score (all 54 pieces) had been tracked. Well, Christchurch does not have the governmental resources of the NT. But ... the music turned out to be my favourite element of the evening. At the start of the play, a lone woodland creature produced an old 78rpm player from a mushroom or tree-stump, put the needle on ... and out came the 'orchestra' with a delightful, warm, olde worlde sound ... no need to explain the musical sound of the piece further! But the triumph of the evening was the 'first-act finale': the little forest creatures, in the most enchanting Woodland Christmas costumes, singing a beautiful harmonised arrangement of 'In the Bleak Midwinter'.

Sidetrack to the sidetrack: the scenery, with its false proscenium of windowed trees and its turntable river, was really pretty, and, now that the theatre has that practical train, perhaps they can schedule On the Twentieth Century for 2020; but the other triumph of the evening was the costume design! Those bunnies and squirrels were so huggable! Not to mention darling Ratty. Mr Badger was a treat! I'm not sure weasels have fur coats ... but they were fun. And the Christmas costumes were wholly, wholly memorable.

Now the play. Curate's eggy. No, that's not fair. Many more nice bits that iffy bits. But I think, perhaps, Mr Bennett tried to fit too much in. Incidents such as the weasels' theft of the baby rabbit, the whole fortune-teller episode, or Mole's venture solo to Toad Hall do not have any effect and purpose in the main stream of events, nor any particular value in themselves. I'd have cut them. But, of course, they may have been done differently at the NT. Albert, the depressive horse, is a gift of a role, but his dialogue is very 1990s. As is the fuss over cross-dressing. There is no reason why Wind in the Willows should not, like a pantomime, be updated (eg the depiction of the weasels and stoats as property developers), but it needs to remain coherent, and that bit, to me, doesn't fit in with Toad's discovery of the motor car -- definitely NOT a 1990s model -- , the presence in the tale of washerwomen and open-cabin trains ...

Toad in a hole

Should one be worried by such incoherencies, or just suspend belief and treat the play as a timewarped or timeless hotchpotch?

Still, like any (ex)-theatrical, I was delighted at little touches such as a brief cross-over by Little Red Riding Hood, and the White Rabbit scurrying down his hole exclaiming 'I'm late'! Author or director, I know not! Coherent - not! But I guffawed.

So, in total, slight reservations about the play, none at all about the music, scenery and costumes, and, indeed, none about the direction, which was straightforward and apt to both piece and subject. Which, in my book, is the best kind of direction there is. But as a very wise international director once said to me: 'direction is 90% in the casting. Get that right and my job's easy'. And here, I think, things went a little wrong. And, once again, I don't know whether it is the author or director who is responsible. And the sound man may have something to do with it..

Casting Mole with an actress, in the National Theatre style of Felicity Kendal in On the Razzle (of glorious memory), seems a valid idea, especially here, where Mole is presented as a simple, childish wee beastie. Alas, the Mole of Eilish Moran (who was a wonderful Judy in Over the Rainbow), was, while she looked and acted grandly, so squeakily pitched as to be all but incomprehensible to me, and, I suspect, to anymal other than bats. When the bunnies and beastlets all took on similarly squeaky tones, the children in front of me (who were clearly not bats) lost interest, and I just gave up. We only got some properly less squeaky lines when good old baritone Badger (Tom Trevella) and the Bargewoman came into the plot.
But worse was to come. In the famous court scene, the actress playing the Magistrate gave a wholly grotesque and garbled performance, which seemed to have been copied from Legally Blonde, and of which I understood only the words 'devilled kidneys'. I can't believe a writer of Bennett's stature wrote the part to be played like that. It was the low point of the evening. Putting on a silly voice is not acting.
Which brings me to my other complaint. Why were Rat (Gregory Cooper), Mole, Badger and Toad (Cameron Rhodes) given moulded-glass English accents, and the 'lower' characters, on the other hand, a confusing array of versions of British provincial and suburban accents? Are we meant to assume, thus, that Rat went to Harrow-by-the-Pond and that the Riverbank, alone, is home to the intelligibly-speaking classes.

Casting Norman, the daft Stephen-Lewisish weasel henchman, with a very obviously female actress, was not a good idea either -- the joke of the character, somehow, vanished -- however, the male Bargewoman (Isaac Pawson, the superb Mary Sunshine of Chicago) was a total success. This young man has playing travesty down to an art. Never campy or flaunting, a genuine bit of on-the-nail character acting. Like. Like. Like.

And one final (I promise) grumble. Most of the young actors in the play's supporting roles were graduates or students of the splendid NASDA. They must be taught not to GABBLE. Look at your four lead players, Messrs Cooper, Trevella, Rhodes and Ms Moran (when not squeaking), you young people, and LEARN. Voices projected, words enunciated, phrases comprehensible ... a basic actor's necessities. One young lady (who shall be nameless) barely took a breath ... one young gentleman who should know better ...

There! Grumbles over. And all of them on the audio side. For there was nothing to grumble about on the visual. Nor, of course the musical ...

The highlights of the evening for me? 'In the Bleak Midwinter', Mr Cooper's characterful, crisp Ratty, Mr Pawson's Bargewoman, the sweet oh-so-sweet costumes, 'In the Bleak Midwinter', 'In the Bleak Midwinter', the bunnies and meeces, bluff Badger and .. of course, everybody's favourite, Albert the Horse (Andrew Todd, who managed to mumble just above the audibility threshold) ...

An enjoyable evening. Infinitely preferably to a Legally Blonde or a Mary Poppins. But I see the theatre's problem. The house last night was but two-thirds full. I imagine that for Grease or Chicago or any other musical with a buzz-word 'film' name, it would have been sold out. I don't suppose for a minute that the Court needs to be self-supporting (witness the rest of their year's programming), but they probably -- like the National Theatre and others such around the world -- need to make up the shortfall from their not generally attractive plays on a festive musical. Shame. So I suppose I sha'n't be back, failing pleasant surprises, to the Court soon.

I certainly won't be attending their next musical production. Guess what. The programme tells me that it is ... Rent! I should have kept my mouth shut. And the amdrams are doing Buddy. So, unless NASDA comes up with something fascinating, as they have, from time to time, over the years ... my next visit to a theatre may be a long time in the coming ...

PS Sadly there is no photo of the Critturs Christmas ... I have asked the theatre for one, and shall add it if and when it comes ..

PPS The theatre tells me it does not want to supply one. Apparently, because they do not want to give away their most picturesque effect before the event. I had to smile. True non-commercial (ie subsidised) theatre thinking. Does it not enter their calculations that if they DID advertise their prettiest scene, they might have full houses instead of 60-70% ones. Oh well, when the run has finished maybe I can ask again...
The theatre also wants me to credit one Danielle Colvin with the photos reproduced (from the programme) above. Well, I'm an agreeable bloke, so, for whatever good it does to the said Ms Colvin: Done. I'd rather have credited the costume designer (Stephen Robertson) and makers ...