THEATRE-GOING WHEN YOUNG – PART 5 of 8

It is some while since I posted my previous Theatre-Going When Young  blog, and it's time I completed the series - more for my sake than for yours.  The background to the series is described at some length in Part 1 of 8, dating from August 2015: in brief, I was fortunate as a young man to attend numerous theatrical performances in Melbourne (mostly courtesy of an uncle), and the programmes I invariably secured have served as a prompt for my ruminations.

26.    Hollywood Bandbox

 

The headline act for this 1961 Tivoli show was Bob Crosby, indeed so headline that the cover of the programme announces the show as "Bob Crosby in Hollywood Bandbox".  I have no recollection of whether Crosby's contribution was stand-out or whether, indeed, he was accompanied by his own band - I suspect not, more likely there was a pick-up group of Australian musicians.  

 

There were seven Crosby siblings, and Bob (1913 - 1993) undoubtedly had to live in the shadow of Bing (1903 - 1977). But a review of his life achievements by no means shows a career eclipsed by his famous older brother. Certainly Bing Crosby's career was incomparable, but Bob Crosby's was not insubstantial.  Starting as a singer, he led his first band at age 22.  His later large-format swing orchestra had within it a separate Dixieland band, the "Bob-Cats".  He was one of the more popular bandleaders of the swing era. He spent years in radio and television, and appeared in around 30 movies.

 

 The Hollywood Bandbox programme, in addition to featuring Bob Crosby, had five solo acts plus two other "performance groups", one of them The Escorts.  It was to see The Escorts that I attended the Tivoli.......because my friend, Bob Turnbull, was one of their number.  The Escorts had an easy-listening style, so affable in fact that a little later they re-formed as The Seekers.  Bob did not continue with the group, made his career in television production, and avoided worldwide fame.  But he was assuredly there at the beginning.  Bob and I attended the same high school, and knew each other more particularly from our shared schoolboy trip to Great Britain some five years earlier than the Tivoli gig.  Bob survives, in Sydney.

 

Another of the Hollywood Bandbox line-up was Pilita Corrales, Filipino pop singer.  She was billed as Pilita, and became well-known while in Australia for several years, from 1959 to 1963.  Her subsequent performing and recording career in the Philippines was substantial. Not mentioned in Pilita's Wikipedia biography is the intriguing episode of her time with American actor and magician, John Calvert.  Calvert appeared in 40 or so Hollywood movies in the '40s and '50s, but his principal and long-time career was magician.  He lived to age 102.  He made his London Palladium debut in 2011 at age 100.  Meanwhile, back in 1959, with Pilita and others aboard heading for Australia, his 120 ft. yacht, Sea Fox, broadcast a distress signal.  After 20 hours of RAAF searching, the craft was located at an off-shore island.  Despite Calvert's denial the episode was widely believed to have been a publicity stunt.   The proposed film starring Calvert and Pilita foundered, the boat was sold off, Calvert departed for Singapore marooning a pile of unpaid debts, and Pilita went on to Australian television fame, and to Hollywood Bandbox.

 

27.       Under the Yum Yum Tree

 

Alexander Archdale had a long career in theatre and radio, principally as an actor.  But he did it hard.  I knew his name and his beautiful voice from radio broadcasts in the 1950s.  (And from his recent performance in Saint Joan - see below.)  His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography is extensive, and attests to a varied career, albeit not quite at the top of his profession.  One could apply the words of Somerset Maugham when asked to rate his place in the world of novelists:  in the front rank of the second rank.   

 

Archdale was born in 1905 in India into a military family, educated in England and at McGill University in Canada, spent five years in British repertory, and first appeared on the London stage in 1932.  He was back in the theatre (and radio and television) after Royal Navy service in WWII, but felt out of step with modern theatre, and came to Australia in 1951, finally settling here in 1961.  He directed stage productions, acted in many; and in 1965 was founder/actor/manager of the Marian Street Theatre Company – financially unsuccessful.  In the meantime, Archdale directed Under the Yum Yum Tree at the Comedy Theatre, in a season commencing 8 August, 1962.

 

The play had had a moderately successful Broadway run (173 performances) a year or so before arriving in Australia. It had starred Gig Young; and the subsequent movie (released October 1963) starred Jack Lemmon.  The lead in the Australian production was British actor Digby Wolfe.  

 

The role, I imagine, was a career milestone for Wolfe.  Described in the programme as a blond-haired blue eyed Englishman of Norwegian origin, Wolfe had an early career in the West End and on British television, arriving in Australia in 1959 as a nightclub performer; and then on to great success in the television variety show Curtain Call.   Revue 61 and Revue 62 followed - with Wolfe as compere and Dave Allen as resident comedian - leading to Wolfe settling in Australia.  Under the Yum Yum Tree provided Wolfe with his first stage appearance in this country.  

 

Wolfe spent time in the USA, then back and forth to Australia - hosting television programs here, appearing in variety specials there (with Sinatra, Diller, Denver, Cher, MacLaine, Hawn) and scripting Laugh-In, for which he won an Emmy. In later years Wolfe taught dramatic writing at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he died in 2013, aged 82…………after a pretty substantial contribution to the world of entertainment one would have to say.

 

Under the Yum Yum Tree is quite forgettable – certainly for me – and judging by the plot summary in Wikipedia it is unlikely ever to be revived.

 

28.    My Fair Lady

 

I have no recollection of a theatrical event in this country that had a more anticipated arrival than My Fair Lady.  Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe had teamed for earlier productions, successful productions, and there was no particular reason to suppose that My Fair Lady would be measurably different and, given the quality of Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon, no reason to suppose it would be “better”.  Indeed, many would say that those earlier musicals are superior.  But the box office disagreed.  What Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon had in folksiness, My Fair Lady had in elegance and charm, strengthened by the underlying story from the Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalian, on which the musical is based. 

 

The excitement generated during the lead-up to the Australian production of My Fair Lady was doubtless due to the advance publicity machine; but probably more so due to the embargo placed by the copyright-holders on public broadcasting of the music from the show.  Despite the embargo, knowledge of the songs became widespread, typically through the bringing of recordings from the USA.  Airline personnel were much in demand to “bring back the LP”: thence my uncle Bill secured a copy through an airline friend – and it was played to death. The adjective “sparkling” took a beating.  But it was the words rather than the music that resonated; brilliant Shaw massaged by clever Loewe.   The individual songs are just right for their words, and taken as a whole the music is delightful, but (in my opinion) none of the melodies is as successful as the three top tunes from each of Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon.

 

The Australian season was launched at Her Majesty’s Theatre on 24 January 1959 (in turn after New York, Chicago and London).  It starred Robin Bailey in the mostly talking role of Henry Higgins, speech and accent aficionado, and Bunty Turner as the pig’s ear cockney flower-seller turned by Higgins into the silk purse “proper speaking lady”.  The show ran for months, and reprised several times over the ensuing years; Australia’s greatest theatrical success ever, I expect.

 

How a play written by Shaw in 1912, and remaining faithful to that era in its musical form, would strike such a sympathetic chord with theatregoers I have no idea, but the programme has three car adverts that may just identify a presumed target audience.  Melford Motors push the Ford Zephyr for 1040 pounds ($2080) and the Fordomatic for 1660 pounds ($3320), Robin Bailey thinks his Rover 105 has “got it”, and – clearly for those of discernment – the Jaguar Mark IX is a steal at 3456 pounds ($6912).   Hosies describes itself as “Melbourne’s finest hotel” without so much as a wink to The Windsor, The Menzies, Scotts, The Oriental, or The Hotel Australia (only one of which survives!).  Hosies survives too, but would choke on the word "finest".

 

29.    Saint Joan

 

George Bernard Shaw, always Bernard and never George (and GBS to one and all), was an Irish playwright.  He was many other things too - public commentator, political activist, prolific letter writer, early Fabian, music and theatre critic. And nonagenarian, which partly explains how he had enough time to achieve all the rest. He lived from1856 to 1950 and, as I've said elsewhere, was also famous simply for being famous. His final decade overlapped my first, and as a youngster I was inexplicably star struck by this irascible old man who was so often in the news, front and centre.  So much so that over the years I have acquired a bunch of books by and about Shaw, some 90 centimetres of shelf space to be precise (about three feet in the old money).

 

Shaw published a volume of his collected plays in 1934.  They numbered 45; and with the twelve that Shaw wrote later, plus the eight that he'd omitted from the original collection, we reach the revised total of 62.  Some of the better known today:  Arms and the Man, The Devil's Disciple, Androcles and the Lion, and Pygmalion (later used by Lerner and Loewe as the foundation story for My Fair Lady).  There is also Man and Superman, a play in modern setting, but with a "stand-alone" third act known as Don Juan in Hell.  Sometimes excised from performance, sometimes performed separately, Don Juan in Hell is a monumental philosophical debate between the Devil, Don Juan (as an old man, recently deceased), Dona Ana (who Don Juan had once tried to seduce), and (the statue of) the Commander (who, a lifetime before, protecting the honour of his daughter, Dona Ana, had been killed in a duel with Don Juan).  Sounds complicated, but Don Juan in Hell is great stuff.  I treasure my 2-LP set (circa 1952) of the company that toured it as a four-hander in the 1950s - Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, Agnes Moorhead and Cedric Hardwicke.

 

And then there was Saint Joan.  Often described as Shaw's greatest play, its plot covers the final days of Joan of Arc, the "Maid of Orleans".  The Tivoli was a variety venue, but here from 5 June,1962, it was staging drama, and a "big" production at that.  Included in the cast was Alexander Archdale, who a little later produced Under the Yum Yum Tree at the Comedy, discussed above.  It is virtually impossible to remember a performance from more than 60 years ago, and the memories we have are typically compilations of the initial impression overlaid with subsequent recollections.  My composite memory of the 1962 production is that Alexander Archdale's performance as the Earl of Warwick was outstanding - it was the dominant memory that I took away from the play; and even though the memory - faded or confabulated - may have grown with the years, I would say that over those years I have thought of Archdale's performance as the greatest acting I ever saw.

 

The Joan character is on stage through much of the play, and it is a mighty role.  The historical Joan of Arc was presumed to be 19 at the time of her travail and execution. The part when first staged in the West End was played by the formidable tragedian, Sibyl Thorndike.  At 42, the right amount of acting (and life) experience, but the wrong amount of youthfulness.  In the 1957 Otto Preminger film, Joan was played by Jean Seberg (aged 19), the right amount of youthfulness , but the wrong amount of experience - it was her first role, she having been chosen  from the (reportedly) 18,000 hopefuls who were screen tested.  Zoe Caldwell, who starred at the Tivoli, was then 29 and youthful enough. And she was experienced.  Melbourne born in 1933, she began her acting career with the Union Theatre Repertory Company, was later with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, later again with the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. She appeared at Stratford, Ontario, and was a stalwart of Broadway, winning four Tony Awards.  Much of that came later, but in 1962 Caldwell was nonetheless feted as the prodigal returning.  In his Herald review of the play theatre critic, Geoffrey Hutton, is bordering on fulsome:

 

"Small, intense and commanding, she dominated the imposing court, her voice dropping to a pathetic whisper or rising to a cry of defiance.  The true climax to the play occurs........when Joan succumbs to the terrors of the flesh, then rises from the ground, denounces her accusers, and prepares for the stake in a mood of exaltation.

 

The peasant girl, not only simple but with a touch of craftiness, too, is transformed in a second to the rapt heroine, the symbolic figure of martyrdom.  It is a great moment of theatre, and Miss Caldwell took it at the flood."

 

After lauding a brace of other cast members, Hutton continues:

 

"Most effective of all is Alexander Archdale's Warwick, a study in diplomacy..........Miss Caldwell's intensely dramatic Joan, and this carefully drawn background, do Shaw all the justice he would ask."

 

The New York Times reported that Zoe Caldwell died at her adopted hometown, Pound Ridge, New York state, in February 2020 of complications from Parkinson's disease.  She was 86.

 

30.   Rhythm Express

 

This revue, also at the Tivoli, showcased fourteen acts, so conditions backstage must have been hilarious (for which read chaotic).  The lead act was Shirley Bassey, and her dominant role can be gauged from the fact that although the review was titled Rhythm Express those words as they appear on the cover of the programme are minute compared with the words Shirley Bassey.  Bassey was the drawcard.

 

Shirley Bassey began her singing carer in 1953, as a 16-year-old, so by February 1958, in Melbourne, she was a seasoned trouper.  I think she is now retired (at 84), but then she released an album In August 2020, so who knows?  What we do know is that in her long career she did 33 television programmes for the B.B.C., and that her discography is so immense that it is listed on its own Wikipedia page.  

 

The enthusiastic author of the Rhythm Express programme notes writes that "Shirley is the first British coloured pop star in world-class alongside Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt".  Surprising, then, that it took a further 42 years for Bassey to be made a DBE.  Furthermore, when did Eartha Kitt get to be a singer as world class as Lena Horne?

 

And, if proof is needed that stars are stars and the others are not, here's a list of those others on the bill with Shirley Bassey:  Lili Berde, Clifford Guest, Eleanor Gunter, George Holmes, Vic Hyde, Jimmy Jeff, Joe Martin, Dorothi Neal, The Three Winds, The Coribas, Paul Newton, David Steele, and Irene Bevans.

 

Gary Andrews