National Identity and the British Musical: From Blood Brothers to Cinderella 9781350243538, 9781350243569, 9781350243552

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National Identity and the British Musical

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National Identity and the British Musical From Blood Brothers to Cinderella Grace Barnes

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METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Grace Barnes, 2022 Grace Barnes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Rebecca Heselton Cover image: Sarah Lancashire as Joyce Chilvers in the production Betty Blue Eyes, directed by Richard Eyre at the Novello Theatre in London. Photo by Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Say it’s just a show: The musical as a British cultural artefact 2 ‘Kyan wait to get to Inglan’: National identity and the British musical 3 Solidarity Forever!: Depictions of the class divide 4 Too many years lost in his story: The absent female voice 5 A cat so clever: Andrew Lloyd Webber and the reinvention of the British musical 6 I can smile at the old days: Nostalgia and the British musical 7 We can turn over and start again . . . : The way forward Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to the following practitioners who very generously shared their experience, their memories and their thoughts on the British musical. Howard Goodall, Philip Hedley, Kerry Michael, Martin McCallum, Gareth Neame, Sir Tim Rice, Willy Russell, Christopher Selbie and Bob Tomson.

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The British nation has a long and envied theatrical heritage of which it is justifiably proud. It is the home of Shakespeare, Olivier, Gielgud and Ashcroft, and tourists travel to the UK specifically to experience theatre. In London, they see a West End musical which may have been running for over a decade, or they watch an angry new play at the Royal Court. They buy tickets to Agatha Christie’s murder mystery, The Mousetrap, now the longest running play in the world having premiered in 1952.1 They journey to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company and, if their visit coincides with Christmas, they see a traditional pantomime in whatever city they happen to find themselves in. In short, Britain is a nation alive with theatre and with something to suit every taste. For centuries, theatrical performance has reflected and challenged or consolidated the societal values which define the United Kingdom. It has validated marginalized British voices by putting them onstage, it has interrogated class structures, re-examined local history, held various governments to account, brought classic literature to life, educated, deconstructed and entertained. As a conduit for the voice of the nation, a primary function of the theatre in any society is not only to reflect the status quo, but to critique it. British dramatists have done this via the Angry Young Men of the 1950s and the In Yer Face playwrights of the 1990s, movements which redefined theatrical boundaries and reaffirmed a view of British playwriting as daring, innovative and, for the most part, unequalled. And it is this reputation which is partly responsible for the conflation of British theatre with drama, a predilection that critic and researcher, Aleks Sierz, labels as the ‘literary gaze’.2 Musical theatre has no place within this literary heritage and, despite the British Invasion of Broadway in the 1980 and 1990s 1

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with the technological spectaculars of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, British musicals are frequently overlooked in national debates concerning culture and identity. The literary gaze which equates British theatre with drama has roots in a view of Great Britain as a nation contextualized within a heritage of intellectualism. From Shakespeare to Jez Butterworth, drama has been a fundamental component in the theatrical tradition which is often regarded as a reflection of this intellectual heritage. Names such as Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Joe Orton, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and debbie tucker green are only a handful of the dramatists who have contributed to an ongoing view of British theatre as primarily text based. Within this context of the literary gaze, musical theatre is frequently dismissed as artistically unsophisticated and too American to hold any relevance. Despite the global success of British musicals in the past four decades, Michael Billington, the UK’s longest serving theatre critic, devoted just twelve pages to the musical in his four-hundred-page analysis, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945. Professor of Theatre, Nadine Holdsworth, considers ‘plays, performance installations, public art projects and multimedia performance’, everything in fact, except musical theatre, in her examination of the role of theatre in constructions of nationhood, Theatre and Nation.3 These are only two examples of the consistent exclusion of musical theatre from a national cultural discourse, an exclusion which embodies how we, as a Nation, view ourselves, and what version of Britishness we wish to nominate as representative of our society and our culture. Musicals are considered populist and therefore incompatible with the intellectual sophistication of the literary greats who form the foundation of the nation’s proud artistic heritage. But the insistence that musical theatre has no cultural currency in the UK overlooks a rich history which encompasses music hall, Gilbert and Sullivan, pantomime, variety, circus, the pier shows and the working men’s club, all of which have contributed to the development of the British musical. With the exception of the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, however, the aforementioned forms of entertainment

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have working-class connotations resulting in their dismissal as lowbrow amusement and thus wholly unconnected to the middle-class theatre-going experience. In the Victorian era, playgoing was a respectable pastime for the educated and discerning classes and endorsed by the Queen herself who commanded an annual season of Shakespeare plays to be performed in the state apartments at Windsor Castle. Performances of music hall and vaudeville, on the other hand, were viewed as disreputable and of no artistic consequence due to their popularity amongst workingclass patrons. The mass appeal of the developing form of musical theatre, with its obvious echoes of music hall, is partly responsible for the implication from critics going as far back as Noël Coward’s day, that the genre is notable for an absence of the intellectual rigour which is an imperative of the British artistic tradition. In a nation where social mobility continues to be constrained by entrenched ideals concerning class and the social hierarchy, it is incontestable that the ingrained snobbery towards musical theatre is due in no small part to the fact that the form holds appeal across the class divide. A large part of the critical distaste for the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, is due to its mass popularity which is (not always justifiably) equated with low artistic quality – a presumption rarely directed at the work of mainstream playwrights Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett or Alan Ayckbourn. This suggests a school of thought that designates popular and/or commercial success distasteful only when it is presented in the form of musical theatre: no critic accused the National Theatre of pandering to the lowest common denominator when it produced War Horse (2007) or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012). The pervasive and ongoing critical view in the UK of the musical as a necessary evil for subsidized theatres struggling to balance finances, and a homogenous and uninspired brand in the West End, designates the British musical as inferior on two counts: it is neither as good nor as relevant as British drama, and it is a poor imitation of the Broadway musical. The way in which a populace imagines or constructs itself as a nation is directly influenced by the narratives reproduced through various

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modes of cultural production. Any cultural artefact, be it Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress or a tartan kilt, contains information regarding the country of origin and enables a performance of nationhood for both the participant and the viewer. Wearing a kilt will not make someone Scottish but it may reinforce the sense of belonging to the nation and subsequently enable a performance of Scottish-ness. Watching a British musical which replays the narrative of cheery Londoners sheltering in an underground station while the Blitz rages outside provokes pride in a united history and strengthens a sense of national identity through the recognition of shared (constructed) national characteristics, i.e. the perception of who ‘we’ are. In a wider context, cultural production offers artefacts such as films, plays and artwork which consolidate or challenge our understanding of the nation and interrogate the societal status quo. While drama is viewed and reviewed within this context, musical theatre rarely is, suggesting that the genre is not regarded as a legitimate strand of cultural production in the UK. This is a notable contrast to the USA where, from its inception, musical theatre has been regarded as a valid art form and has functioned as a means of reflecting and deconstructing the societal status quo. It is entirely possible that the British money-spinning spectaculars of the 1980s and 1990s resulted in a view from practitioners and commentators alike that the sole function of the British musical was to make a profit. Far from being held up as an art form producing cultural meanings within the context of national identity, the musical in Britain became associated with lesser artistic connotations within a discourse of ‘entertainment’. This permitted commentators to critically engage only at a superficial level, and the implications of this are clearly on display in the numerous British shows which go unchallenged for reproducing the white, male and middle-class values of their creators. These viewpoints are subsequently absorbed by audiences up and down the country who appear not to notice that the musical theatre depiction of their own society is not an ‘authentic’ reflection in the way that the prime-time soap operas of Eastenders or Coronation Street purport to be.

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The assertion by commentators that the musical is too intellectually lightweight and too commercial to warrant the same level of critical analysis as drama overlooks the sheer number of people engaging with the form. Indeed, apart from pantomime, musical theatre is frequently the only experience of theatre that many Britons will have, and this alone makes it imperative that British musicals are considered alongside British plays as cultural artefacts which produce meanings relating to definitions of ‘Britishness’. And to summarily dismiss the musical as irrelevant within a wider cultural context is to reject the choice of a large section of the population and deem it as unworthy of attention. Anything that is seen by this number of people matters deeply as it has the power to unite the nation (witness the viral lockdown YouTube performance of ‘One Day More’ from a family home in Kent) and possibly even effect change. Far from being irrelevant, then, the British musical is highly significant within debates relating to national identity due to its potential to endorse a political viewpoint through the value system represented onstage. As an example, what wider meaning are produced by the proliferation of shows by male practitioners with narratives focusing on men or boys, or the constant depiction of the contemporary British populace as universally white? British musicals hold additional currency within national identity debates as they are now an international commodity, marketed and sold for global consumption and, just like a branch of Marks and Spencers in Kuwait, assumed to be representative of the UK. An audience attending Matilda (2010) in Korea will make certain assumptions regarding Britain and the British based on what they are seeing onstage. The modern British musical matters enormously within the construction of nationhood at home because it is assumed to be a reflection of the nation – Our story, told by Ourselves, i.e. not Brigadoon or My Fair Lady. Audiences have a desire to see themselves and their own culture represented onstage as it confers both validity and significance onto the individual and community. A large part of the popularity of Noël Coward’s work between the two world wars was attributed to his persistent reproduction of English values and narratives

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at a time of increasing Americanization. His lavish 1931 musical, Cavalcade, shamelessly exploited an emotional attachment to a dignified and ‘great’ England, subsequently stirring such levels of patriotic fervour that the show was credited as having assisted the election of Conservative government. The literary gaze in this era was already dismissing musical theatre as a form which existed beyond the intellectual boundaries of British drama, and this resulted in a reluctance amongst creators to mobilize the form either as a tool of political engagement or to challenge myths relating to nationhood. Undeniably, the nation represented in Cavalcade was viewed, and reproduced, through a middle-class lens, but the show was unique at the time in that it utilized the form of the musical to hold up the history and the future of the nation for public examination, thereby endowing the British musical with a corresponding political function to the American shows on Broadway. Before the influence of imported American shows into London, an early British musical theatre sensibility was shaped by European operetta at one end of the scale, and music hall at the other – an accurate reflection of the class divisions at the heart of British society. Prior to the Second World War, the ground in between the extremes of music hall and operetta did not produce an instantly recognizable ‘British’ style, and despite the best efforts of Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, the homegrown musical struggled to escape the definition of Other in comparison to Broadway – Other being ‘less-than’, not ‘different’. In the immediate post war period, swamped by the ground-breaking shows of Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, British musicals continued to struggle to establish an original voice which captured the character of the British populace and culture. This was partly due to a view of the form as not ‘serious’ enough to engage with identity discourses but it was hindered further by the fact that practitioners were attempting to reflect the British nation via an American medium. In the early 1960s, a distinct British voice was apparent in the work of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, Lionel Bart and Joan Littlewood but of these, only Littlewood, with her unashamedly socialist theatre company operating out of the East End of London, mobilized the form

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of musical theatre to challenge the socio-political status quo and to explore questions of ‘Britishness’ beyond the superficial. Since the Victorian era, British theatre has operated within a set of assumptions concerning the race and class of its patrons, and the work onstage has been intended to gratify a white, middle-class audience. The creators of musical theatre have consistently reproduced these suppositions and, even as late as the 1960s, working-class stereotypes who conformed to an idealistic middle-class view of the happy, hardworking cockney were very much in evidence. In addition, the audience for musical theatre in the UK tended to be middle-aged and the first real challenge to this white, middle-class and middle-aged demographic came via Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972. This iconoclastic phenomenon attracted the following of a younger audience who recognised the counter-culture movement reflected in the anti-establishment message of peace. The fact that the long haired, sandal-wearing Jesus delivered his radical message via electric guitar and rock-style vocals secured the reputation of the show as representing the voice of youth. Since then, the British musical, particularly the shows of Andrew Lloyd Webber, has steadily widened its appeal to attract and thus reflect a broader class, race and age demographic. The arrival of Cats in 1981 at the New London Theatre paved the way for what became the global phenomenon of the megamusical – large-scale spectaculars which employed commercial marketing techniques and a Fordist method of reproduction to replicate carbon copy productions worldwide, thus attracting the largest possible audience. But the transformation of British musicals from popular, to populist, meant that they were no longer as worthy of the critical examination that Joan Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War! had drawn in 1963, or Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers in 1982, because the megamusical was so patently far removed from any socio-political function. When Jesus Christ Superstar opened in the West End in 1972, there was palpable excitement at the potential of the Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice partnership to influence the future direction of British musical theatre.

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This excitement proved to be well founded with the premiere of Evita in 1978, which demonstrated that British musicals were capable of tackling serious subjects with political overtones. Until this point, the superiority of Broadway musicals over their British counterparts had never been up for debate, and although the Lloyd Webber/Rice partnership did not last beyond Evita, its influence on the development of the British genre was as much psychological as it was artistic. The duo imbued the British industry with new confidence and offered a glimpse of a future where the musical could be mobilized as a socio-political voice in the same way as drama. Four years after Evita, Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers confirmed that the British musical was developing a robust new voice, one intrinsically linked to a theatrical foundation built on innovation, strong writing and a political sensibility. This view should have been consolidated by Howard Goodall and Melvyn Bragg’s The Hired Man in 1984, which was the first musical to depict British working men demanding the removal of power from ruling class, but the crowds flocking to Lloyd Webber’s Cats and Starlight Express (1984) were a growing indication that an evening of spectacle and easy emotion was what this new audience required, and expected, of musical theatre. The two producers who had the energy and desire to redefine the understanding of the term British Musical, namely Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber, were seduced by the market forces of capitalism (and previously unimaginable personal profits) and subsequently led the British musical down a route far removed from the direction Blood Brothers and The Hired Man had been heading. Thus was the megamusical born. In transforming musicals into a commercial product available worldwide, the British musical lost the critical currency it had accrued via Joan Littlewood, Evita, Willy Russell and Howard Goodall. How could critics be expected to analyse the meanings pertaining to national identity within Phantom of the Opera (1986) one evening, and Jim Cartwright’s Road at the Royal Court the next, and consider both under the same collective term of British Theatre? If anything, the increased visibility (and popularity) of the musical acted to reinforce the division within British theatre between musicals and

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the works reflecting the literary gaze. The subsequent dismissal by the critics of one genre to focus on the other effectively gave the British musical free rein to represent the nation in whatever way it chose without being held to account. And the juggernaut which was the megamusical resulted in intelligent and interesting work such as Howard Goodall’s Days of Hope (1990) and Ken Hill’s The Invisible Man (1992) falling by the wayside. * Prior to the Covid-19 lockdown, the British musical had largely reverted to being a faded photocopy of its now more innovative Broadway counterpart. Musicals originating in UK today often suffer from a lack stylistic originality and continue to reproduce an outdated vision of both the populace and the nation which would not be considered acceptable in any other medium. The two main subsidized theatre companies commissioning and developing new musicals, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Chichester Festival Theatre, are creating stylistically conventional shows with unremarkable narratives designed to appeal (and appease) their conservative audience demographic: in spite of its title, very little about The Boy in the Dress (2019) at the RSC was subversive, and Flowers for Mrs Harris (2018) at Chichester could have been written by Noël Coward circa 1935. Forthcoming musical adaptations of Bedknobs and Broomsticks (national tour) and 101 Dalmations (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre) suggest that producers and/or artistic directors regard the under tens as their primary audience, and it is hard to define the genre as cutting edge when the first major musical to premiere post-lockdown was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella. Current trends in the genre include a preference for narratives which write women off the stage in favour of men in women’s clothes, and Hamilton derivatives such as SIX (2017) and & Juliet (2019). In terms of racial diversity, it remains to be seen if Get Up Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical heralds the beginning of a more aware and racially inclusive industry or if it quietly disappears. And it is still almost impossible to

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locate an authentic female voice, onstage or off, beyond Mamma Mia!, or to identify an intelligent and stimulating new work which tests stylistic and musical boundaries in the way London Road did in 2011. Where are the British equivalents of Stephen Sondheim or Lin Manuel Miranda? The stagnation of the British musical is an issue which no commentator wishes to confront because to do so would first involve an acknowledgement that the issue exists. The lack of investment in new voices and directors is at the core of the problem: there is no British equivalent of Stephen Sondheim or Lin Manuel Miranda because none of the producers who amassed wealth, status and power from the industry in the glory days of the British megamusical reinvested it into initiatives designed to develop new talent. Cameron Mackintosh may fund resident composer placements through the Mercury Musical Developments (a UK-based organization dedicated to developing new writing for musical theatre), but he uses the same handful of male creatives on his productions that he has used for the last twenty years. Prior to that, he used a different batch of men who have now been discarded. There is no evidence of any real commitment to nurturing diverse musical theatre voices at the RSC or the National Theatre, and the call from Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre, Rupert Goold, for greater government subsidy to develop British musicals with underrepresented voices is not only a little late in the day, but sounds suspiciously like a justification for the historical exclusion of multicultural practitioners from an industry in which Goold plays a not insignificant role.4 And, not surprisingly for a man who employed an all-male creative team on his production of Made in Dagenham in 2014 – a musical concerned with the instigation of the Equal Pay Act – Goold does not offer suggestions as to how an increased subsidy could be used to accommodate the excluded female voice in the industry. Despite the lack of programmes to foster new voices and the proliferation of narratives which are out of step with a supposedly gender equal and racially aware Britain, no commentator appears willing to open up an honest and frank discussion concerning the way in which British

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musicals are misrepresenting contemporary British society. Or ask why the genre of musical theatre in Britain is floundering in the wake of recent Broadway successes. This study is concerned with British musicals from Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers in 1982 to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, which premiered in 2021. I have chosen this time frame because Blood Brothers was the antithesis of the corresponding high-tech spectaculars which heralded the dawn of the megamusical, and Cinderella was the first major musical to premiere in the UK (in a blaze of media attention) following the Covid-19 national lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. I am primarily examining musicals which played on the West End, as this continues to be the yardstick by which success is judged, but a number of these shows have transferred from regional theatres. I am interpreting ‘British’ to mean shows which either premiered in the UK and/or had a predominantly British creative team. This is not a history of the British musical starting at 1982, and there are subsequently many writers and shows which are not included. That should not, however, be taken as a judgement on artistic merit. The lack of published scripts or recordings of songs is a consequence of the low status ascribed to musical theatre within the UK, and raises the question of what kind of theatre is considered artistically valuable enough to warrant preservation? And, more pertinently, who is making that decision? Inevitably, the wellresourced larger theatrical institutions have archival facilities and the will to safeguard their history, but companies such as the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, which commissioned a number of musicals with local relevance, has no such facility (or funds), and therefore no record of those shows survives. This is a recurring problem at regional theatres where musicals and Christmas shows are created for a local audience and with no intention of a London transfer: after closing night, the shows simply disappear, meaning it becomes impossible to include them within an examination of the genre of British musical theatre. Despite the assertions of sniffy critics, the British musical is a highly significant cultural artefact which enables the viewer – and there are many of them – to either construct or consolidate a set of beliefs

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regarding national identity. This book will examine the role of the British musical within the context of national identity and explore the implications of a populist genre reproducing, rather than challenging, constructed ideals contained within a narrow definition of ‘Britishness’. This issue is compounded by critics who analyse the meanings produced by British drama with intellectual rigour but consistently fail to apply the same standards to new musicals. Despite the demand for inclusion from social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the British musical theatre industry continues to operate within practices intent on maintaining a bias in favour of white, middle-class men who create work which does not authentically reflect the modern British nation. This inevitably leads to questions regarding whose nation, exactly, is being represented onstage, and what function new British musicals are performing in terms of reinforcing certain identity constructs which subsequently influence our perception of ourselves as a nation. One of the main functions of theatre as an art form is to hold up the nation for examination, but when certain significant groups within the populace are excluded from participation and their narratives ignored, the national voice is neither authentically nor fairly represented. This book will examine what specific interpretation of national identity is being creatively produced by British musicals, and what meanings are contained within this interpretation. In short, does the British musical accurately depict the nation as it is, or in the way we would like to believe it is? Or in the way we would prefer others to see us. * Chapter 1 reviews the position of the musical within national cultural debates and examines the consequences of the reluctance of commentators and the arts Establishment to regard the British musical as a legitimate cultural artefact. This attitude manifests itself at the RSC and Chichester Festival Theatre through the development of shows which are intended purely to prop up the company finances and make little effort to challenge the boundaries of the genre with new voices or

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new performance practices. This is replicated throughout the nationwide rep theatres where the musical is regarded as little more than the annual cash cow which will bankroll the less popular or more experimental plays. The influence of the British folk music tradition and a socialist theatre performance practice are reviewed in this chapter within the context of Blood Brothers, which defiantly endured to become the antithesis of everything represented by its contemporary, the megamusical. Blood Brothers is also examined within a national identity context as being the exception to the rule in its reflection of the societal divisions exacerbated by the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments of the 1980s. The chapter considers whether the inferior status of the musical theatre genre within a national theatrical tradition which elevates the literary gaze, accounts for the fact that British shows are rarely mobilized as a tool of intervention in discourses concerning nationhood in the way the Broadway musical has historically been utilized. This is partly due to the megamusical producing fantasy narratives which are created with a global, not national, audience in mind, and to the failure of the flagship national institutions to lead the way in investing in, and displaying a regard for, the British musical as representative of national culture. Chapter 2 discusses the difficulties in accurately pinpointing a defining sense of ‘British-ness’ in a country consisting of four separate nations, each with their own distinct culture and cultural practices. In addition, Britain is a nation divided by class and political loyalties bound by location, resulting in widely differing notions of what constitutes national identity, i.e. what defines the industrial north of England is very different to the perception of Englishness played out by the populace of the affluent county of Surrey. The continuing absence of non-white practitioners from the creative teams of new musicals has resulted in only a handful of shows on the West End with a Black British or Indian British perspective and this suggests the prevalence of a form of nationhood with negative connotations, built on views of what Britain and Britishness is not, rather than what it is. The chapter questions why new musicals are not portraying Britain as a multicultural

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nation and why there appears to be no space within the industry for a British equivalent of Lin Manuel Miranda. The United Kingdom is a nation built on a rigid class system which continues to divide the country and Chapter 3 considers the ways in which the musical has interrogated, or reproduced, the class structures inherent in British society. A superficial caricature of the cheery cockney with a strict moral code engaging with the ineffectual upper classes is a commonplace scenario, but in recent decades this has given way to more authentic depictions of the working-class experience and the socialist utopian dream in Billy Elliot (2005) and The Last Ship (2018). The constructed national characteristic of the ‘saucy’ British personality is frequently reproduced in popular culture through the formulaic over-sexed working-class young woman, and this trope regularly makes an appearance in British musicals. So too does the sacrificial mother, the ‘our Mam’ construct familiar from soap operas and nostalgic dramas (frequently by Alan Bennett) which reproduce the high status of the family unit within the context of working-class patriarchal conventions. These conventions decree a performance of masculinity based on physical strength and aggression, and this chapter considers male characters in British musicals who refuse their ‘macho’ roles within the working-class community and fight to exist beyond these restrictive boundaries. Chapter 4 examines the consequences of the ongoing male stranglehold on the British musical theatre industry and the resulting absence of women from creative teams which enables an inauthentic female voice to speak for women in shows such as Made in Dagenham, The Band (2017) and Mrs Henderson Presents (2016). The stereotypical characterizations of women onstage are frequently framed within a male gaze paradigm or victim/mother/whore clichés where the sole function of the female characters is to support the male characters and enable the male narrative to progress. SIX (2017) presents a version of womanhood which equates sexual attractiveness and complicit objectification with female power, yet few critics have questioned this assertion. Cinderella succeeds in being more interested in Prince

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Sebastian than Cinderella, and, like SIX , sets women against each other as they compete within the beauty ideal for the prize of a man. Chapter 4 also examines the long-term implications of the rising fashion for male actors playing female characters and the mobilization of a gender fluid political position to edge women out of the narrative. The examination of the missing female voice from British musicals again raises the question of who, or what, exactly is the genre representing in terms of nationhood? Chapter 5 concentrates on Andrew Lloyd Webber, the most successful British theatre composer and producer in history, whose staggeringly successful and long-running shows have made him a defining figure in British popular culture. Although much has been written with regard to the music and shows of Lloyd Webber, his work is rarely considered within the context of national identity, possibly because his musicals rarely reflect British society. But the name Andrew Lloyd Webber is increasingly synonymous with the term, the British Musical, and therefore the meanings produced by his work require investigation. Lloyd Webber was at the forefront of the development of the megamusical and the associated marketing innovations which, for the first time, regarded musical theatre as a product like any other, ripe for branding and global export. His exploitation of public taste and trends has earned him censure from arts commentators but there is no question that his work has propelled the British musical to new heights within the public – national and global – consciousness. While his shows democratized access to theatre by creating a new form of entertainment designed to deliver an easy emotional fix, the question remains as to whether Lloyd Webber and his work post Cats, has ultimately reinvigorated or destroyed the British musical by turning it into a global commercial product. Chapter 6 considers the historical and ongoing love affair between the British musical and nostalgia. The wistful hankering for the idealized England on display in shows such as Underneath the Arches (1981) and Goodbye Mr Chips (1982) produce meanings which manifest in a plea to turn back the clock and ignore societal progression. Nostalgia and

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mythmaking intersect with national identity when an idealized version of who ‘we’ are is reinforced by shows such as Mrs Henderson Presents, which induce patriotic pride by mobilizing the ‘plucky little England’ construct. Musicals based on children’s films from the 1960/70s – Scrooge (1992), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (2002) and Mary Poppins (2004) mobilize nostalgia to invoke memories of childhood amongst the adult ticket buyer, and the onslaught of touring jukebox musicals exploits the same sentimental connection, this time to fondly remembered pop groups. The British musical could be construed as utilizing nostalgia to support a political position, particularly when the race, class and gender of the creators is taken into account, and this chapter considers if creators are manipulating an idealized past in order to challenge a liberal present. Ultimately, the question underpinning the issue of nostalgia and the British musical is focused on the future: are British practitioners looking back because they are unable, or unwilling, to consider a future in which the genre embraces new stylistic innovations and cultural voices and thus displaces the status quo? The concluding chapter considers what a post Covid-19 future looks like for the British musical. Will the industry take the opportunity of the prolonged shut down to take stock and re-evaluate, or will it simply press the restart button, raise the chandelier and go back to where it left off ? The chapter considers the long-term implications for the British genre if the domination of the industry by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh – both intent on continuing to dictate the direction of the British Musical according to their terms and taste – is not successfully challenged. * The purpose of drama is to entertain, but also to reflect and to challenge the societal status quo and to subsequently produce meanings relating to either individual or national identity. Musical theatre should perform the same function but in its current state, the British genre is failing dismally. In the year prior to the 2020 lockdown, new shows were consistently reproducing a narrow and obsolete definition of British

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identity and doing so within a stylistically outdated and conventional framework. As a cultural product representing the nation, the British musical would appear to have had its moment in the sun, with the glory days of three and four decades ago now consigned to the history books. Perhaps the reason the British critics have been so quick to claim the artistically superficial SIX as the ‘British Hamilton’, has less to do with the show itself and more to do with a desperate need amongst practitioners and commentators for the British musical to be regarded as Great again. Because if the genre has lost sight of the distinct and unique voice which made itself heard in the 1960s, and the stylistic innovations which drove the genre forward in the 1980s and 1990s, the question of why it has, is less vital than the question of how to replace it. And what with.

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Say it’s just a show: The musical as a British cultural artefact

In 2004, the then Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, published a paper entitled, ‘Government and the Value of Culture’ in which she debated the role of culture within the nation, stating, ‘culture has an important part to play in defining and preserving cultural identity – of the individual, of communities, and of the nation as a whole’.1 As acknowledged by Jowell in her paper, the Arts play a crucial role in establishing and consolidating cultural identity at a national level through artefacts such as plays, films, music and visual art works. These artefacts contain cultural signifiers which the viewer recognizes and associates with national identity, thereby confirming their own sense of belonging to that particular group or nation. In order to be defined as a cultural artefact, the object has to transmit information regarding the society or nation which produced it. In certain cases, as in statues commemorating the Great Men of history for actions which modern society deems unacceptable, the meanings produced by the cultural artefact are unwelcome or bear witness to past transgressions that the nation would rather disown. In the port city of Bristol, protestors at a Black Lives Matter rally in June 2020, tossed a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent philanthropist and seventeenth-century slave trader, into the harbour in an act of collective restitution. The fact that Colston was considered worthy enough to be commemorated in monument form throughout the city represented the cultural values of the era just as decisively as the crowds tearing down the statue embodied the zeitgeist of 2020. What is chosen or permitted to represent the nation, and the nation’s history, therefore, is highly revealing as to how Britons see themselves at a particular cultural moment. 19

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The highly produced technological performances which redefined the British musical in the 1980s and 1990s, reflected the capitalist selfinterest embodied by the policies of Margaret Thatcher and the Greed is Good mantra of the era. But while the shows were a phenomenally successful British product on a global stage, the glitzy excesses of a Cameron Mackintosh or Andrew Lloyd Webber production was not how all Britons wanted to see their culture represented internationally. The reluctance of the theatrical Establishment to endow the British musical with the status of a cultural artefact is inexorably linked to a desire to maintain an impression of British theatre as a cradle of intellectualism, not populism. Infuriatingly – for the critics and the Establishment commentators and practitioners who do not consider musical theatre to be ‘real’ theatre’, i.e. drama – the audience figures demand that the genre is given consideration within the wider context of British theatre. And not all British musicals are showy spectaculars or manufactured jukebox shows – the literary heritage makes its presence felt through musical adaptation of the masters in their field – Dickens, Kipling, Shakespeare, J. M. Barrie, Chaucer, P. G. Wodehouse and Roald Dahl. But this has neither altered the low status of the musical within artistic debates nor caused British shows to be reconsidered as representative of national culture. At the heart of this attitude is the belief that anything that appeals to the number of people who have bought tickets to The Phantom of the Opera cannot possibly hold artistic merit and is therefore mass entertainment, not art. This conflict between entertainment and serious theatre has roots, as almost everything does in the UK, in the rigid class structures permeating society. In the reign of King Edward VII (1901–10) theatrical performance flourished, particularly in London where the King was a regular and enthusiastic theatre attendee (and lover of high-profile actresses) and his patronage gave the seal of approval to playgoing as a respectable past time for the educated and discerning classes. Opera and operetta were also regarded as the domain of the upper classes, but music hall and vaudeville were considered disreputable and of no artistic

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consequence due to their popularity amongst working-class patrons. In the 1930s, Noël Coward’s stylish revues and the musicals of Ivor Novello – which were closely related to operetta – were popular, but not populist, and the discernible links to music hall in early British shows such as the Gracie Fields revues including Walk This Way (1931) and composer Noel Gay’s Me and My Girl (1937) caused fledgling musicals to be viewed as dangerously close to working-class entertainment. In addition, there was the pervasive view that musical theatre was an American art form and therefore not something the British could ever understand or do with any accomplishment. Following the Second World War, the London stages were dominated by the imported, ground-breaking shows of Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, and not even the triumphs of British practitioners Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, Joan Littlewood and Lionel Bart in the 1960s could persuade the public that musical theatre was a legitimate art form worthy of inclusion as a new strand of British culture. It was not until 1978 and the unveiling of Rice and Lloyd Webber’s Evita that musical theatre began to be seen as something the British could not only do but could do well enough to challenge the Americans. This was reinforced in 1980, when Evita won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, thus becoming the first British production to be awarded the honour. In the four decades since the triumph of Evita, British musicals including Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Mamma Mia!, Sunset Boulevard (1991), Mary Poppins (2004), Billy Elliot and Matilda have met with success on Broadway. Despite this, and the fact that more people than ever are engaging with musical theatre throughout the UK, there remains a palpable reluctance to regard the British musical as meaningful in any way beyond the box office receipts. There is no single reason which explains the reluctance to class British musicals as representative of British culture but there are a number of assumptions relating to the wider context of British theatre and the arts which contribute to the exclusion. The branding of musicals as populist and less than is a direct result of the intellectual snobbery which defines the literary gaze. It is a view which illuminates the invisible but very

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present boundaries concerning participation in the arts in Britain, and discriminatory views regarding which sections of society are considered worthy of having a voice within culture. It is also a reflection of the lingering presumption that the audience for theatre in Britain is middle class, and this is embodied by a set of customs and a presentational form which intentionally reproduce an elitist experience: imposing buildings, high ticket prices, lavish interiors and a requirement that the audience is passive and receptive rather than responsive and included. Within this framework, little has changed since the Victorian era and the British definition of ‘theatre’ is one which continues to favour this conventional but narrow interpretation. When the audience does encompass a broader, cross-class demographic – as represented at a commercial musical – the work is assumed (by middle-class commentators) to be intellectually inferior in order to accommodate what is taken to be a less sophisticated taste. This attitude fails to take into account that just as there is more than one genre of play, there is also more than one kind of audience, and one is not more or less valid than the other. Different audiences, especially in varying locations, will bring different expectations and value systems to a performance, and yet a universal middle-class context continues to define the parameters of the British theatrical experience. The experience of the audience at a performance of SIX in Blackpool, for example, is thus dismissed as less valid than the audience experience at Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt in the West End. These ongoing assumptions universalize the literary and middle-class gaze fixed upon UK theatre and establish it as normative. Anything beyond this gaze is viewed from a position which already regards it as inferior, thus corroborating a narrow definition of what can be classed as artistically and culturally relevant. This attitude does not, however, explain why other populist arts forms have produced work which is embraced as embodying the character of the nation. Gerri Halliwell’s appearance at the 1997 Brit Awards wearing a Union Jack dress is recognized as one of the most famous iconic pop moments of the decade, a byword for Cool Britannia and notions of (pseudo) feminism tied up with Girl Power. The dress was even voted ‘Most Inspiring British

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Fashion Moment’ in a 2016 online poll. Why then, is the Phantom’s signature mask not accorded corresponding status? Possibly because the Spice Girls were part of a British popular music tradition which produced a unique style and sound distinct from the American pop/ rock industry. From Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle bands of the 1950s, through the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, David Bowie, Queen and The Police, to the 1990s and manufactured boy bands, the Spice Girls existed within the well-established and much-loved institution that is Brit Pop – a cultural institution unencumbered by the class divisions lingering in British theatre. And unlike the musical, Brit Pop is an entity which stands alone, relatively free from comparisons with the corresponding American industry. The same could be said of the early British musical films – often vehicles for music hall and variety stars such as Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews and George Formby – which were so evidently ‘British’ that to compare them to Busby Berkeley’s celluloid extravaganzas of the same period was an exercise in futility. And because film production on both sides of the Atlantic developed at the same time and at the same pace, the new industry was a more level playing field than other art forms and was thus able to expand free from the constraints of rigid traditions. The understanding that film was a medium specifically designed as mass entertainment placed it beyond debates concerning who exactly certain branches of the arts were for, thus eliminating the social and financial barriers which hindered participation. The British musical film was a very different product to the American musical film, but in this case, ‘different’ stood for separate, and not, less than. British musical films were, like the population and the country, more selfeffacing and on a smaller scale than the glitzy, brash Hollywood musicals, and perhaps this was their unique charm. In the latter half of the 1940s, British film studios produced more musical films than any other genre – films which drew on the music hall and variety traditions to unapologetically appeal to the widest possible audience. As an art form in its own right, musical theatre emerged out of American cultural trends such as Tin Pan Alley and jazz – music

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brought to the country by an immigrant population. The quintessential American sound of ragtime was popularized by Irving Berlin, or Israel Beilin, who had arrived at Ellis Island from Russia in 1893, aged five. George and Ira Gershwin (Jacob and Israel Gerwshowitz), the brothers responsible for the songs ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’, ‘Embraceable You’, and the ‘folk opera’ Porgy and Bess, were born in New York to Russian/Ukrainian parents, and George M. Cohan was the offspring of Irish Catholics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, America’s performance trends were thus being forged by a multicultural society and within a theatrical landscape which was, by and large, free from the class division which restricted British theatre. This made it possible to create a new form, situated somewhere between a play and an opera, and utilizing the multicultural musical fusions which frequently had origins in the street or saloon bars. In London, the sounds of the streets met with (quasi) dramatists in music hall, which bore no relation to the offerings onstage at the Theatre Royal Haymarket or at the London Coliseum, but in New York, the music of the street was incorporated into this new form of musical theatre and produced in legitimate Broadway theatres. The American musical then, emerged from an immigrant community building new lives in a society which, if not quite classless, certainly offered more opportunities than England, or indeed Europe, for the working class and ethnic minorities to advance their social position. Immigrants to the UK in the same era faced not only the insurmountable class barrier but also the systemic racism which was an inevitable byproduct of Colonialism. Although influenced by European operetta, musicals were undeniably an American creation, one which reflected the society and societal concerns of its populace. Leonard Bernstein described musical theatre as ‘an art that arises out of American roots, out of our speech, our tempo, our moral attitude, our way of moving’,2 and this assertion of musical theatre as intrinsically American partly accounts for the British habit of dismissing the art form as immaterial to constructs of national identity. During the 1940s, a strain of anti-Americanism took hold in the UK as fears abounded concerning the dilution of British

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culture by an influx of American goods, shows, music, films and, of course, the GIs with their open wallets and smooth talking. The Americans were no match for the British where classical theatre was concerned but musicals were a different matter, and although the integrated shows of Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe took the post-war West End by storm, there was an unspoken resentment at the occupation of London theatres by American musicals, no matter how good they were (this situation was reversed in the 1980s/1990s when the reluctance of American critics to fully endorse the megamusicals which constituted the British Invasion of Broadway was not solely a critical response but partly because the creators were British). In the immediate post-war period, it was undeniable that musical theatre was a stylistic form the Americans had mastered, and although members of the British theatrical Establishment were capable of appreciating the proficiency, they saw no reason to reproduce their own version of something so fundamentally American – it was on a par with playing baseball at Lords. The light musical comedies of Noel Gay, Vivian Ellis and Noël Coward flew the flag for British musicals but no one in the upper tiers of the English theatrical hierarchy was entirely convinced it was a flag worth raising in the first place. The post-war British musical was certainly different to the American version, but unlike film, ‘different’, in this case, translated as less than. Secure in their superiority as the creators of this new art form, American practitioners (and consequently, audiences) had no reason to view musicals as inferior to plays, or to equate popularity with a lack of artistic intelligence. Musicals in America were thus enabled to perform the same function as drama in the UK and were mobilized as an artistic tool with which to reflect and question the societal status quo. Early shows such as Showboat (1927) and The Cradle Will Rock (1938) exerted influence over a national identity construct by simultaneously challenging and mythologizing the concept of the American Dream, and this influence has continued through to The Prom (2018) via West Side Story (1957), A Chorus Line (1975), Rent (1996), The Scottsboro Boys (2010) and Hamilton (2015) to name but a handful. In the

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immediate post-war years, Broadway musicals played a crucial role in unifying the fractured nation by reminding audiences of their shared experience of nationhood and the benefits of community. By the 1960s, an indication of the power the form had accrued in America with regard to the ability to manipulate public opinion is apparent in the efforts to exert influence over the Women’s Liberation debate by reminding women of their innate role as mother/wife and the sad fate of the deviant (non-conforming) woman in shows such as Gypsy (1959), How To Succeed in Business . . . (1961) and Sweet Charity (1966). On the other side of the Atlantic, far from intervening in socio-political debates or consolidating ideals regarding national identity, corresponding British musicals appeared to revel in their status as escapist nonsense, and a series of warm-hearted Cockneys and effete aristocrats reinforced well-worn cliches concerning class and colonial ideals across the stages of London’s West End. Joan Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War! (1963) was a notable exception in that it harnessed the form of the musical to make a political point concerning class privilege viewed through the lens of the First World War, but her contemporaries – Lionel Bart, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley – did not offer corresponding work which realized the potential of the form to champion political change.3 Charles Dickens, for example, was an uncompromising social reformer whose novels critiqued the societal inequities of nineteenth-century Britain, but Lionel Bart’s musical adaptation of Oliver! steered clear of anything which could be construed as a political statement. Bricusse and Newley’s Stop the World, I Want to Get Off (1961) transferred to Broadway and was nominated for five Tony Awards but did little to dispel the view of the British musical as lightweight fluff. Evita proved that the British could create an artistically sophisticated musical which tackled a serious subject, but as the industry approached the 1980s – the decade in which the British would redefine the genre – the Eva Peron bio-musical stood alone and was as thus taken as evidence that the British musical was, on the whole, incapable of analysing societal meanings with any depth. It was consequently not worthy of the definition ‘cultural artefact’ because it had little to say regarding

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contemporary society and made no contribution to debates focused on national identity. The pervasive view that the British musical was an imitative and inferior reproduction of an American model further disbarred it from consideration as representative of British culture as it appeared to lack the immediate quality which marks a product as unmistakeably British – Gerri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress, for example, or the Last Night of the Proms concert. The British musical was therefore in a no-win situation: required to demonstrate its ‘Britishness’ via an American art form and within the context of its American counterpart. In other words, the British musical had to answer the question of what exactly it was that made the British version of an American product, uniquely British. The musicals of Noël Coward, with their preoccupation with class divisions and a distinct musical sound which had echoes of Gilbert and Sullivan in the patter songs and operetta-style arias, went some way to answering this question. Coward, however, was a one-off, and post-war British musicals drew on the sounds of music hall in the same way that Broadway shows referenced jazz and Tin Pan Alley. The musical hall influence was palpable in the 1960s in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (alongside distinct musical references to his Jewish heritage) Half A Sixpence (1963), The Matchgirls (1966) and, of course, in Oh What A Lovely War! which mobilized musical hall as an ironic backdrop and to make a political point concerning class. The question of whether or not the British musical had a unique British sound which marked it as separate to Broadway was still being debated when the Lloyd Webber/Rice partnership hit the scene in the 1970s. Undeniably, the sound of a Lloyd Webber show is immediately recognizable as Andrew Lloyd Webber, but that is not the same thing as having a distinct and recognizable British character. In the current landscape, the shows of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe do not have an immediate identifiable signature, either stylistically or musically, in the way that Kander and Ebb, for example, or Sondheim does. To therefore attempt to define a musical as British solely through a musical sound is unlikely to yield results given that one particular style of music is not indicative of the genre in the UK.

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A visual hallmark, however, became associated with the British musical from as far back as the Lionel Bart productions of the 1960s, which were characterized by interlocking and revolving set designs by Sean Kenny. Kenny strived to achieve a scenic framework which was so integral to the overall production that it became another character – a narrator perhaps, effortlessly controlling the flow of the action from one scene to the next. Kenny was at his best with the original 1960 production of Oliver!, and his multi-level scaffolding, exposed brick wall and revolving turntables gave a brooding foretaste of the Les Mis look in the 1980s. During the megamusical era, the critics on both sides of the Atlantic who uttered quips about leaving the theatre humming the scenery, appeared to have forgotten both Sean Kenny’s earlier contributions and the identical sniping they had provoked at the time. Leading London critic of the earlier era, Kenneth Tynan, was so alarmed by the supremacy of the scenery in Bart’s Blitz! in 1962, that he wrote of a not-too-distant future when the set will ‘advance in a phalanx on the audience and expel it from the theatre’4 (probably a good thing he did not live long enough to witness Starlight Express). Sean Kenny’s sets for the Lionel Bart musicals are evidence that there was a peculiarly British design aesthetic which defined the look of post-war British musicals, an aesthetic subsequently picked up by John Napier, who had studied under the renowned Ralph Koltai, often credited as the father of British theatre design. John Napier’s set designs for Cats, Les Misérables, Starlight Express, Miss Saigon and Sunset Boulevard created the distinct ‘look’ which marked the shows as uniquely British, and his design framework was as essential in defining the term ‘megamusical’ as Cameron Mackintosh’s reproduction and marketing strategies. The techno-spectaculars which were born out of the Mackintosh/Lloyd Webber/Napier partnerships not only established a new visual framework for the genre, they also imposed a British way of doing things onto the production of musical theatre. American creative counterparts were subsequently forced into emulating British production methods and their stylistic revolution in order to satisfy the growing expectation amongst a Broadway audience

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for technological wizardry. Napier’s designs emulated Sean Kenny’s desire to create sets which were not merely platforms on which a narrative was played out but were integral to the production. The moment in Les Misérables when the two onstage towers rise then interconnect horizontally to form the iconic barricades, is not only as memorable as any number in the show, it supports the action onstage by providing the physical means for the narrative to progress. Audiences at Miss Saigon regularly applauded the helicopter or the neon Bangkok street, implying that the design was performing a function beyond providing a visual backdrop for the story. John Napier’s designs contributed to the view of the British megamusical as an event, rather than simply a night at the theatre, and shows such as Wicked (which did not arrive on Broadway until almost twenty years after Les Misérables) reflect his aesthetic. The Les Misérables influence is also visible in Hamilton in the use of the levels, a revolve and the exposed brick wall, thereby affirming the hold that Napier, and the British megamusical design aesthetic, continues to wield over musical theatre on Broadway. The question of whether or not there is a discernible style of musical theatre which marks a show out as British will remain unresolved as long as the British musical continues to be viewed in relation to Broadway, instead of as an entity in its own right. The American critics who resented the British Invasion judged British shows within an American musical theatre paradigm, thereby setting them up to fail. If the perspective was reversed, Wicked would be seen as lacking if The Phantom of the Opera was the yardstick, and Rent would not quite cut it next to Jesus Christ Superstar. To deny that the British musical holds cultural collateral is to retain a perception of musical theatre as intrinsically, and therefore uniquely, American. Admittedly, the British musical has not kept up with the pace of change visible on Broadway in the last decade, but it was British practitioners who were responsible for shows in the 1980s and 1990s which resulted in the creation of new models within the genre. The global branding of large scale, spectacular shows was the invention of Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Utilizing a pop music back catalogue as the foundation for a

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show grew out of the phenomenal success of Mamma Mia! (1999) and it was Andrew Lloyd Webber who dispensed with the book writer and introduced the sung through musical. One of these movements on its own would have challenged the boundaries of the form of musical theatre, combined, they were nothing short of a revolution which continues to have impact on the global genre today. Perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether there is a discernible and unique British voice in musical theatre, but how many contemporary Broadway shows exist as a result of the influence of the British musical. * The Mackintosh/Lloyd Webber/Napier megamusicals have, over time, become so intrinsically associated with an immediate definition of the term, ‘British Musical’, that it is easy to form the opinion that nothing uniquely British existed within the genre prior to Cats. This overlooks the ‘play with music’ which was not strictly a musical – a crucial distinction given the intellectual barriers erected between drama and entertainment – but incorporated music as integral to the storytelling. The 1960s saw a flourishing in the UK of the socialist theatre practice of presenting politically themed plays which fused music with text in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. The productions were often built around a narrative related to the local community and the shows toured extensively, performing in local halls or schools. There was no band or orchestra and the actors frequently played instruments and the musicians joined the action onstage: War Horse represents the commercial version of the play with songs and faithfully reflects the traditional folk music heritage. These works were indisputably part of a text-based theatrical landscape and, due to their strident, political voice, the works produced by companies such as John McGrath’s legendary 7:84, the Liverpool Everyman, the Citizens in Glasgow and the Theatre Royal Stratford East under the direction of Joan Littlewood, were accepted as productions with social and artistic value. The Scottish National Theatre’s Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (2015) is the most recent example of a production treading the fine line between a musical

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and play with music,5 and although the music is an eclectic mix including Felix Mendelssohn, Electric Light Orchestra and Bartok, the style of the show has distinct roots in the Scottish socialist theatre tradition of fusing various modes of performance to create an allencompassing theatrical experience. The socialist theatre movement thrived in Scotland and the North of England – the industrial, unionized heartlands – in the 1960s and 1970s, and although the shows were never billed as musicals, they were born out of an approach to theatre making which had music at its core. Works such as Alan Plater’s mining epic, Close the Coalhouse Door (1968), for example, incorporated songs by Geordie singer/songwriter and BBC broadcaster, Alex Glasgow. John McGrath’s Soft or a Girl (1971) had a band onstage integral to the action, and his seminal work The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil (1973) is remembered as much for its narrative as for its eclectic theatrical style and seamless use of songs. Keith Dewhurst’s Corruna! premiered at the Royal Court Upstairs in 1971, and is noteworthy for the inclusion in the cast of Maddy Prior, lead singer with the folk/rock band Steeleye Span. These works reflected the influence of the second wave folk music revival which reproduced left-wing politics in protest songs which often held public appeal beyond the social movements. The political play with music often danced around the edges of musical theatre but the distinction between a play with a political standpoint which incorporated songs, and a musical, gave the former a theatrical legitimacy which was denied, for instance, Bricusse and Newley’s Stop the World . . . possibly due to its commercial success. Certainly, by the late 1970s, the touring socialist-themed plays with music were a truer indication of a uniquely British voice in musical theatre – one which emanated from folk music – than the musical theatre voice. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice excepted. The influence of the protest movement style of folk music which emerged out of the second revival is palpable in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers, which is unmistakably a musical and not a play with songs. Having said that, over the decades the show has developed the reputation

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as being the musical for people who don’t like musicals, because it is a musical that is not really a musical and more of a play with music. Originally developed in 1981 as a play for youth theatre, the narrative follows two friends, Mickey and Eddie, as they grow from children to adulthood, unaware that they are twins. Mickey is brought up by a single mother on a council estate in Liverpool, but Eddie has all the social advantages, including education, of a middle-class upbringing. When Mickey and Eddie both fall in love with the same woman, their paths converge on a collision course to tragedy. As a playwright, Willy Russell was well versed in the performance traditions of socialist theatre which were practiced by directors such as Alan Dossor at the Liverpool Everyman, John McGrath, with his Scottish, agit-prop 7:84 Theatre Company,6 and Joan Littlewood in Stratford East, all of whom drew on Brechtian techniques to create politically charged work with broad appeal. These directors of radical, left-wing plays with music had an unshakeable belief in the power of theatre to effect change, and their productions challenged the boundaries of performance by interweaving text, improvisation, music, dance, songs, poetry and audience participation to create an evening of theatre with roots firmly embedded in musical hall traditions – music hall with a political point to make, nonetheless (interestingly, when the socialist touring productions were defined as ‘popular theatre’, it was heralded as a good thing, possibly because the work had a political foundation and could therefore be regarded as educational). Willy Russell drew on the performance techniques embedded in the socialist play with music tradition when he reworked Blood Brothers into a musical following the school performance of the play, and the show premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1982. Russell was fresh from his Olivier Award-winning triumph of Educating Rita in 1980 and had written a musical for the Liverpool Everyman theatre in 1974, entitled John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert. This tribute to the Beatles had transferred to the West End, winning the London Theatre Critics award for Best Musical of 1974. Russell was not, then, as many assumed, a newcomer to musical theatre – although his previous work was more

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likely to be classed as a play with music – and he had, in fact, spent many years as a semi-professional singer, performing his own songs around the folk club circuit. The casting of singer Barbara Dickson, a well-known figure on the folk music circuit in the 1970s, as the original Mrs Johnstone in Blood Brothers is a clear hint as to the musical influences at the heart of the show.7 The musical is not a folk opera on the scale of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) or Kurt Weill’s Street Scene (1946), but it is possible to trace a line from Blood Brothers back to the traditional English folk ballads from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were collected and published by Francis Childs in the late 1800s. The Child’s Ballads are considered darker in tone and subject matter than was common in the era, and proof of their longevity is in their reappearance in the second folk revival when a number of the songs were popularized by British and American singers. Ewan McColl, Joan Baez, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span have all recorded one or more of Child’s Ballads, and as recently as 2013, American singer/songwriter, Anais Mitchell recorded an entire album entitled Child Ballads made up of songs from the collection.8 The structure and tone of the songs in Blood Brothers reveals a distinct connection to the Childs’ ballads, and subsequently to the centuries-old tradition of folk music which continues to thrive in certain areas of the British Isles. Willy Russell’s musical, then, was knowingly referencing centuries of indigenous music in a show which reflected an aspect of British culture. Blood Brothers was a searing reflection of the political mood of the era and pulled no punches in condemning the government of Margaret Thatcher for policies which exacerbated catastrophic social divisions, particularly in cities such as Liverpool which were already battling post-industrial decline. The show was a world away from the whimsy of Sandy Wilson and Julian Slade or from the Rice/Lloyd Webber epic rock musicals, and had distinct echoes of the agitational style of the epic community plays of McGrath, Plater, Dewhurst, Bill Bryden, Littlewood et al. Blood Brothers referenced Brechtian theatre practices with characters who broke the fourth wall, a narrator who played multiple roles, and the band in full view onstage and occasionally part

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of the action, thus rendering the show a closer relative to Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) than any other British musical (excluding, of course, Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728)). Authenticity was undoubtedly a key factor in the initial local success of the show, as was the fact that here was a musical, not a play with music, which mobilized the form to reiterate the socialist demand for a restructuring of the power structures which produced an unequal distribution of wealth. On the back of the success in Liverpool, the show transferred to the Lyric Theatre in London in 1983, where it opened to mixed reviews, but still managed to pick up the Olivier Award for Best Musical. Critics on the middle-class broadsheet newspapers were, on the whole, unimpressed, and a prejudicial tone against this Northern, workingclass show daring to infiltrate the West End enclave was evident in their reviews. The younger ‘hipper’ reviewers at Time Out and City Lights greeted the show with enthusiastic approval, but ticket sales remained slow and producer, Bob Swash, accepted a deal for reduced rent on the theatre in return for a guarantee to close the show after six months to make way for a Judi Dench/Michael Williams vehicle. Within weeks of this deal, Terry Wogan, an enormously popular BBC Radio 2 personality, started promoting Barbara Dickson’s single of the show’s anthemic ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ on his breakfast show. Ticket sales rocketed but the ink was long dry on the agreement with the Lyric Theatre and, rather than take the gamble on transferring to a larger West End theatre, Bob Swash closed the London production and sent out a national tour. Over the next few years, the musical gathered momentum and built up a loyal fan base until finally, a still bruised Russell was persuaded to risk the wrath of the sniffy London critics a second time and permit the show’s new producer, Bill Kenwright, to take Blood Brothers back into London. The show opened in the Albury Theatre in 1988, then moved to the Phoenix Theatre in 1991, where it remained for an incredible twenty-one years. When Blood Brothers closed in 2012, it was the third longest running musical in West End history. It is impossible to attribute the success of Blood Brothers to a single factor, rather it was the combination of a number of elements, including

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the wider national and social contexts, which resulted in the right show appearing at the right time. In terms of production values, the show could not (and was never intended to) compete with the megamusicals of the same period, and it might even have been the lack of technology and effects which contributed to the sense of ‘honesty’ surrounding the production: no expensive mechanical trickery diverted the audience attention. More crucially, the show did what British musicals had consistently failed to do, and authentically depicted an urban British community in a way which resonated with a British audience. Viewers were able to substitute their own community for the Liverpool council estate they saw depicted onstage, thus provoking a sense of pride in ‘our’ story. The show presented a brand of social realism more often seen in drama and it did not shy away from declaring its political standpoint. It also had the advantage of appealing to a younger audience which British musicals (Jesus Christ Superstar aside) tended not to do. Given the shattering social upheaval of the times – the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the miner’s strike, mass unemployment, uprisings in English black and Indian communities and the occupation of the Greenham Common airbase by peace activists – all exacerbated by Thatcherite values of privatization and capitalism, the younger generation was politically aware, engaged and (re)active. Blood Brothers therefore had an immediate resonance as it embodied the national political battleground, the economic disparity between the North and South, the dearth of opportunities for young people and the futility of the class divide. The show brought the class war, as depicted through socialist theatre (and socialist theatre practices), into the mainstream, musicalizing the traditional political convictions of the industrial heartlands of Britain. This was not a position welcomed by the middleclass West End critics and their lack of generosity in giving Blood Brothers the opportunity to initially thrive in London speaks volumes concerning the structures of power at the heart of the British theatrical Establishment in the early 1980s. A contemporary and political ally of Blood Brothers was Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man, which arrived at the Astoria Theatre in

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London from the Leicester Haymarket in October 1984. Adapted from the 1969 novel by arts broadcaster, Melvyn Bragg, the musical was a close relative of Blood Brothers in that it did not shy away from the socialist sensibility underpinning the narrative, and there were distinct musical echoes of both the English folk and choral traditions in the score. The Hired Man spans three decades from 1890, and follows farm labourer, John Tallantire, whose transformation into miner and then soldier in World War One reflects the changing landscape, physical and emotional, of the nation. Rural England, in this case, was the idealized ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ of William Blake, and when John leaves the coal mines at the end of the show to return to the farm, the sense that this pastoral idyll is the real England and the heart of the nation, is palpable. Like Willy Russell, Howard Goodall was mobilizing traditional English music as the foundation to tell a story expounding a socialist viewpoint and posing questions relating to nationhood. The Hired Man asks who this Green and Pleasant Land really belongs to: the men and women who work in the fields and the mines and die upholding the honour of the nation? Or the bosses of industry and the wealthy landowners? In raising these issues, the musical was doing what had previously been regarded as the role of British drama and interrogating the social and political structures of the nation – just as Blood Brothers had done before it. But this challenge to the view of the British musical as an escapist fantasy was not entirely welcome, either by the public who was flocking to Cats and the recently unveiled Starlight Express, or by the critics who found it impossible to reconcile their vision of what a British musical stood for, with the leftist politics and uniquely British voice in Russell and Goodall’s shows. This was the era of privatization, capitalism and globalization – everything, in fact, that Blood Brothers and The Hired Man railed against, both in their narratives and stylistically. But everything that the approaching megamusical stood for. When The Hired Man closed in London after a disappointing five month run, defeated by the might of the Les Misérables phenomenon, it foretold the end of a distinctive British style of music theatre which had

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one foot in left-wing politics, another in traditional music and a whole which was concerned with national identity. It is impossible not to wonder what the outcome could have been for the British musical with regard to cultural acceptance if the arrival of the megamusical had not diverted the genre away from the path Willy Russell and Howard Goodall were leading it towards. Thatcherism essentially put a financial value on the arts, and the spiralling profits of the Lloyd Webber/ Mackintosh shows consequently branded other musicals as less than if they were not able to monetize their artistic collateral and transform themselves into global commodities. Compared to Starlight Express and Les Misérables, the Russell and Goodall musicals were modest selfeffacing works, intent on serving a wholly different purpose than the megamusicals. And they had a contribution to make to a discourse on culture and nationhood, unlike the shows from the Mackintosh/Lloyd Webber production companies which were in no way concerned with a national narrative or identity – their ‘Britishness’ resided in the predominant nationality of the creative team. Crucially, the political foundation of the socialist theatre movement was absent from the British megamusicals and thus the form was transformed from a fledgling tool of social enquiry into pure entertainment. The spectacular fantasy became the trademark of the British musical, and any social or political aspirations stirred by Blood Brothers or The Hired Man were suffocated by a global marketing machine which enticed audiences in numbers more readily associated with a Premier League football match. Love the shows or loathe them, it was impossible to deny that this new form of British culture opened up a previously untapped seam of apparently inexhaustible profits. The fact that Blood Brothers survived the onslaught of the monolithic megamusical is a testament to the skill of Willy Russell who created a work which was able to exist beyond the parameters of the dominating trend. Although its defiance shone like a beacon throughout the years of theatrical excess, it took two decades before the influence of Blood Brothers on the British musical as a genre was able to be realized. By then, the moment for a flood of copycat musicals drawing inspiration

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from British folk music had passed (and any such show would have had little hope against the might of the megamusicals) but as the appetite for the technological spectaculars began to wane, the lasting impact of Willy Russell’s musical became apparent. In 1998, a show was developed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds based on the life of factory worker, Viv Nicholson, who won a large amount of money on the football pools in 1961 and subsequently descended into a chaotic lifestyle of partying and profligate spending which ended in her bankruptcy.9 Written by Steve Brown and Justin Greene, Spend Spend Spend took its title from Nicholson’s infamous reply to a journalist who asked what she would do with all her winnings. A woman had not been at the heart of a narrative of a British musical since Blood Brothers fifteen years previously, and Viv Nicholson was, like Mrs Johnstone, a working-class Northern woman, battling an unreliable husband and patriarchal behavioural expectations. The narrative was different, but the themes and the enduring female character at the heart of the show were reminiscent of Willy Russell’s work. A decade later, Our House (2002) was a jukebox musical by Tim Firth which utilized the hits of the 1980s British band, Madness. Also set against the backdrop of the capitalist values of Thatcherism, Our House substitutes two sides of the same person for the twins in Blood Brothers and considers the different life outcomes for one young man depending on a decision he makes as a teenager: a barely disguised nod to the conclusion of Blood Brothers when Mickey sees the life he could have had if he, not Eddie, had been the twin his mother had given away. The character of Dad in Our House is one step removed from Willy Russell’s Narrator, and the show adopts a left-wing political position through the subplot of the gentrification of working-class inner-city suburbs by the middle classes. Madness is a band with a distinct and unique sound and so the folk music tradition discernible in both Blood Brothers and The Hired Man is not present in Our House, but it can be clearly heard in the score of Billy Elliot. Pit brass bands were an established tradition in mining communities and this acknowledgement of a very specific heritage is present in the orchestrations adding

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musical authenticity. The ballad, ‘Deep into the Ground’ sung by Billy’s father at the Christmas party references the folk ballad, and there are more than a few echoes of the stirring political anthem in the finale, ‘Once We Were Kings’. And an argument could be made that Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country (2017), which premiered at London’s Old Vic Theatre in 2017, also owes a debt to Blood Brothers. Although not technically British – Conor McPherson is Irish, and Bob Dylan, American – the style of the work does call to mind the mood and theatrical style of Blood Brothers and reignites the debate as to what is a musical and what is a play with music. Critic Michael Billington, called Girl from the North Country, ‘a remarkable fusion of text and music’10 which, had he been in a more accommodating frame of mind in 1983, he could easily have attributed to the original production of Blood Brothers – the musical that is not really a musical. But possibly the most enduring legacy of Blood Brothers is its inclusion on the drama curriculum in English schools. Subsequently, thousands of young people have studied the show and engaged with the education programme, relating to the text as a narrative and community they can easily identify with. The show becomes their gateway to theatre-going and if it remains the only show they will ever see in their lives, it is something they connect with and recognize as belonging to their world. * From their very incarnation in the early 1980s, the mass appeal of the British megamusicals resulted in the shows being broadly equated (mainly by the critics) with artistic inferiority, and the assembly line method of reproduction which characterized the ‘McMusicals’ did little to dispel this equation. At the core of this attitude is the implication that ‘entertainment’ has no social value and that the associated capitalist values render it less worthy than an ‘intellectual’ performance with a political agenda. This view fails to consider the musical as an entity which can be both entertaining and political. Blood Brothers musicalized a sanitized version of life on the economic margins of Thatcher’s Britain, but the twenty-year gap between Russell’s hit and the premiere of Billy

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Elliot in 2005, suggests that musical theatre creators were acutely aware that the accepted function of the British musical was not to provoke debate, but to entertain. And to make money. The Mackintosh/Lloyd Webber megamusicals were so intent on reproducing profits by providing spectacular entertainment for as broad a demographic as possible, that to define them as cultural artefacts – something that offered information about the nation which had created it – was almost impossible. The sung through extravaganzas were the antithesis of the classical text-based theatrical tradition and impossible to include in serious debates concerning national identity as they were often deliberately stateless having been created with a global market in mind. What is often forgotten amidst the sniping concerning the banality of the British musical, is that the show which began the decisive shift away from a style of musical which referenced British cultural traditions towards an apolitical brand of entertainment was Les Misérables, created by the pinnacle of British theatrical history and intellectualism, the Royal Shakespeare Company. The RSC’s part in any discussion concerning British culture, and what denotes a cultural artefact, is crucial because of what the RSC purports to represent: a classical English theatrical heritage which stretches back centuries yet continues to define the artistic reputation and tradition of the nation. Musical theatre was possibly the furthest thing from Peter Hall’s mind when he took the reins in 1961 of the new, government subsidized company dedicated to the works of Shakespeare, yet the RSC has made a number of forays into the genre, most notably as co-producer of Les Misérables in 1985, producer of the ill-fated Carrie in 1988 and of Matilda in 2010. Regardless of their success, the RSC musical outings have not been without dissent and for many, the fusion of the Royal Shakespeare Company and musical theatre is an insult to the Bard. Yet the wide-eyed waif adorning the Les Misérables merchandise is instantly recognizable worldwide as an icon of British theatre (although not necessarily the RSC). Despite the insistence from successive artistic directors that RSC is a company with a national perspective and relevance, the classical productions in Stratford play to

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a predominantly white and middle-class audience and are largely irrelevant to the majority of Britons, particularly as the productions rarely tour beyond England (which does raise the question of how the RSC can describe itself as a national company without putting ‘English’ in front of the acronym). The musicals, however, tour nationally and internationally thus enabling the company to engage with a much wider audience demographic which, without the musicals, the company would fail to reach. An audience at Matilda in Belfast, for example, where patrons are unlikely to even associate the show with the RSC, is a very different audience than the one which attends The War of the Roses in Stratford, drawn by the international reputation for excellence in classical theatre. Beyond the box office then, the benefit for the company of engaging with musical theatre is that it enables the RSC to restyle itself as an egalitarian institution with wide reach and a culturally diverse audience – vital for any government subsidized theatre. The tag lines adorning the RSC website during the national Covid-19 lockdown – ‘Keep Your RSC’ and ‘From Our Place to Yours’ – were aimed at the audience who would be searching the website for streamed classical productions, not the Matilda fans. Which does raise the question of who exactly the RSC is primarily aiming to incorporate in a definition of ‘Your RSC’. The Royal Shakespeare Company and the London-based National Theatre of Great Britain (not to be confused with the National Theatres of Scotland and Wales) were built upon the notion that theatre had a pivotal role to play in constructing nationhood and representing the nation. An all-female production of The Taming of the Shrew at the RSC, for example, utilizes a historic text to shine a light on the modernday issue of unequal gender representation. Musical theatre was not initially granted space within this marriage between performance and nationhood but the crippling funding cuts from Margaret Thatcher’s government to the arts sector which began in the late 1970s and continued well into the next decade, resulted in subsidized theatres looking for new ways to generate income. In 1985, the RSC, under the directorship of Trevor Nunn, joined forces with Cameron Mackintosh

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to produce Les Misérables. Nunn was not a complete novice in the world of musical theatre, in 1976 he had written the book and lyrics for a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors which he also directed,11 and he had directed Cats in 1981. A year prior to Cats, Nunn had co-directed, with John Caird, the eight and a half hour long play with music, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby at the RSC. The company therefore had extensive experience of staging plays with music, but Les Misérables was a different beast. This was a sung through show which employed the structural conventions of musical theatre but required the grand vision usually reserved for one of Shakespeare’s epic history plays. What this meant in practice was that Les Misérables was treated, and created, as if it was a classical play. Both Victor Hugo and Trevor Nunn endowed the project with the artistic legitimacy that was in keeping with the ethos of the RSC and the reputation of the company for daring and innovative work. The critical sniping concerning the partnering of the RSC with commercial musicals was not initially a by-product of Les Misérables but gathered momentum in 1988 when the company produced the disastrous musical adaptation of Stephen King’s horror story, Carrie, directed by Terry Hands and featuring an overblown and treacherous set by Ralph Koltai. The resounding failure of the show, both in Stratford and in the USA – where it became one of the most expensive flops in the history of Broadway, costing almost $8 million and playing twenty-one performances – raised the first serious mutterings concerning a government subsidized company producing American musicals which contributed nothing to debates concerning national identity or cultural production. This was exacerbated in 2000, when the RSC staged a production of Lucy Simon’s The Secret Garden which transferred to the West End the following year. What was this show contributing to a heritage of classical theatre, was the question posed by many commentators. The RSC was not the only subsidized theatre company eyeing the potential for profit offered by musicals and in 1982, the cash strapped National Theatre on London’s South Bank staged Guys and Dolls as the

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first in a series of ‘reimagined’ productions of Broadway classics. By the time Trevor Nunn took over the National Theatre in 1997, he had reinvented himself as the most capable British director of musical theatre having helmed Cats, Starlight Express, Les Misérables, Chess (1986), Aspects of Love (1989), The Baker’s Wife (1989) and Sunset Boulevard (1993). His six-year reign at the National included productions of Oklahoma (1998), Candide (1999), South Pacific (2001), My Fair Lady (2001) Anything Goes (2002) and Jerry Springer (2003) with only one new British musical, Honk! by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe debuting on the mainstage Olivier Theatre in 1999 (becoming the first British musical to premiere at the National). While the National welcomed the financial rewards from the string of revivals of American classics, it was clear that Nunn did not regard the development of new British musicals as worthy of the same development process that the company bestowed upon new plays. No profits from the American revivals were diverted into establishing initiatives which actively sought out new musical voices to commission or supported workshops for upcoming composer/lyricist/book writing teams – initiatives which could have created the pool of expert practitioners who would lead the British musical into the new millennium. Nicholas Hytner took over the National Theatre from Nunn in 2003, and despite having directed Miss Saigon for Cameron Mackintosh in 1989, and Carousel at the National in 1993, it was clear that he regarded musical theatre as outside the National’s remit. During Hytner’s tenure, only London Road in 2011 – a show which employed verbatim theatre techniques and musicalized ‘real’ dialogue – made any significant contribution to the British musical theatre canon. The National Theatre is respected as one of the great artistic institutions of the nation, so when that institution deliberately does not engage in the development of new British musicals, it conveys a calculated message concerning the place of musical theatre within the culture of the nation: that what is staged across Waterloo Bridge in the theatres of the West End is Different (less than) to the work that is staged at the National. Contained within that view (again) is the unspoken pronouncement that musical theatre is not part of the nation’s

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cultural heritage and does not therefore require the same consideration, respect or, more crucially, investment, that drama, and new dramatists, require. The RSC is one of the few subsidized theatre companies in the UK which is investing in developing new musicals, but whether the primary intention is to reap the rewards at the box office or to genuinely explore the form is up for debate. Regardless of its international success, Matilda had nothing to offer in terms of advancing the form, and neither did Miss Littlewood, Sam Kenyon’s 2018 bio-musical of the life and work of Joan Littlewood (who would have loathed the idea of her life being musicalized by the ultra-Establishment RSC). Matilda was undoubtedly created with an eye on an international box office, and Miss Littlewood appeared to fall into the box-ticking category with its celebration of an unconventional icon of British theatre by a racially diverse cast (interesting to note that Miss Littlewood, the only RSC musical ever directed by a woman, was relegated to the 400 seat Swan theatre – a practice typically associated with the grudging accommodation of the ‘women’s play’ in the 1990s). The real problem with the partnership between the RSC and musical theatre is the consistent failure of the company to regard it as an art form requiring specialist knowledge – Carrie should have been the proof of the consequences of such a dismissal. In all fairness, the ‘anyone can do a musical’ attitude is not peculiar to the RSC, the regional theatres are littered with the debris of failed musicals created by practitioners with no concept how to utilize the form to create an integrated show – Local Hero (2019) at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh being the most recent example. The latest musical offering from the RSC, The Boy in the Dress, may tick all the correct boxes with regard to inclusion and the reflection of societal concerns, but it does little to dispel the suspicion that the company regards musical theatre as an inferior cultural product which is included in the repertoire only because it delivers rewards at the box office. Adapted by Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers, Chris Heath and Mark Ravenhill from David Walliams’ 2008 novel, The Boy in the Dress premiered in Stratford in late November 2019, and had it not been for

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the national lockdown, the show would have transferred to the Savoy Theatre in London in 2020. Directed by Gregory Doran, also Artistic Director of the RSC and, according to company website, ‘one of the supreme Shakespearian directors of our era’ (which could also have been said of Terry Hands who failed so spectacularly with Carrie), The Boy in the Dress was a barely disguised attempt to exploit the success of Matilda with another musical aimed at pre-teens featuring a defiant protagonist. The narrative concerns twelve-year-old Dennis, star striker of the school football team, who is so enthralled by a sequinned dress belonging to his friend Lisa, that he wears it to school and is consequently forbidden to play in the final football match of the league. With Dennis’s team losing, Lisa persuades the players to don dresses so that Dennis will no longer be violating the regulations and thus entitled to play. The team wins and all the male members of the community dress in women’s clothes to demonstrate solidarity with Dennis. The reasons behind the choice of this show are obvious: David Walliams is the number one best-selling children’s author in the UK, and Robbie Williams’ has six albums in the top 100 UK album list and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records for selling 1.6 million tickets in one day for his 2006 Close Encounters tour. In addition, by offering a theatrical response to the current public debate relating to gender identification, the company was able to shake off the lingering stain of elitism and demonstrate inclusive credentials. From the outside, engaging with the gender fluidity debate marked the latest musical from the RSC as politically aware and occupied in an interrogation of the societal status quo. But for all its apparent inclusivity, The Boy in the Dress only superficially engaged with the issue of gender identity and almost completely succeeded in silencing the female voice onstage. The show was also stylistically regressive – a throwback to the cheery chappie shows of the 1960s – and made no attempt to challenge a traditional mode of storytelling. And for a show emanating from a national company, The Boy in the Dress had very little to say concerning national identity, aside from reaffirming England (not Britain) as white, lower middle class and favouring boys and men.

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Despite the RSC website claim that the company is committed to ‘shocking, thrilling and bold’ new work, no musical from the company has ever sought out diverse musical voices to confront the conventional sound of a British musical or employed a non-white writer or director on a mainstage musical. The company welcomes the financial advantages and worldwide exposure that a successful musical brings, but it demonstrates no intention of engaging with the art form at anything other than the shallowest level. Why this is problematic beyond the RSC is the wider assumption that the company, alongside the National, is representative of the theatrical culture of the nation and therefore wields influence beyond Stratford and London. Little wonder that so many regional theatres regard the musical as little more than a subsidy boost when this appears to be the precedent set by the two major national companies. Perhaps The Boy in the Dress was indeed a genuine attempt to mobilize the musical as a tool of societal investigation, in which case it is a great pity the show was not more challenging stylistically. And for a musical debating the issue of gender fluidity, it is an even greater pity that the company did not include women among the core creative team in what purports to be an inclusive show. * At the height of the megamusical era, critic Michael Billington was so infuriated by the National Theatre joining forces with Cameron Mackintosh in what he called a ‘slavish obeisance to musicals’, that he referred to London in the 1990s as ‘the western world’s leading songand-dance factory’.12 Billington was of the opinion that the inclusion of musicals in the repertoires of companies renowned internationally for their work in drama was pandering to populism – which he equated with ‘philistine’ – even referring to Les Misérables as a ‘witless musical cartoon’. Billington’s reference of musical theatre as proof of the ‘dumbing down’ of the arts deserves a moment of attention because it is a position which continues to plague the industry in the UK and is partly responsible for the lack of cultural credibility endowed on the form. If the term suggests that the shows of Cameron Mackintosh and

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Andrew Lloyd Webber resulted in the wider genre of musical theatre simplifying their product to accommodate the new undiscerning audience, then it is an odd assertion to make as both Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita broke new ground. As did Cats, for all its decades of mockery. As works of theatre, Les Misérables or The Phantom of the Opera may not be to everyone’s taste, but there is no denying they are brilliantly conceived and executed by directors at the top of their profession. From the beginning, the primary objective of the British musical was to entertain, not to educate, so what then, exactly, has the megamusical dumbed down from? Salad Days and Rocky Horror are not exactly cradles of intellectualism. If ‘dumbing down’ refers to the wider British theatrical landscape, then it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that populism, to the Billingtons of this world, translates as a form of anti-intellectualism which has no place at the National or the RSC. But is Alan Bennett’s History Boys really so intellectually superior to Billy Elliot? Perhaps Billington is, in fact, aligning the success of the megamusicals with the growing trend of anti-intellectualism throughout society, holding Mamma Mia! responsible for the trend of reality television being reclassed as documentary and soap opera as drama. It is not a huge leap to read the scorn for popular theatre as a manifestation of a belief system which reserves seats in the stalls for the post-graduate members of society and is surprised when working-class or regional accents stray beyond the confines of the stages of the Royal Court and into the auditorium. There is no question that commercial musicals engage with a demographic beyond those who would attend a gritty drama at the Almeida or a modern-dress Shakespeare at a regional rep, and this audience statistic is easily manipulated to support the accessibility vs excellence debate. As noted earlier in the chapter, this debate is grounded in the assumption that mass entertainment – embodied by an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical – is conceived to appeal to the largest number of people possible. It is therefore inevitable, or so the belief goes, that artistic excellence will be the main casualty. This is an argument that follows ever decreasing circles including, how is excellence decreed and by whom, community arts vs professional and,

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not least, who are the arts for? The Billingtons of this world appear to be of the opinion that the national reputation for unrivalled dramatic excellence is somehow under threat from Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella. There is even a whiff of fury that popular shows and jukebox musicals are invading theatres which should be the preserve of new drama and classic revivals. Does it then, simply come down to a question of taste? It is ironic that the very thing that transformed British musicals from a barely acknowledged and easily dismissed entity into a global sensation – the megamusical – is the same artefact that is primarily responsible for the disdain towards a form of theatre enjoyed by millions. The extraordinary financial rewards reaped by a handful of men in the megamusical era did, undoubtedly, affect the new work which followed as practitioners attempted to reproduce the formula which came to be regarded as a licence to print money. But this overlooks the innovation and exceptional creativity which were undeniably at the heart of Cats and Les Misérables, and mistakenly ascribes the megamusicals with the term formulaic. If this was indeed the case, the British musical would not now be in the position where it is frantically struggling to reproduce the success of the glory days. The question as to why the British musical holds such low cultural currency ultimately comes down to how the musical represents Britain and Britishness. Blood Brothers authentically depicted a community and a social situation which viewers recognized and enjoyed, in a style which had political roots and a theatrical history. The Boy in the Dress depicts the nation as a middle-class monoculture populated by fantastically tolerant men and passive women. These two extreme ends of the scale illustrate the problems inherent in discussing a national cultural voice: whose voice is it that defines the nation? Willy Russell or the RSC? Andrew Lloyd Webber or Joe Orton? Or all of them? As a cultural artefact, the main problem with the British musical is simply that is tells us so little about our own society. Possibly it is lingering distaste for the ‘Greed is Good’ excesses of the megamusical era which keeps the British musical in a place where we can see it if we choose to, but where it does not define us. And perhaps the endless depictions of

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Britain as English, white and middle class (The Boy in the Dress, Flowers for Mrs Harris, Betty Blue Eyes (2011), Aspects of Love (1989)) prevents universal acknowledgement of the British musical as holding cultural weight because it leaves no room for a contemporary redefinition of ‘Britishness’. There is, of course, the possibility that the reason contemporary British musicals remain relegated to the periphery of cultural debates is that they often fall short in artistic standards and integrity. It is hard to place We Will Rock You (2003) in the same category as Jersey Boys, or SIX next to Hamilton. It is also difficult to deny that British musicals in the last two decades have frequently been afflicted by creators who display no comprehension of how, in a good musical, the book, lyrics and music are inextricably linked. This is exacerbated by the lack of theatre critics with any understanding of how the form of musical theatre works, and this dearth of knowledge (and interest) is what subsequently enables shows such as SIX , The Boy in the Dress and Local Hero to pass without anything more than superficial critical examination. There is an undeniable complacency pervading contemporary musical theatre in the UK, an attitude that appears to believe that the British musical has never loosened the ferocious grip it had on the industry in the 1990s when Rent in 1996 was hailed by American critics as the turning point in the battle against the British Invasion. In Tessa Jowell’s 2004 paper, ‘Government and the Value of Culture’, Jowell stated that, ‘culture defines who we are, it defines us as a nation. And only culture can do this.’ Notably, she did not differentiate between different forms of culture, she included all artistry in the term. And for all the mutterings concerning the popularity of musical theatre dumbing down the theatrical heritage of the nation, it was not Rufus Norris, Artistic Director of the National Theatre, or Gregory Doran of the RSC, who rallied the public behind demands to reopen theatres in line with large scale sporting events. It was Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Does that perhaps indicate a reappraisal of where musical theatre fits within British culture?

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2

‘Kyan wait to get to Inglan’: National identity and the British musical

National identity is a term used to describe how an individual or a collective understands their relationship to the nation. It emerges from the point where the individual or collective agrees on their understanding of the nation and celebrates their part in it – at an international sporting event, for example, or a national holiday. The term also embodies the sense of belonging which is generated when signifiers such as historical or cultural icons are recognised as representative of the nation. When this recognition is shared at, for example, a Burns Supper celebration in Scotland or Trooping the Colour in England, the collective is united by the emotional response which is induced by the performance of nationhood. The pride which is subsequently induced is directly related to a sense of the nation – ‘our’ nation – as unique and different to other nations. Constructed mythologies reinforce characteristics which are subsequently accepted as national traits – the English stiff upper lip, the Welsh fondness for singing – and these cultural identifiers are presumed to be further evidence of the unique character of the nation. National identity produces patriotism, a love of one’s country, but in an extreme form it can result in a form of nationalism based on a belief of superiority – the foundation of Colonialism. The performance of identity is perceptibly visible in flag waving, singing national songs and wearing traditional costume but it is also evident in cultural production through artefacts which interrogate the wider understanding of meanings contained within the word ‘nation’. The image a nation constructs about itself and projects to others is directly related to the stories told by, and to, the populace through various modes of cultural production. Theatre, film, television, literature 51

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and art play a vital role in reflecting an ideal of who ‘we’ are and what we stand for. Theatrical performances stimulate this emotion, this sense of belonging, by presenting a viewpoint which consolidates the sentiments already in place amongst the audience members. This subsequently encourages a sense of community amongst the audience who share the experience of relating to a show which appears to replicate their own experience. In SIX , for example, the wives are deliberately constructed to give the impression that they are no different to the millennial women present in the audience. They refer to each other as ‘babe’, they blow kisses, they high five and they discuss boyfriend/husband problems: in other words, they are you, me, or the girls you went to school with. A woman in the audience believes she ‘knows’ these characters, and this impression of familiarity reinforces a specific version of womanhood by replicating it. Similar strategies are brought into play in other British musicals to reinforce a collective experience of nationhood by depicting societal situations and settings which an audience recognizes and feels an emotional connection to. This visceral engagement is supported by the use of national signifiers including accents, music and constructed characteristics such as stoic Londoners battling the Blitz, or the Northern sense of humour, which serve to bond the mythical ‘us’ as a group. This then, is the creative production of national identity, which can be both mobilized and manipulated to serve a specific purpose within wider debates. Any subsequent interpretation of the term will inevitably be influenced by external factors including, but not limited to, class, geography, language, ethnic identity, education and religion. Sociologist Krishan Kumar identifies the immediate problem which arises in any discussion concerning British identity – that of ‘British’ constantly being conflated with ‘English’.1 English, Kumar notes, is a word which provokes strong emotions, particularly amongst the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish who are highly sensitive to the imperious English habit of referring to Britain as England. Scotland has a devolved parliament, separate judicial and education systems, its own religion and ancient language. Wales also has a devolved parliament and its own

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distinct language. Welsh culture and cultural icons are different to those of Northern Ireland which, in turn, has a history inextricably linked to a country which is not part of the United Kingdom. This results in ‘British’ being a term which is almost impossible to pin down, subsequently rendering British identity an elusive ideal. Indeed, it is pertinent to ask if British nationalism as a concept can even exist when icons of England – cricket, the Royal Family – mean as much to Scots as a Welsh male voice choir means to the inhabitants of Belfast. In addition, England is split by the North–South divide resulting in the England of Newcastle or Liverpool holding very different cultural meanings to the England of the affluent South. The North of England, in fact, has more in common with Scotland or the industrial areas of Wales than with the affluent English counties below the Midlands. Accents aside, and without icons immediately recognizable as British, i.e. not Scottish, Welsh, English or Northern Irish, how do we define a distinct British sensibility? Musical theatre in the UK makes no attempt to answer this. The British musical is, in fact, the English musical, and the ideals of identity which are reproduced presume England as the normative. SIX for example, assumes that pupils in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland study English history in place of their own and are familiar with the rhyme referring to the wives in the show. Mrs Henderson Presents and Betty Blue Eyes both appear to be under the impression that England alone fought the Second World War with no input at all from the other three nations in the United Kingdom. The fact that the combined population of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland is just over 10 million compared to England’s almost 56 million, goes some way towards answering why England is frequently conflated with Britain, but to assume a one-size-fits-all approach to national identity within the UK disregards the separate nations and the multiple diverse and ethnic community identities existing within these nations. Consequently, to discuss the British musical in terms of national identity is equally problematic due to four nations with separate characteristics making up the United Kingdom, but only one of those nations consistently producing musical theatre. Inevitable

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then, that the British musical will primarily represent English concerns, not least because a clear interpretation of Britishness remains elusive. The existence of four nations within the UK, and historical and ongoing simmering resentment between the smaller nations and the dominant England, means that the British musical struggles to intervene in constructions of national identity. It is impossible to consolidate or challenge nationalistic ideals when those ideals differ so dramatically between the nations: the Brexit vote clearly revealed the polarizing political divisions, with Scotland and Northern Ireland voting Remain, and Wales and England voting Leave (although London voted Remain). Any emotional attachment to the constructed ideals which can be mobilized to nurture a sense of belonging to a national community is fractured amongst the inhabitants of the UK, and cultural signifiers are associated with individual regions or nations rather than Great Britain as a whole. The question of whose Britain is being represented by the British musical therefore yields different answers depending on which part of the United Kingdom the show originates from or depicts. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is representing a very different Britain than the genteel depiction of the nation on display in Flowers for Mrs Harris, and both shows were created with the respective local demographic – working-class Sheffield and middle-class Chichester – in mind. Consequently, the capacity of the British musical to engage audiences in a performance of nationhood is dependent on whether or not the version of Britishness the show depicts is one which resonates in that particular part of the UK. This was most obviously demonstrated on the 2018 UK tour of The Last Ship which opened and closed in cities in the North of England which had been directly affected by the decline in shipbuilding depicted in the show. The show affirmed the history and validity of those long-gone communities, members of which were often present in the audience, thus transforming the musical into ‘Our Story’ and instilling a sense of ownership which is unlikely to be reproduced with a London audience.2 A recent initiative to tackle this contradiction is the new Musical Commissioning Hub which was launched in Scotland in 2020, with the

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aim of developing and staging ‘great Scottish Musicals’ at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in the Highlands and subsequently on nationwide tours.3 For all its good intentions, the initiative has an air of English paternalism in the assumption that a Scottish musical will utilize the English model (which was developed from the American model) as a blueprint rather than building on the characteristics which identify Scottish theatre as separate, and different. As discussed in the previous chapter, the socialist theatre practices of the 1960s and beyond established an idiosyncratic music theatre voice in Scotland – the play with music utilizing folk traditions – and to impose the English/ American model onto Scottish theatre practice to essentially create an English musical with a Scottish accent overlooks the distinct theatrical heritage already in place. The musicalized stage version of the 1983 film, Local Hero, which premiered in Edinburgh in 2019, proved the point as, apart from the location, nothing about the show reflected Scottish heritage, music or theatrical tradition. It was homogenized Scotland, a culture and country imagined by people who have no roots there, reminiscent of the fantasy Scotland in Brigadoon or the inauthentic depiction of Northern Ireland in the Lloyd Webber/Ben Elton musical, The Beautiful Game (2002). Sunshine on Leith (2017) however, was built around the music of the iconic Scottish band, The Proclaimers, thereby establishing a distinct sound immediately identifiable as Scottish from the outset. In keeping with its Scottish foundations, Sunshine on Leith borrowed from the play-with-music style, rather than adhering to a strictly musical theatre stylistic format. Possibly this was an unintended consequence of book writer Stephen Greenhorn’s lack of experience in musical theatre, but it did reproduce a style familiar to Scottish audiences through their engagement with John McGrath’s 7:84 company and the epic shows of Bill Bryden – The Ship and The Last Picnic – in the 1990s. As previously discussed, the British musical has never been as concerned with the construction of Britishness as the American musical has been with constructions of America. When the British musical does attempt to intervene in an identity discourse, it tends to reproduce

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mythologies rather than challenge them. British dramatists have a proud history of contesting the values of the nation by examining those ideals under a theatrical microscope, but aside from the occasional show which confronts the power imbalance fortified by the class system (Oh What A Lovely War!, Blood Brothers, Billy Elliot) British musicals tend to idolize the nation through a nostalgic gaze and reproduce mythologies relating to the eccentric and endearing qualities which apparently embody Britishness. Confrontations with the political Establishment is exactly what audiences expect from their national dramatists but the majority of British theatregoers who attend musical theatre do so to enjoy an evening of untroubling entertainment, i.e. they do not buy a ticket to Mamma Mia! expecting to have their political ideals challenged. In response, the creators of new British musicals have a marked tendency to indulge an impartial viewpoint which reassures audiences that nothing has changed, and all is well in white, middleclass England. In his book, You’ve Got to Have a Dream: The Message of the Musical,4 Ian Bradley maintains that it is possible to write a social history of the UK and the USA based on an analysis of the dominant musicals in the respective countries from the past seven decades. Although it is not helpful in terms of cultural identity to analyse the British musical solely within the context of the Broadway model (can an American cultural product ever accurately reflect British culture?) Bradley’s assertion holds more weight when applied to American musicals. British musicals, both historical and contemporary, are more likely to side-step any engagement with societal schisms in their own nation by simply ignoring the existence of any such ruptures. Bradley’s conviction that musicals reflect the societal preoccupations of the moment is, however, undoubtedly correct when applied to Blood Brothers, which, in the 1980s, was the most accurate reflection of British societal breakdown as it was happening since Joan Littlewood’s work twenty years previously. Prior to Blood Brothers, home grown musicals which authentically depicted contemporary life in Britain were few and far between, and the familiarity of Mrs Johnstone’s personal struggle,

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and that of the community, endowed the audience with a sense of ownership. This was their story, their experience of the world, told by one of their own. The phenomenal success of Blood Brothers was undeniably due in part to a local audience responding to the challenge to unpopular government policies which appeared to serve an elite minority of the population. The show also had the advantage of being set (and created) in Liverpool, a city well known for its distinctive character and thriving arts scene – it was, after all, the city which had produced The Beatles and the distinctive Merseybeat sound of the 1960s. In the 1980s, Liverpool had for generations been a fiercely political city, and although Blood Brothers debuted before the Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council adopted the militant policies which were effectively a declaration of war against Margaret Thatcher’s government, it was impossible to live in the city in this period and not be aware of entrenched poverty, mass unemployment, social deprivation and injustice. Like a number of cities in the North of England, Scotland and South Wales, Liverpool suffered disproportionately from the loss of manufacturing and industries associated with trade and was already in a steep decline by the time Thatcher came to power. Blood Brothers was a cry of rage against the death of a once glorious city and fury at the unfairness of the consequences of government policies on the most vulnerable sections of the population. The show intimated that here was a community at the mercy of a London Government which didn’t care. This was a widely held viewpoint throughout the areas of the UK which suffered the greatest social deprivation as a result of Thatcherite policies, and Willy Russell’s musical thus gave voice to a section of the population who regarded themselves as voiceless. Any notion of national identity provoked by Blood Brothers undoubtedly had foundations in class, and this ultimately prevailed over the regional specificity, uniting audiences across the nation in political, rather than localized solidarity. It is impossible to know if this would have been the case had the show debuted after the reign of Margaret Thatcher, but the fact that it survived for almost twenty-five years in the West End intimates that Blood

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Brothers was saying something beyond the regional affiliation which struck a chord throughout the nation. That is not to say that the local character of Blood Brothers was not intrinsic to its success. Indeed, the failure of the show on Broadway (and of Sting’s The Last Ship over thirty years later) could partly be attributed to the inherent regional personality of both of the works which consequently rendered them alien to American audiences. * If a show can consolidate the emotion of belonging, it can just as easily provoke a sense of exclusion through a lack of representation. This is an aggressive form of national identity, predicated on what we are not, rather than what we are. The fact that Bend it Like Beckham and The Big Life remain the only British musicals in the West End with narratives focused on immigrant communities produces meanings which designate England as not Indian or not black. Comparatively, The Boy in the Dress and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie depict the nation as not female. These strategies consciously prevent certain groups from positioning themselves within the nationhood construct visible onstage, thereby denying them both an identity within a national community and the emotional security of belonging. As innocuous as the constant references to England (not Britain) fighting the Second World War may seem in Betty Blue Eyes or Mrs Henderson Presents, to Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish viewers it effectively suffocates all notions of Scottish-, Northern Irish- or Welsh-ness, thus consolidating the perception of an English attitude towards the smaller nations as irrelevant. This exacerbates a sense of exclusion from a collective national consciousness and reinforces local nationalistic tendencies as members of the smaller nations learn to define themselves as not English. The United Kingdom in the twenty-first century is a multicultural nation with a history of an immigrant population going back centuries (especially from nations which were formerly part of the British Empire) suggesting that the lack of accommodation of a non-white voice in British musical theatre is too prolonged to be coincidental.

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Apologists will argue that the absence of BAME musical theatre creative practitioners renders the predominance of white narratives inevitable, but this replicates the familiar position of blaming a minority for their own under representation instead of actively encouraging participation through initiatives specifically aimed at the said minority groups. The lack of action in seeking out diverse voices by the subsidized companies which commission new musicals indicates that incorporating multicultural Britain into a musical theatre definition of nationhood is not a priority. When a ‘revisited’ production of a British classic musical is staged at a subsidized theatre company with an all-white cast and creative team, as was the case in 2016 with the Chichester Festival Theatre/Cameron Mackintosh production of Half A Sixpence,5 it is hard not to read a racist agenda into the failure of critics to take the theatre company and Mackintosh to task. Both the show, and the inaction of the critics, suggests that the depiction of Britain as white nation is the preferred viewpoint. Admittedly, the non-white proportion of the British population barely makes double figures: in England and Wales the percentage of the population defining themselves as Asian/Asian British, or black/African/ Caribbean black British is 11 per cent, in Scotland it is less than 3 per cent and in Northern Ireland, less than 2 per cent. Yet this has not prevented a distinctive non-white voice emerging in drama. It is also worth remembering that the enormously popular light entertainment programme, The Black and White Minstrel Show, featuring male singers in blackface, was still being aired weekly on the BBC in 1978. In 1967, the Campaign against Racial Discrimination submitted a petition to the BBC calling for the Corporation to axe the show and was met with an official response which justified the practice of blackface as a tradition of British musical hall, and insisted that the show was good-hearted, family entertainment.6 The West End has housed only a handful of British musicals with a BAME sensibility, a glaring contrast to Broadway which, since Shuffle Along in 1921, has a history of musicals featuring BIPOC narratives and/or performers, including Cabin in the Sky (1940), The Wiz (1975), Jelly’s Last Jam (1991), The Color Purple (2005), In the Heights (2008)

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and Hamilton – to name but a few. Although these musicals were initially categorized as Other – the ‘Black Musical’ – they did enable authentic African American and Latinx voices to be heard in mainstream theatre in a way that has not yet been replicated in British musicals. That is not to say that Broadway musicals are completely stain free when it comes to race representation: the Native American narrative was written out of Oklahoma! in preference to the pioneering mythology of white Americans ‘taming’ uninhabited land, and non-white practitioners remain a tiny minority on the creative teams of Broadway shows. But it is certainly a more inclusive and progressive landscape than musical theatre in the UK which continues to struggle to shake off the remnants of a colonial past with regard to an entitled appropriation of non-white cultures. White creators continue to appease white audiences by producing characters who conform to the expected racial stereotypes – the excruciating cliché of the Indian shopkeeper in The Boy in the Dress being the latest incarnation – and colour blind, or colour conscious, casting still has a long way to go in UK musical theatre practice. Even then, plugging a handful of non-white performers into ensemble roles does not absolve the absence of any real commitment from producers and/or artistic directors to actively develop new works with BAME narratives and creative teams. It also assumes that the white roles are what non-white performers aspire to play and overlooks the fact that half-heartedly turning a non-white lens onto areas of a white show does not make the show authentically black. It is hard not to read a negative agenda into the fact that rock star Robbie Williams has been picked up by the RSC to write a musical yet the enormously popular black British rapper, singer and songwriter, Stormzy, has not. Nor indeed by the National. At the beginning of 1885, Gilbert and Sullivan took advantage of the craze for all things Eastern and presented The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre in London. This creatively produced version of Japanese culture (performed by white singers) proved so popular that it ran for an unprecedented eighteen months and by the end of the year it was estimated that over one hundred companies in Europe and America

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were presenting a version of the show. A large part of the public appetite for the show was due to the wider framing of Eastern cultures as Exotic, and the perception of Otherness which pervaded The Mikado reinforced the colonialist ideology of white supremacy. The show reflected the trend for Exoticism or Chinoiserie in European art and design which, from the eighteenth century, had reinterpreted Eastern artistic style within a European gaze thereby effectively removing the authentic origins. In 1989, over a century after the premiere of The Mikado, Cameron Mackintosh opened Miss Saigon – Alain Boublil and Claude Michel Schönberg’s updated version of Eastern exoticism – complete with two white actors wearing prosthetics to play leading roles7 and a depressingly familiar depiction of Asian women as submissive and sexually available to white men. When Mackintosh announced his intention to bring Jonathan Pryce to Broadway in 1991 to reprise his portrayal of the Eurasian Engineer, Asian American actors protested vociferously against this display of yellowface, the practice which enabled non-Asian actors to control the portrayal of Asians onstage. Yellowface, as a practice, harked back to the beginning of the century when white American actors donned make-up and taped their eyes to portray Asian characters in a form of appropriation which served to remind the audience of the inferiority, and foreign-ness, of the Chinese immigrant. The protests on Broadway in 1991 which were mobilized against Pryce’s inclusion in Miss Saigon emanated from a historical foundation of demeaning Asian stereotypes functioning as the acceptable face of a racist agenda. American Equity initially supported their members by refusing to grant Pryce permission to appear, but the Union was forced to capitulate when Cameron Mackintosh threatened to withdraw the production altogether, thereby putting numerous jobs – including rare ensemble roles for Asian/American and Asian performers – in jeopardy. Mackintosh’s victory over American Equity not only demonstrated the enormous power he and his megamusicals had accrued in just under a decade, it was a disturbing reminder that the detritus of Colonialism had yet to be entirely removed from the English psyche. Not only would the actor’s union, American Equity, be forced to

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do what the more powerful Mackintosh required of them, so too would Asian American actors. * The British Empire first established trading routes to the Indian Ocean region in the 1600s, and the formation of the East India Company at this time saw the recruitment of a steady number of Indian sailors on British ships travelling back to Europe. With their employment terminated upon arrival in the UK, many of these sailors were unable to afford the passage back to India and had no alternative but to settle in England. During the period of British Rule in India (1858 to 1947) increasing numbers of Indian nationals settled in the UK. Often these workers were servants accompanying wealthy British families returning home, but a significant number of Indian middle- and upper-class families sent their sons to be educated at the great public schools and Universities of England and Scotland, thus establishing future ties. Following the breakup of the British Empire after the Second World War, Indian migration to the UK increased steadily throughout the 1950s and 1960s, mainly as a result of the 1948 British Nationality Act which enabled citizens of Commonwealth countries to settle in the UK. Today, British Indians, or Indian Britons, make up the largest ethnic minority population in the UK – almost 1.4 million people – and two British musicals, Bombay Dreams (2002) and Bend it Like Beckham (2015) have represented the community onstage. Bollywood films from India had been screened in the UK since the 1950s, and by the late 1980s many British cities could count up to twenty Bollywood video stores in their vicinity – over forty in the city of Leicester. The creation of a new musical which replicated the style and narrative of the Bollywood musicals was a shrewd move by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his production company, the Really Useful Group, a move which mined a previously untapped seam of young British Indian fans, potentially delivering a whole new audience for other Lloyd Webber’s shows. Bombay Dreams opened in London in 2002 and despite the pairing of white creative practitioners Don Black (lyricist), Anthony

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Van Laast (choreography) and Thomas Meehan (book) with Indian counterparts, A. R. Rahman, Farah Kahn and Meera Syal, the whiff of cultural appropriation surrounding the show was hard to ignore. The fact that the title reproduced the British colonial name for the city instead of Mumbai, which had been in use since 1995 and reflected the country’s Maratha heritage, pointed towards the white sensibility driving the production. Although the participation of an Indian musician, choreographer and book writer undeniably added a sense of authenticity to the production, the director, Steven Pimlott, was white and the show was created within a paradigm dictated by the conventions of Western musical theatre. This hybrid of two cultural forms was calculated to reassure a white audience that the performance signals of the show would be familiar and replicate those of the megamusical, whilst at the same time the narrative, music and style was intended to appeal directly to the legions of fans of the Bollywood blockbusters. The voice of the show was neither entirely British nor British Indian, and this shaky Anglo/Indian artistic encounter thus became an accurate reflection of the younger Indian audience members who were British born but bound by the cultural traditions of their parents. The clash between traditional and contemporary cultures, between East and West, is a familiar Bollywood storyline and the stage musical was therefore reproducing meanings which were able to be interpreted on more than one level. It is impossible to know if Lloyd Webber genuinely harboured a desire to represent Indian culture or if Bombay Dreams was merely an expensive tool which enabled him to display politically correct credentials via his engagement with a more ethnically diverse audience. Whatever was behind his commitment to the show, there is no doubt that Bombay Dreams offered an unprecedented number of roles, including leading roles, to Indian, and British Indian actors in a West End musical, raising the profile of both the performers and the culture on a West End stage. Despite the fact that Lloyd Webber went out of his way to imbue the show with cultural authenticity by holding auditions in cities throughout England with high British Indian populations, the

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cultural legitimacy of the characters in Bombay Dreams was up for debate: were these characters believable as real members of the Indian community, or were they characters whose ‘Indian-ness’ had been imagined by white English people sporting a post colonialist hangover? Ultimately, no one attending a screening of a Bollywood blockbuster is on a search for political realism, and the fantastical plot line of the show tended to render any attempt at a serious discussion concerning minority representation, irrelevant. But in producing the show, Lloyd Webber was sending a clear signal regarding the inclusion of multicultural Britain in artistic and cultural production. Bombay Dreams ran for two years on the West End and transferred (less successfully) to Broadway in 2004. The number ‘Shakalaka Baby’ was released in the UK as a single sung by Preeya Kalidas, and although it is not remembered as one of the monster hits from a Lloyd Webber show, it did make it into the Top 40. The album of the show was a top selling record in India, suggesting that the infusion of a white artistic product with A. R. Rahman’s culturally specific music was not regarded as an aberration by the population who claimed ownership of the music. Lloyd Webber’s hunch with regard to an untapped seam of new audience members proved absolutely correct and the production in the West End attracted a more ethnically diverse audience in larger numbers than had ever previously been seen at a commercial British musical. Thirteen years after Bombay Dreams, Gurinder Chadha, writer and director of the 2002 hit film Bend it Like Beckham, brought a musicalized version of the work to the Phoenix Theatre in London in 2015. The film tells the story of eighteen-year-old Jess, whose love of football dominates her life but her British Indian parents have forbidden her to play. Jess secretly joins a local women’s team and leads the team to the deciding game of the league. The cup final, however, falls on the same day as her sister’s wedding. Observing her unhappiness at missing the game, Jess’s father allows her to leave the wedding and play in the second half. Jess scores the winning goal thereby earning herself a sports scholarship to Santa Clara University in California and her parents finally agree that she should have the opportunity to follow her dream. The fact that Bend

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it Like Beckham had been a successful film prior to its theatrical incarnation undoubtedly made a West End adaptation an easier sell than if it had been a new musical with a British Indian focus. The participation of British musical theatre heavyweights, composer Howard Goodall and lyricist Charles Hart, sent a signal that although this show had a narrative rooted in the Indian community in the London suburb of Southall, Bend it Like Beckham made no claim to a cultural form that was not Western. But neither was it culturally insensitive: writer/director Chadha brought in Kuljit Bhamra, an award-winning musician and record producer known for pioneering the British Bhangra sound, to work alongside composer, Howard Goodall. British Bhangra was a distinct musical style which emanated from the British Punjabi community in the 1960s and combined traditional Punjab folk music with Western instruments and an upbeat pop sound. Combining the skills of Kuljit Bhamra and Howard Goodall – both masters in their own national musical language – was intended to create a synthesis of their respective and distinctive sounds which would subsequently reflect the themes of Anglo/Indian fusion permeating the show. This fusion was achieved so successfully that Bhamra, Goodall and lyricist Charles Hart were nominated for an Olivier Award in 2016 for Outstanding Achievement in Music for their work on the show. Unlike cricket, which is primarily associated with England, football is a cultural signifier throughout all four nations of the UK. Despite the fact that David Beckham played for the national team of England, Bend it Like Beckham offered a narrative which resonated throughout the country (The Beautiful Game and The Boy in the Dress also recognized this). When the musical premiered in 2015, London was still bathing in the post-Olympic glow resulting from the successful hosting of the games in 2012. A show centring around a sport which a large percentage of the population either enjoyed watching or playing, and a sport in which British teams had international standing, was fortuitously timely. Sport has deep rooted connotations with nationalism and is frequently mobilized as an indicator of assimilation: the levels to which an

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immigrant has adopted their new homeland is often judged by which national team they now support or their knowledge of teams and players in the UK Premier League. Bend it Like Beckham engages with questions concerning the performance of nationhood as Jess’s desire to play football marks her as totally assimilated into British culture. Her father, however, demonstrates his ongoing ties to his homeland through his allegiance to cricket, a game introduced to India by English Colonialist rulers and subsequently adopted as the national game. The opposition from Jess’s parents to her desire to play football reveals the clash of cultures apparent in the older generation’s desire to maintain Indian traditions, pitted against the next generation’s desire for a more liberal British way of life. In addition to confronting the identity issues associated with the traditional/progressive binary, Bend it Like Beckham engages in a debate concerning the performance of gender – the age old ‘sport is for boys’ stance. It is, in fact, Jess’s sex which poses the greater problem in terms of her mother’s disapproval than her cultural defiance, although the subplot concerning the wedding of Jess’s sister illustrates how gender and tradition are inextricably linked in the eyes of both her parents. The Indian community provides the context for Bend it Like Beckham, but equal to the cultural disturbance posed by Jess, is her disruption of the traditional performance of gender, reiterated by Jess’s white team-mate, Jules, who faces similar disapproval from her mother with regard to girls playing football. These thematic intersections between gender, race, culture and nationhood enable audience members to identify with and enjoy varying interpretations of the show. Women in the audience can relate to the central premise of a young woman demanding the right to live the life she determines, free from male control, but while one woman will see a wider metaphor in the challenge towards the male stranglehold over national sport, another may read it through a prism of cultural and religious restrictions on women. These interpretations may be framed by the race of the viewer, but equally, they may not. The show was a critical, if not a commercial, success (it had a run of nine months) but the real achievement of Bend it Like Beckham, and Bombay Dreams before it, was the creation of a space for

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a multicultural audience to not only see themselves represented onstage, but to include themselves in a paradigm of nationhood which offered acceptance and belonging: in other words, to experience a British musical in the same way as white audiences do. Both Bombay Dreams and Bend it Like Beckham were long overdue efforts to accommodate the British Indian community into an area of the arts which, by 2002, was representing the UK on a global platform. For the musical theatre genre in Britain to be making space for shows which reflected the Indian community and sensibility was an indication that the minority population was finally being incorporated into constructs of nationhood and mobilized to drive a narrative which was intrinsically British. Ten years before Bend it Like Beckham explored the experience of the British Indian community in the UK, another West End musical, The Big Life, had focused on the experience of Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s. Originally produced at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2004, The Big Life was a musical which utilized ska music (a forerunner to reggae) and had a score composed by local reggae musician, Paul Joseph. The script by Paul Sirett relocated the plot of Love’s Labours Lost to four male Jamaican immigrants who arrive in the UK in 1956 on board the ship, MV Empire Windrush, and make a vow to remain celibate until they have established their successful new lives in London. The former is established as unlikely due to the arrival onstage of attractive young immigrant women already living in London, and the ‘American Dream’ narrative of the successful immigrant is thwarted by the systemic racism driving a post-colonial nation. The Big Life was directed by Clint Dyer whose parents were part of the Windrush Generation, the collective name ascribed to Caribbean immigrants who arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1970. The narrative of the show did not shy away from the pervasive racism experienced by the new arrivals into the UK and the consequent failure of their ambitions for the new life in ‘Inglan’ to materialize. There is a sense of betrayal amongst the Jamaican male characters in the show, a suspicion that they have been lured to Britain with false promises. ‘They invited us!’ notes the character of Lenny, as he, and his three friends begin to understand the

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reality: England does not want University graduates and war heroes, the country wants manual labourers and bus conductors. The Theatre Royal Stratford East was no stranger to musicals and since the 1960s, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop was one of the few companies in the country to include a multicultural perspective in their productions. Littlewood and Lionel Bart’s Fings Aint Wot They Used T’Be and Blitz! referenced Bart’s cultural heritage and the Jewish community in the East End thereby reflecting the local community on the stage of the resident theatre. In 1990, the company (in association with Cameron Mackintosh) sent Five Guys Named Moe, featuring the music of Louis Jordan, to the West End where it ran for years and won the 1991 Olivier Award for Best Entertainment. And five years later, the company sent the (less successful) Clarke Peters’ tribute to Nat King Cole, Unforgettable, to the Garrick Theatre, proving, if nothing else, that it was possible to create new shows in Britain which forced a gap in the white, middle-class fence around the genre. Phillip Hedley was Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East in the 1990s, and he was not unaware of the ability musical theatre had to attract a large crowd to the theatre. He was also equally conscious that the productions (like most musicals in the West End in the 1990s) held little appeal to a youth audience. In response, Hedley set up the Musical Theatre Project in 1999, primarily to create shows which would appeal to a younger audience by utilizing Urban Music which encompassed a wide range of forms including hip hop, rap, RnB, garage and basement. These sounds had roots in black culture and the potential for fusions with Brit pop and Indian classical and populist music was finite and reflected the extraordinary diversity of East London. Broadway musicals had traditionally reflected current popular musical trends, albeit a few years behind the trend, and Hedley intended the Musical Theatre Project to take the music of street and youth culture and place it onstage, thereby attracting the audience who would become the next generation of patrons. The Musical Theatre Project also had a secondary objective: to utilize the form of musical theatre for a socio-political purpose, that of bringing to the stage unrepresented diverse stories

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which more authentically represented the cultural make up of contemporary Britain. The Theatre Royal established a partnership with the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and two lecturers from the musical theatre writing programme came to Stratford in 1999 to lead a summer school. This month-long intensive course brought together local practitioners from different art forms – composers, performance poets, writers, pop singers, folk artists – encouraging them to collaborate and explore the form of musical theatre. One of the early success stories was the pairing of poet, Hope Massiah, and the composer Delroy Murray, who reinterpreted the traditional British pantomime to give an Urban/ Caribbean sound and sensibility to Jack in the Beanstalk (2002) and Sleeping Beauty (2004). The initial musical theatre summer school was so successful that the programme continued for twenty years producing shows with a South East Asian context – notably Baiju Bawra in 2002, which was an adaptation of the 1952 hit Hindi musical film of the same name, by Niraj Chag, who had participated in the inaugural workshop. The following year saw the premier of Da Boyz (2003) a contemporary reworking of Rogers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse, utilizing rap and hip hop, and two years later, there was The Big Life. Despite the astounding success of the Musical Theatre Project, repeated applications for government funding to specifically support the initiative were refused, a sign of either systemic racism within the arts or another example of the low status of musical theatre in a value system which considers text-based drama as the definition of a national theatrical heritage. The Musical Theatre Project was ahead of its time in terms of diverting the sound of musical theatre away from the traditional jazzy, brassy style, and the initiative is no longer running. But the results spoke for themselves. The Big Life attracted universal acclaim with critics frequently incorporating words such as ‘triumph’, ‘exuberant’, ‘vibrant’ and even, ‘a veritable tour de force’ in their glowing reviews. When The Big Life transferred to the Apollo Theatre in 2005, it became the first British musical in the West End to focus on the experience of black Britons. The show was nominated for the Best New Musical

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Olivier award in 2006 (losing out to Billy Elliot) and remains a defining example of what can be achieved when a company invests, long term, in the development of new British musical theatre voices. What the Musical Theatre Project at Stratford East was cultivating from the very beginning is exactly what audiences worldwide are currently enjoying in Hamilton. If the initiative had been properly funded, and if the controlling interests in the West End musical theatre network had been more open to a multicultural musical interpretation of the UK, Britain might have produced its own Hamilton years before Lin Manuel Miranda. And it would almost certainly have been developed and premiered at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. It is remiss to give the impression that there are no musicals (or Christmas shows) with a multicultural sensibility being produced in the UK – there are, but these shows rarely make it to the West End. Shows with a multicultural voice and/or narrative are a feature of many repertory and fringe theatre companies, often reflecting the audience demographic of the particular locale. Since 1979, NitroBeat (formerly Black Theatre Co-op, then Nitro) – now based at the Soho Theatre in London – has been fusing music, theatre and visual art to represent the black British experience, both in theatre and on television. Tamasha Theatre, again in London’s East End, has been championing British South Asian artists and narratives for over twenty years and was the company responsible for East is East (1996)8 by Ayub Khan-Din, a play which enjoyed three sold out London runs and was nominated for the 1998 Olivier Award for Best Comedy. An enormously successful and BAFTA award-winning film adaptation of East is East was released in 1999, and the work is frequently cited as a turning point in presenting Indian culture to a mainstream British audience. NitroBeat and Tamasha Theatre are by no means the only British companies producing theatrical performances with a multicultural perspective – regional theatres such as Birmingham Rep and West Yorkshire Playhouse (now renamed the Leeds Playhouse) have an impressive history of work which engages with the local racially diverse communities. But the cultural snobbery which designates the West End as the pinnacle of

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artistic success ensures that black and Indian British productions at fringe or regional rep theatres are not given the critical appraisal and attention they would be given if they were playing at the National, for example. This could be interpreted as another form of elitism within a British theatre intent on keeping fringe and rep productions in their assigned place, as the lack of attention given to the production is one way of ensuring it will not transfer to the West End. But it could also be an indication of a resolve within the British theatrical Establishment to keep the West End, where the majority of tourists will see a play or musical and form an opinion of British culture, white. In fairness, one of the problems with musicals which are developed for a localized audience is their limited appeal beyond the locale, which consequently makes a West End transfer unlikely. A large percentage of the audience at a West End show are overseas tourists and a location or community specific show, such as Stratford East’s Baiju Bawra, is unlikely to consistently attract the size of audience necessary to achieve a respectable run in the West End. This is by no means a reflection on the artistic quality of the material and if shows with an authentic regional flavour are not being seen beyond their originating locale then the British musical as a cultural product is being defined purely by the large-scale and almost exclusively white, commercial spectaculars in the West End. Few of these shows engage with national identity, and even then, it is a version of British identity which has been manipulated to appeal to tourists. The rep theatres, then, are in a Catch 22 situation: they create an excellent show which capitalizes on local multicultural and class authenticity, but this same regional flavour is exactly what keeps the musical out of the West End, subsequently denying the company the profits and attention a London run would bring. It also prevents the show from being considered within the wider cultural umbrella of British musicals as commentators rarely regard musical productions any further from London than Chichester or Stratfordupon-Avon as holding cultural relevance. It is therefore correct to say that there is multicultural work being created in the UK within a loose definition of musical theatre, but

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whether those shows are deliberately being denied a wider platform is impossible to know. What is undeniable is that the Musical Theatre Project at the Theatre Royal Stratford East was doing the inclusive work twenty years ago in musical theatre that the National and the RSC has still not come around to doing. And yet the, now iconic, line from Hamilton, ‘immigrants, we get the job done’, receives as loud a cheer in the West End as it does on Broadway, suggesting the desire is present amongst audiences to see racial diversity given a voice in British musicals. The fact remains that until it is, the British musical theatre industry is unlikely to produce a show which reverberates with the same force as Hamilton, and any new musical with a racially diverse sensibility is likely to come into the West End following development and a premiere at a regional theatre. Although, given its history, that regional theatre is unlikely to be Chichester where, it is worth remembering, the all-white production of Half A Sixpence debuted almost a year after the arrival of Hamilton on Broadway. Within that context, it is hard not to view the Chichester/Cameron Mackintosh production within a framework of stubborn defiance and a refusal to countenance societal change. * Constructed national characteristics are reproduced in popular culture because the resulting caricature often holds appeal – the charming but bumbling upper middle-class Englishman embodied on film by Hugh Grant and the no-nonsense, sightly superior Englishwoman by Emma Thompson. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and The Boy in the Dress both utilize the construct of Britain as a nation of loveable eccentrics to frame the cross-dressing narratives of the central characters, Jamie and Dennis. This appeals to the British viewer’s sense of patriotism as it is a fondly regarded cultural stereotype which reaffirms the unique and quirky nature of Britishness. Both shows feature middle-aged men in drag giving performances which deliberately invoke the Pantomime Dame, thereby reminding British audiences of a long theatrical tradition (Miss Trunchbull in Matilda performs the same function). The

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performance signals associated with this caricature are immediately recognizable as unthreatening and thus any perceived danger from the disruption to a recognized performance of gender by Jamie and/or Dennis is neutralized and accepted. Another similarly unthreatening cultural fabrication which has become an apparently defining national characteristic, is the British obsession with sex – or, rather, the British obsession with the repression of sex – which spawned the enormously successful Carry On film franchise.9 These films and associated spin offs drew inspiration from the bawdy seaside postcards and end-of-pier risqué comedians (often in drag) who invoked gender stereotypes such as the nagging wife and overtly sexualized dumb blonde. The Benny Hill Show, which ran for four decades on British television from the late 1950s, was a fusion of slapstick, burlesque and innuendo entirely built around the premise of the sexually repressed Englishman confronted by hyper-sexualized young women. The show remains one of the most successful British comedies ever produced (in 2006, Benny Hill was voted into seventeenth place by the British public in a poll of TV’s 50 Greatest Stars) suggesting that the image of Britain depicted on the show was one which greatly appealed to the British sense of humour. But Benny Hill was not depicting anything new – music hall acts from the beginning of the century had traded on the same imagined characteristics with similar success. Hill was merely exploiting the nation’s delight in cheap titillation. When and why this trait became a recognized cultural signifier is a subject for another study, but the stereotype is universally accepted as a marked component of Britishness, part of the ‘cheeky British personality’ ascribed by one reviewer to SIX .10 The British fondness for naughty postcard humour and double entendre pervades British theatrical history encompassing the Pier Shows, music hall, vaudeville, pantomime and later, the working mens’ clubs. Almost twenty bawdy farces with a peculiarly British sensibility came from the pen of Ray Cooney, including Run For Your Wife (1983) which played for nine years in various West End Theatres. No Sex Please, We’re British, by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriot opened in London

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in 1971, and ran for sixteen years, and there was the Kenneth Tynan erotic revue, Oh! Calcutta! (1970) which clocked up a run of ten years despite consisting of little more than a series of sketches (some featuring full frontal nudity) on sex-related topics. It was therefore inevitable that the style of humour based on the British predilection for smut would find its way into British musicals. The overtly sexual Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror (1973) is an extreme incarnation of the antithesis of the repressed Englishman and therein lies his appeal to British audiences. Sexual repression was at the heart of Calendar Girls (2015), a musical version of the enormously successful 2003 film which retold the true story of members of a rural branch of the Women’s Institute posing topless for a calendar to raise money for leukaemia research (the show was originally titled The Girls, an English vernacular term for women’s breasts, and premiered at the Grand Theatre in Leeds in 2015). The musical (like the film) played on the prevalent stereotype of middleclass and middle-aged English women as either sexless or embarrassed by nakedness and thus, by implication, sex. The humour in the show was entirely built around this caricature, which is a popular depiction of older English women and one with a long history. The crucial difference between Calendar Girls and Benny Hill or the Carry On films, was that in Calendar Girls, the women not only demonstrated agency but gave the impression that they were in on the joke. This sense of the British laughing at themselves and their stitched-up prudery – even when it is constructed prudery – was replicated in Mrs Henderson Presents, which recreated the story of the Windmill Theatre in London, famed for its tableaux of nude women onstage. The central character of Mrs Henderson is an upper middle-class, wealthy widow and, like Calendar Girls, it was the juxtaposition of a particular class, age and gender, with sex, that provided the foundation for the humour. A more sinister interpretation of the national obsession with sex was on display in Lloyd Webber’s Stephen Ward (2013) which revisited the national scandal prompted by the affair in 1963 between John Profumo, government Secretary of State for War, and a showgirl, Christine Keeler, who was also having a sexual relationship with a Soviet spy. The

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protagonist of the show, Stephen Ward, had a predilection for grooming young women and supplying them to high class parties frequented by aristocrats and high-profile politicians – the same people who later abandoned Ward following his arrest for procurement and living off immoral earnings. Stephen Ward was not, then, an endearing image of an idiosyncratic Britain populated by sexually repressed bowler hatted Englishmen and Barbara Windsor dolly bird blondes. This was a seedy underworld enabled by the abuse of class privilege and status, and the collective national prudery and hypocrisy surrounding sex. In other words, it was a distinctly British tale which reflected attitudes towards women, power and homosexuality completely at odds with the 1960s Swinging London scene which is more frequently invoked as characteristic of the easy-going attitudes of the era. * The question of how to express the voice of a nation via the form of musical theatre is a difficult one to answer, not least because of the cultural, racial, class and national divisions within the United Kingdom. Without a doubt, the most authentic and accurate representation of the populace can be found in London Road, a musical utilizing the techniques of verbatim theatre which premiered at the National Theatre in 2011. The show was created from interviews conducted over a threeyear period by Alecky Blythe (who is credited as book writer and lyricist) with members of a community in the English city of Ipswich following the murders of five female sex workers in the area. Focusing primarily on the residents of the suburban London Road, the show recounted the effect on the community of the arrest of Steve Wright, the man later convicted of the murders, who had been living in a house on London Road at the time of the killings. The practice of verbatim theatre requires actors to reproduce the spoken text of the interview exactly as it is preserved on the recording, and composer, Adam Cork, used the rhythm, pitch and metre of the words of the interviewees to, almost unnoticeably, enable the actors to transition from the spoken word to the sung. This technique effectively blurred the boundaries

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between the reality of the spoken word and the artificiality of the conventional performance parameters of musical theatre. The awareness that the characters onstage existed in the real world and had spoken these very same words prior to their incarnation onstage served to bestow a sense of cultural and historical importance onto the show. The show did not hold up a particularly pleasant snapshot of contemporary Britain for examination – the murders of the five women exposed the societal issues of prostitution and drug addiction, as well as the inevitable judgement which is frequently directed at sex workers. Not all of the residents of London Road were entirely sympathetic to the plight of the murdered women, and the show highlighted the intrusive media frenzy which is triggered by serial killer trials, particularly when the victims are involved in the sex industry. It was the sheer ordinariness of the residents of London Road itself, which made the musical, London Road, so extraordinary. They could so easily have been ‘me, ‘you’, or the family next door. Ordinary people suddenly thrust into the spotlight and into circumstances beyond comprehension, resulted in a narrative and a show which was almost hypnotic. Because, as one of the cast members sings through the fourth wall in reference to the killer, Steve Wright, ‘. . . he could have been next door to you.’ It was a slice of the national narrative, of national history, and as such, London Road was contributing a theatrical response to a shocking event which had not only resonated throughout the nation but had forced wider conversations with authorities concerning the policing and management of sex work. The fact that the response was coming from musical theatre was unusual, that it was a verbatim musical, was doubly so. The local setting of London Road, the accents, the suburban street, and characters who were so unremarkable as to be remarkable, all imbued a sense of familiarity for the audience, and this was heightened by the direct address style of performance which enabled the viewer to feel personally included in the narrative. The show presented this British community with such searing authenticity that audience members could easily place themselves into the narrative and experience it from within. London Road juxtaposed facts and a documentary style

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of presentation with musical theatre performance techniques to create a manipulated version of the events with a theatrical purpose in mind. Despite knowing this, viewers accepted the version of events depicted onstage as ‘real’ as this fostered greater empathy with the community onstage, thus enabling the emotional engagement associated with the recognition of ‘mine’ or ‘ours’. Because London Road reflected a living community, Alecky Blythe was limited in how she could present this snapshot of the nation, i.e. she could only interview the people who were there and had experienced the events. The community represented onstage may not therefore intersect the social, racial and class divisions, but it is a searingly authentic depiction of one particular corner of suburban Britain. And although the narrative presented the darker and seedier side of the nation, the honesty of the characters was astonishing – disturbingly so in one case – and was undoubtedly what contributed to the critical success of the show. No musical before London Road (or since, incidentally) had given voice to a national consciousness with such unabashed candour. It was the antithesis of the fantasy and escapism more readily on offer in the British musical and not something which tourists looking for a night of easy entertainment would ever have supported in the West End, hence the sole engagement at the National (London Road did have a further life, however, when a film version was released in 2015 to critical acclaim). The reputation for fantasy and escapism which more frequently envelops the British musical has resulted in shows which present an audience with a constructed ideal of the nation they inhabit – an ideal which holds great appeal – rather than the reality. So the fondly absorbed nudge-nudge-wink-wink tone of the Carry On films which is reproduced in Calendar Girls and Mrs Henderson Presents, is a more welcome version of Britishness than the confrontation with racial issues which is triggered by Bend it Like Beckham or The Big Life: although given that neither of the latter two productions toured nationally it is impossible to judge how audiences beyond London would react (the fact that the shows did not tour is notable in itself). Audiences may not particularly like the seedy slice of British life on display in London Road,

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but it is a more realistic depiction of the nation than the fantastical, and completely unrelatable community on show in The Boy in Dress. If there is agreement that culture and cultural artefacts represent any given nation and offer information relating to the populace, then the ‘we’ represented by the British musical is defined by a narrow and outdated set of constructs which deliberately overlooks the reality of contemporary society or acknowledges that three other nations form the ‘United’ part of the UK. The issues concerning the absence of nonwhite voices in British musicals, onstage and off, are compounded by the commercial sector where the dominant production houses of the Really Useful Group and Cameron Mackintosh could, between them, count their combined non-white creative staff on one hand. The British musical, then, is being created by white men who, not surprisingly, define nationhood as white and male. Whilst this is an accurate reflection of the hierarchy of power within British musicals, it is a glaring contrast to representations of nationhood in other areas of popular culture which are mindful of depicting the populace from an inclusive perspective. In the TV show, Britain’s Got Talent, for example, the changing face of ‘Britishness’ brought about by globalization and liberalism is represented by performers of varying ethnicities and gender identities in numbers which equal those of their white, nonqueer counterparts. The glaring question, of course, is why the redundant image of a monocultural nation depicted by UK musicals goes unchallenged, either by audience members or by the critics and arts commentators who should be holding the industry to account. A critique of British theatre as being controlled by and serving the interests of the white middle classes is nothing new, but what is interesting to note is that the progressive strides made towards rectifying this condition in repertory and straight theatre through active recruitment of BAME playwriting voices and artistic directors, have not been replicated in musical theatre. This is explicable in the commercial sector where enormously wealthy producers/theatre owners such as Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber can do whatever they please within the industry and not be held accountable,

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but it does not explain why subsidized theatres escape censure for the exclusive practices habitually employed on their musical productions. If the National Theatre staged a new British play with an all-white cast and creative team it would not go unchallenged by commentators – which reinforces the suspicion that the universal disdain amongst British theatre critics for musical theatre enables them to apply one set of rules to drama and another to musicals. The audience demographic at Chichester Festival Theatre is predominantly white, middle class and retired, i.e. exactly the audience an all-white revival of a traditional cheery chappie English musical would appeal to. In one sense, then, the 2016 production of Half A Sixpence was accurately reflecting the rarefied Britain which is familiar to that specific audience demographic, something, it could be argued, the theatre company is compelled to do to make money at the box office. But the theatre at Chichester is in receipt of government funding and is therefore obligated to widen access to a more socially and racially diverse audience. And this has to begin with representation onstage. Just as Hamilton enabled African American and Latinx audience members to experience a sense of nationhood and of belonging (often for the first time) through seeing their country’s history retold from a non-white perspective, so a biracial or minority ethnic audience member watching an entirely white production of Half A Sixpence constructs a paradigm of nationhood in which there is no room for someone who is not white. In addition, the production functions as a means of reassuring the white members of the audience of their superiority within the racial hierarchy of the nation, simply by presenting their racial group as the dominant and ruling faction. The contemporary British musical appears intent on depicting a fantasy version of a nation inhabited by a funny and eccentric white population, ultimately loveable despite their predilection for men in drag, smutty jokes and scenarios involving men in raincoats and naked buxom women. If musical theatre is, as Ian Bradley suggests it is, an artistic reflection of the societal status quo, then what is to be made of this insistence that the British society apparently preserved in the

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amber nectar of the 1950s is an accurate depiction of the current state of the British nation? When examined more closely, the British musical, and the British musical theatre industry, is a disheartening vision of exclusion and entitlement. Depending on one’s race and gender, it is arguable whether this is, or is not, an accurate reflection of Britain in the twenty-first century. Perhaps the British musical is in fact, albeit inadvertently, representing the exclusion from nationhood concepts experienced by racial minorities in the UK, with precise honesty. Given the lack of inclusion of the contribution of members of the non-white communities in Britain in narratives reproducing the history of the nation, this is unsurprising. But in 2022, it should be challenged. The fact that no critic or commentator appears to notice the lack of nonwhite narratives and practitioners onstage and off, suggests two things: that the genre is still not regarded as culturally relevant enough to be seriously interrogated within a context of national identity, or that the contemporary British musical is reproducing a version of nationhood which holds wide appeal. The question left hanging takes us back to the definition of ‘Britishness’. Can everyone who could, and who wishes to identify as British, find the space within the British musical into which they can insert themselves? Or is the space one that is open only to certain groups?

3

Solidarity Forever!: Depictions of the class divide

Great Britain is a nation obsessed with class and regulated by the class divide. Class defines Britain to a level which is almost impossible for non-Britons to fully appreciate, and the loyalties, laws, subtleties and characteristics of the class divide are incomprehensible to those who have not grown up with them. In her book, Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth, historian Selina Todd, defines class within the context of unequal power relations: the leisured and enormously wealthy minority living off the exertions of the working majority.1 This inequality, which is manifested through the means of production, is at the heart of British society. It preserves the right of the upper classes to rule, as much as it accounts for the historical and passionate commitment to socialism in the industrialized areas of the nation. Class not only defines one’s status in British society, it limits the potential for achievement by restricting access to education and certain professions. The constrictions of class are so all-encompassing in the UK, that many of the migrants who took advantage of the 1945 Assisted Passage Migration Scheme which offered Britons passage to Australia for £10, reported that they were doing so in the belief that Australia offered a more egalitarian way of life in a classless worker’s paradise. Or at least a new start in a nation where ambition was not thwarted by birthright. The intersection of class, politics and national identity in the UK is frequently framed by location, and again, by the existence of four distinct nations under one umbrella. Many of the symbols of English identity have upper-class connotations – the Royal Family, Public/ Independent (fee paying) schools, Ascot and the Boat Race – yet the 81

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cultural signifiers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, such as a distinct musical tradition, unionism and Self Rule and Independence movements are associated with the working classes. Class loyalty is frequently aligned with political allegiance, which in turn, is influenced by location. Working-class identity, more than middle- or upper-class identity, frequently intersects with localism and the industrial heritage of a defined catchment area and this is visible in working-class theatre which is often contextualized within a regional, rather than a national definition. This is manifestly clear in the political traditions at the heart of the North–South divide of England, where the North has traditionally supported the leftist policies of the Labour Party, and the more affluent South – the Home Counties – has consistently returned right-wing Conservative MPs to Westminster.2 Despite its rich industrial and trading heritage, the North suffered disproportionately in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the subsequent over-reliance on manufacturing and mining resulted in a steady economic decline from the early 1970s, as a result of the loss of these, and related, industries. Although cities such as Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester have experienced a cultural renaissance in the last two decades, the economic disparity between the northern and southern counties in England continues to divide the nation with the North experiencing slower economic growth, poor transport infrastructure and a lower life expectancy. Such is the ongoing discontent in the North with Londoncentric governments and policies, that increasing calls for devolution – the granting of greater governmental autonomy to the Northern counties – is no longer regarded as an entirely ludicrous notion. The mining areas of South Wales and the shipbuilding history in Ulster have produced political and class traditions in line with those of the North of England, and Scotland has a long and proud history of socialist activism: during the Spanish Civil War, almost one-quarter of the British volunteers who served in the International Brigade were Scottish and affiliated with communist and/or trade union organizations (since Devolution in 1999, however, Scotland’s Labour base has given way to the Scottish National Party). Historically, Scotland had a firm

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commitment to state education and thus had fewer private schools than England, where attendance at the elite public schools of Eton, Winchester and Harrow, leading to Oxford and Cambridge Universities was, and still is, a marker of class. The point is, that the class divide permeates every aspect of British society and culture so thoroughly that it would be odd if it was not reflected in the British musical. British musicals have engaged to various degrees with notions of class, from the witless toffs of The Boy Friend (1953) and Salad Days (1954) to the howls of socialist rage emanating from Blood Brothers in 1982, and Billy Elliot in 2005. It is worth noting the twenty-year gap between the latter two shows as it speaks volumes with regard to the structures of power within the British musical theatre industry at this time. The decades between the two shows were years of social turmoil in the UK, resulting in a widening of the inequality gap which was both exacerbated, and held in place, by class divisions. Despite the protests from playwrights against the unequal distribution of power and resources, the creators of British musicals during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) produced spectacular fantasies and resolutely refused to engage in anything which reflected the social breakdown happening beyond the theatre auditorium. It was two decades after the event before a musical dared interrogate the ramifications of the miners’ strike, and even then, it is highly unlikely that Billy Elliot would have made it to the stage had it not already been a successful film. This had less to do with the class-based narrative of the show and was directly related to who was controlling the production of commercial musical theatre. The reins of power were firmly in the hands of white, upper middle-class men who were educated at private schools and/or were alumni of elite universities. Little has changed in the intervening years although, to be fair, theatre is not the only profession in the UK with a discernible class bias. The ranks of the judiciary, banking and medicine are filled with members of the upper classes and even sport has strict class demarcation lines: there are not many competitors from a working-class background in downhill skiing and three-day eventing.

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Although it is not obligatory to have an upper middle-class background to break into the production of British musical theatre, it is certainly an advantage. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had their first break with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in 1969, which was written at the request of Alan Doggett, Director of Music at the Independent Colet Court boys’ school. Doggett was already acquainted with the Lloyd Webber family having taught Andrew’s brother Julian at (Independent) Westminster Under School, and it was Doggett who suggested to Rice and Lloyd Webber that they write a pop cantata for his school choir. More recent evidence of class advantage can be found in SIX , created by Cambridge undergraduates, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, for the University Musical Society: how many drama clubs at further education colleges have the financial means to commission and produce a new musical, then tour it to the Edinburgh Fringe for three weeks? English theatre is awash in the old school tie network, and the result of this is not only prioritized entry into the industry for those with the right contacts but a pervasive class viewpoint which permeates narratives and productions. This is palpable in shows which utilize a working-class scenario or characters as a backdrop for a production created by middle-class practitioners. And any socialist narrative in musicals is relayed within a theatrical language which was developed by the upper/middle-classes for the amusement of the upper/middle-classes. This class suffocation of British theatre is nothing new and as far back as the 1920s, Noël Coward went to great pains to divest himself of his lower middle-class origins and reinvent himself as an upper-class gentleman who affected a clipped accent and disparaged the audience members in the cheap seats as the ‘galleryites’. His transformation may have been more than simple snobbery and been born out of the need to compensate for the lack of the right connections and the Oxbridge education which would have secured his entry into the hallowed halls of English theatre. The predominance of upper middle-class men in the top tiers of British musical theatre is so well established now as to be unremarkable. Where it becomes problematic is when these men (and they are all

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men) presume to speak on behalf of the working classes by creating shows with a working-class backdrop and an imagined experience which have unmistakeable middle-class hands firmly on the steering wheel. The Boy in the Dress, with its fanciful RSC interpretation of a working-class community, is a case in point. Made in Dagenham, is another. These shows, and others like them, have an air of paternalism clinging to them, or, even worse, a patronizing attitude towards the lower-class characters which their socially superior creators reproduce onstage. The shows are products of an elitist mindset which presumes that a middle-class voice is better suited to tell a working-class story than an authentic voice. Due to the pervasiveness of class divisions throughout every aspect of British life, it is impossible to create a cultural product which is not representative of class in some way, often through the context which is shaped by the viewpoint of the creator(s). SIX may have been intended as joyous and empowering show for all women, but the equation of loose morals with scantily clad, workingclass young women reveals more about the class value system of the creators than it does about the characters onstage. The domination of the British industry by members of the same class ensures that the voice of the British musical speaks with one note and reproduces a single and exclusionary view of a wider social and political perspective. The irony is that, for once, this is a searingly accurate reflection of wider British society where the working-class voice is constantly stifled or spoken over by voices from the upper social classes. * The American Dream is founded on the concept of upward mobility, and American musicals reinforce the ideal that anything is possible in the USA for an honest, hardworking and god-fearing person. The British class system, however, requires that everyone remains in the social class to which they were born and frowns upon aspirations of upward social mobility. This notion of ‘knowing your place’ is a typically British concern, one which elicits an odd sense of pride. Early British musicals by Noel Gay, Vivian Ellis and Ivor Novello treated class as

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immutable, and a series of plotlines concerning cheery cockneys and effete aristocrats reinforced the mythical moral superiority of the English working man who comes to realize that wealth is no substitute for integrity and a sense of self. Noel Gay’s Me and My Girl (1937) centres around the formulaic class conflict which is deemed inevitable when an uneducated, cockney barrow boy, Bill Snibson, who values the ‘simple’ things in life, discovers he is heir to the Earl of Hareford title and estate. Before Bill can inherit, however, he has to learn gentlemanly ways and this puts his relationship with Sally, his girl of the title, at risk. Ultimately, it is Sally who manages to pass as a member of the upper classes and the couple are reunited and accepted into their new aristocratic family. Me and My Girl was given an enormously successful revival in 1984, winning two Olivier Awards and transferring to Broadway, with a script revised by (Independent) Uppingham School educated and Cambridge graduate, Stephen Fry. Half A Sixpence (1963) has a similar narrative, that of a cockney lad inheriting wealth only to discover that true happiness lies with his humble origins and was reworked in 2016 by (Independently educated) Julian Fellowes, aka Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, Conservative peer of the House of Lords. Mr Cinders (1928, revived in 1983), Our Man Crichton (1964) and The Card (1973, revived in 1994) all have similar themes concerning the perils of the breakdown of the class barriers via the acquisition of wealth, suggesting that this was a narrative which the British audience not only enjoyed, but held to be correct. It is now sixty years since Joan Littlewood’s production of the Stephen Lewis play with music, Sparrows Can’t Sing transferred from Stratford East to the Wyndham’s Theatre in 1961 and was acknowledged as the first time authentic working-class accents were heard in a West End musical/play with music. But the fact remains that the majority of modern musicals in London with a working-class sensibility are speaking with an imagined, one could say, appropriated voice, and thus exemplify the entitled assumption which is pervasive throughout British musical theatre – that of the right of one group to speak on behalf of another. The cheery chappie musicals with their depiction of the loyal and uneducated working man who gladly accepts his rightful place in the

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social hierarchy, functioned as a means of reassuring the middle-class audience that the ongoing class divisions within the social sphere ensured a cohesive and harmonious society. At the same time, the shows delivered a thinly veiled rebuke to the working man with ambition for placing his entire community, which relies on the ongoing existence of the working man, in jeopardy. The shows reinforced mythologies regarding the superior moral backbone of the working man, achieved through honest hard work and a life of deprivation. These mythologies were, it goes without saying, constructed by the upper classes who, secure in their own wealth and power, reminded the working classes how fortunate they were to be in possession of a more authentic sense of self due to their poverty (interesting to note that these simplistic depictions appeared in the 1930s and 1960s, and in revivals in the 1980s, periods of mass social unrest and calls for greater equality concerning the distribution of power). This was the working class as the middle classes preferred to see them – deferential cockneys doing the Lambeth Walk or singing the brassy music hall songs which immediately revealed their class affiliation. Despite the passing of decades and movements in the new millennium towards a fairer and more inclusive society, the cheery chappie stereotype is still given a platform in British musicals, the most recent outing being Flowers for Mrs Harris, which originated at the Sheffield Crucible in 2016, under the Artistic Directorship of Daniel Evans. When Evans moved to Chichester Festival Theatre, he took the show with him and restaged it at Chichester in 2018. Set in 1947, the plot concerns a cleaning lady and First World War widow, Mrs Harris, who is so captivated by a Dior dress she sees in the home of one of her employers that she becomes determined to own one herself. Mrs Harris works extra hours for her clients – one of whom is entertaining Princess Elizabeth and thus requires Mrs Harris to polish the family silver – finally saving enough to go to Paris where she is enraptured by beautiful clothes and treated kindly by a Marquis. Mrs Harris returns home with the Dior dress and everyone she has encountered on her travels sends her flowers as a token of the esteem in which they now regard her, having witnessed the deep integrity this ‘simple’ woman

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possesses. If it appears bizarre that a narrative laden with such class cliches could be produced in 2018 (and be rewarded with four-star reviews) it is worth bearing in mind the origins of Chichester Festival Theatre itself. Chichester is a small city some sixty miles south of London, in the affluent county of West Sussex. The theatre was the brainchild of a local resident and town councillor, Leslie Evershed-Martin, whose enthusiasm for a repertory theatre company in his home town inspired a group of locals to effectively crowd fund the theatre in the early 1960s. The project capitalized on its marketing potential as a theatre built by the community, for the community, which indeed it was. But the community was a wealthy, middle-class one, and the theatre was built solely to service the needs of that particular demographic. Having built the theatre and created the company (which, with Laurence Olivier at the helm, would prove to be the pre-cursor to the National Theatre) it was not a surprise that Chichester Festival Theatre subsequently catered primarily to the taste of a white, middle-class audience. When the theatre building opened in 1962, the summer festival consisted of a nine-week season with four or five productions. By the mid-1990s, the theatre was producing work almost twelve months of the year and had added a studio space, the Minerva, which had opened in 1989. The company first began receiving Arts Council funding in 2000, and three years later this became a permanent situation with grant funding making up around 11 per cent of the theatre income. Bearing in mind that the company subsequently has to self-generate 89 per cent of its income, it is vital that the shows appeal to the specific audience demographic which has not undergone any major shift since the days when Leslie Evershed-Martin first had his vision of a rep theatre. Flowers for Mrs Harris was adapted from the 1958 novel of the same name by American, Paul Gallico (which explains the inauthentic class stereotypes on both sides of the social divide), and it is, unquestionably, the perfect show for the Chichester audience. The feel-good story of the cleaning lady with the heart of gold whose simple aspirations bring out the best in all of those around her reaffirmed the class predisposition of

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the audience without challenging this bias. Mrs Harris saves for three years to buy a Dior dress that will surely have gone out of fashion, and, not being the recipient of numerous debutant ball invitations, she will never be able to wear. She has no ambition to move up the social scale, she merely wants to own a thing of beauty, and she therefore never questions the social inequity which leaves her with so little and others with so much. Neither does the show question it – it could, in fact, be interpreted as reaffirming the equation of happiness with acquisitional power. Mrs Harris demonstrates her understanding of her rightful place in society by cleaning the Marquis’ apartment in Paris, thus reassuring the audience that her identity and status as a woman who performs menial work for the better off is not threatened because she now owns an object associated with the upper classes. When the Dior dress is ruined by a woman who borrows it from Mrs Harris, the warning from Me and My Girl all those decades ago is roundly reinforced: no good comes from stepping above your class and toying with the things you were never meant to have. Without prior knowledge, an audience watching Flowers for Mrs Harris could be forgiven for assuming that the show came from the immediate post-war era, a time when British society was desperately endeavouring to reinstate the class divisions which had been unsettled by the war. A narrative with comparative themes concerning social class is present in Spend Spend Spend, the 1998 musical based on the life of Viv Nicholson, who won a large amount of money on the football pools in 1961. The show devotes a large amount of time to depicting Nicholson’s inability to cope with her sudden wealth and this view of the child-like working classes, who are assumed to have no idea of how to cope with money or objects denoting status, was a portent of things to come in Flowers for Mrs Harris. The paternalism which pervades both shows is exacerbated, of course, by the fact that the protagonists are female. While the audiences at Me and My Girl and Half A Sixpence were encouraged to laugh at the class faux pas of the male protagonists, Viv Nicholson and Mrs Harris are to be pitied for their lack of knowledge concerning the ways of the upper-class world: you don’t go to New York

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and never leave the hotel room, as Nicholson is depicted doing. Nor do you lend a couture dress to a flighty actress – you wear it with white gloves to dinner at the Savoy. Regardless of who the cautionary tale of status/wealth acquisition involves, the message from the British musical is clear: class disruption never ends well. More authentic (and dramatically interesting) examinations of the class divide do exist within the British musical, in Blood Brothers, of course, and also in The Hired Man, Billy Elliot and The Last Ship – shows which depict working-class communities within a framework of Socialist ideals. Unionism and the socialist struggle are fundamental aspects of British history, but the pervasive view of musical theatre as a conduit for escapist fantasies ensured that the artistic movement of social realism was represented in British drama, film and literature, but absent from musicals. This could have been as much to do with audience demand as the decision of producers. When The Hired Man arrived in London in 1984, audience members and critics were equally confused as to why characters in drab costumes demanding release from the bondage of tied agricultural practices were in a West End musical instead of a gritty drama at the Royal Court. Les Misérables fever had not yet reached the West End which was then playing host to lavish Broadway revivals – David Merrick’s 42nd Street was packing the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and Rogers and Hart’s On Your Toes was at the Palace Theatre. Little wonder then, that critics were slightly bemused by the socialist sentiments of The Hired Man being advocated by a musical. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the narrative of The Hired Man follows a farm labourer, John Tallantire, over four decades encompassing the industrial revolution and the First World War. The class disparity is initially presented through the farm workers who are obligated to offer themselves for hire to landowners, then through the miners who have no control in their working environment, and finally through the soldiers on the battlefields of France facing an almost certain death. If Blood Brothers pointed an accusing finger at Margaret Thatcher and the destructive economic policies of her government, the

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denunciation in The Hired Man was more personal: the class indicted as accountable made up the majority of the audience in the theatre. The Hired Man was possibly the first time a middle-class musical theatre audience in London had witnessed working men calling for the establishment of a socialist state and miners demanding Union representation, and the fact that the show premiered in the middle of the increasingly acrimonious miner’s strike gave the musical an unforeseen relevance. Although the show had spent two years in development at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton and the Leicester Haymarket prior to the West End outing (thus refuting any notion that it was a response to the 1984 strike) it premiered in a period of widespread industrial unrest marked by trade unions facing down a new Conservative government intent on reducing their power. The resonances between the show and life beyond the theatre auditorium were thus not hard to find. Leicestershire, for example, was a county with both working and non-working mines, and during the run of the show at the Leicester Haymarket, the Union Song in Act Two was frequently interrupted by shouts from audience members both for and against the striking miners beyond the theatre. The relatively short West End run of a show which deserved a more considered reception may indeed have been due to an interpretation of the narrative onstage as supportive of the unrest outside: ten minutes from the Astoria theatre, striking miners and their supporters confronted mounted police in violent clashes in Whitehall. And the political leanings of the majority of a middle-class West End audience were more likely to be proThatcher and anti-Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers. Twenty years later, in 2005, those striking miners in Whitehall were the characters onstage in Billy Elliot, recreating the civil strife which had divided the nation so viscerally in 1984. The Britain of Billy Elliot is deep in the grip of industrial decline and whilst the miners sing of Solidarity and walking proudly, a sense of hopelessness pervades the community, a realization that not only has the utopian state slipped from their grasp, so too has any hope of one. The assertion from the

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community that ‘we’re proud to be working-class’ sounds as jaded as Billy’s ballet teacher Mrs Wilkinson, who reminds her young charges that they are ‘marching forward to socialism’ with palpable cynicism. The critical and audience reaction to Billy Elliot, however, was vastly different to that of The Hired Man, due in no small part to audience familiarity with the 2000 film which had been nominated for three Academy Awards and enabled Jamie Bell, as Billy Elliot, to become the youngest ever recipient of a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. In addition, the two decades separating the premieres of The Hired Man and Billy Elliot had seen a significant shift in the audience demographic in British theatres as a result of the appearance of the megamusical. The marketing machine behind shows such as Cats, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera which refashioned the musicals into events, had enticed a new audience into the auditorium, one which previously would have viewed theatre as ‘not for us’. The decidedly middle-class audience at The Hired Man in 1984 may have been less than impressed by the attitudes expressed onstage towards their own class, but by 2005, the audience at Billy Elliot was more inclined to cheer the parody of Margaret Thatcher onstage and voice support for the miners confronting the police in the show-stopping ‘Solidarity’ than be offended. The historical distance of the two decades enabled the miner’s conflict to be reshaped as a noble fight and a proud feature of the nation’s cultural heritage, in contrast to the 1984 alarmist media portrayal of violent Marxist insurrectionists intent on overthrowing decent society. The rebranding of the miner’s strike as heroic serves a specific purpose within the context of cultural memory and national imagining, and Billy Elliot exploits the working-class/good and middle-class or authority/bad binary to elicit empathy not just for Billy, the miner’s son who wants to dance, but for the community. By association, this stimulates a positive reaction towards the plight of the miners and the wider working classes. The audience is encouraged to admire the tenacity – even when it is a willingness to engage in violence – displayed by the working men to ensure the survival of their livelihood, and by

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extension, their community. The battles between workers and bosses, or indeed government forces, are recast as a David and Goliath struggle and despite knowing the adverse outcome of the year-long strike, the audience is encouraged to believe that the miners and the community will ultimately triumph. Any negative reaction from audience members towards a perceived biased retelling of historical events is displaced by the central story of Billy overcoming personal obstacles to achieve his goal. He, not the strike, becomes the focus for onlookers whose political affiliations may not be in accord with those being played out onstage. For others, possibly those who were there in 1984, the strike is the story. This refashioning of a historical narrative to give the audience a more uplifting experience is also evident in Sting’s work, The Last Ship, which is set in the early 1970s and focuses on the death of one of Britain’s proudest achievements, the shipbuilding industry. The show takes place in the town of Wallsend in Tyne and Wear, a county in the North of England previously dominated by shipbuilding but which, by 1970, was facing the closure of six yards in as many years. Protagonist, Gideon Fletcher, returns to Wallsend after an absence of two decades to find the community on the brink of ruin. The last ship in the yard – ironically named the Utopia – lies unfinished behind locked gates and is set to be broken up and sold for scrap, heralding the end of production at the yard. The workers occupy the shipyard with the intention of finishing and launching the Utopia, fired up by the euphoric idealism of the worker’s foreman who announces, ‘this is not the story of us being expendable, it is the story of us being unstoppable’. This sentiment echoes a popular (and populist) vision of the British working class as united by the class struggle and their common experience of inequality. It plays on an emotional reaction, mythologizing the working man in a similar way to Me and My Girl or Half A Sixpence as morally superior and with a strength of character which is noticeably lacking amongst the aristocracy or the boss class. Broadway critics noted that the fantasy of launching a ship with nowhere to go was faintly ludicrous, but audiences in the North of England who experienced the 2018 tour recognized the last defiant fist raised in acknowledgement of a proud

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socialist heritage and the dream of the workers revolution. The community onstage thus not only became ‘us’ and ‘we’, the narrative of the show also reminded a local audience of the socialist traditions and history at the heart of their communities. Place is extremely important in The Hired Man, Billy Elliot and The Last Ship, as the settings not only draw attention to the political and economic North–South divide of England, they acknowledge that different cultural traditions predominate throughout the UK. In these (almost) social realist musicals, the North is presented as a separate entity, a different state to the rest of England, inhabited by people bound by a working-class identity and built on socialist traditions and backbreaking physical labour. Communal solidarity is a defining feature of the representation of Northern working-class identities in popular culture and The Hired Man, Billy Elliot and The Last Ship utilize the individual community as a metaphor for the wider social class. In Billy Elliot, the mining community is united in the working men’s club through their hatred of Margaret Thatcher – the embodiment of the ruling class – and by singing a traditional folk song with Billy’s father, a reminder that their shared history goes back generations. In the Union Song from The Hired Man the men sing that ‘every boy is born in the Union/ every child knows it’s where their future lies’ suggesting a continuing familial line of fathers introducing their sons to their socialist birth right. Young men, or indeed boys, who refuse to conform are viewed with suspicion, the weak link that could disrupt the communal ideal of ‘standing as one, beneath the sun’. To therefore look towards a life beyond the working community suggests that the uprising which will eradicate class and power inequalities is an unattainable fantasy. Whilst not exactly cast out from the fold, the male protagonist of each show is required to make a sacrifice in order to escape, and when he does leave, he leaves alone. To transcend class is a betrayal of the values of these working communities and to spurn the collective is to spurn the quixotic worker’s revolution, the foundation stone of these communities. In The Hired Man, for example, John’s troubles begin when he leaves the community of his forebears to work in the mines.

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Gideon in The Last Ship feels obligated to stay away from the community for almost twenty years after turning his back on the yard, and an audience at Billy Elliot is left in no doubt that this is not a community Billy will be able to return to. Not least because he now inhabits the noman’s-land between social classes, having moved into an art form which epitomizes elitism. These British musicals with industrial communities at their heart utilize nostalgic interventions of the glorious Empire to provoke patriotic pride amongst audience members, perhaps without them even realizing it. The history of the Empire is inexorably tied in with the history of the industrialization of the nation, the coal hewn in Britain which powered the fastest ships built in Britain which established the trade routes which enabled colonization . . . The shipyard, the mines and agriculture are essential contributing factors to the mythology of Britishness as Great, as is the physical body and labour of the working man whose story was seldom given voice. The pride displayed in farm work by John Tallantire who sings of, ‘no greater pleasure than work done well’, by the miners who remember that once they were kings, and by the shipyard workers who built ‘the greatest shipping tonnage that the world has ever seen’, is an expression of identity – personal, political, social and historical. And British. These musicals provoke a different patriotism to Noël Coward’s Cavalcade with its colonialist viewpoint of a superior England framed by Imperialism. The patriotism invoked by The Hired Man, Billy Elliot and The Last Ship is incited not only by pride in what we, the Nation, achieved in terms of industrial might, but also gratification at the steadfastness of communities which stood together and acted on principles which benefitted the collective, not the self. The sense of loss of both community and of a greater struggle, is a contributing factor in the audience reaction to these shows today, a rejection, perhaps, of the loneliness and sterility perpetuated by the cult of the individual. The American critics who either dismissed or misunderstood Billy Elliot and The Last Ship were unable to connect with the depth of socialist convictions and history which is the

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foundation of national identity for a large proportion of the British population. Possibly the authenticity of the depiction of the class divide was also disconcerting: both shows presented visceral depictions of grinding poverty and the hopelessness of long-term unemployment – a world away from the well-dressed, well-educated student revolutionaries of Les Misérables, or the cheerful boy thieves in Oliver!. The background of the creators undoubtedly enabled this authentic portrayal: Sting dedicated The Last Ship to his father, a former shipyard worker, and Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot, had a working-class upbringing in Newcastle Upon Tyne, a city in the coal-mining heartlands. And both shows had very different intentions to the lovable cockney revivals penned by Stephen Fry and Julian Fellowes, in which class as a social issue was much less important than entertainment. * The class divisions which reinforce inequality throughout British society are further exacerbated by gender and race inequalities. Many immigrants from Commonwealth countries or from nations which were previously part of the British Empire frequently discovered on arrival that life in Britain was a step down the social ladder in comparison to what they had previously been accustomed to. As illustrated in The Big Life, post-war recruitment schemes promised potential new workers access to education and employment opportunities that were not available in their homeland, but on arrival in the UK the new immigrants quickly discovered that a combination of racism and entrenched class divisions limited their social and economic progression. A middle-class background was meaningless within the strict racial hierarchy of the UK, and an educated professional from Jamaica or India could easily find themselves driving a bus or working as a nursing auxiliary with little chance of promotion. Employment offered even fewer opportunities for social progression to women, immigrant or British born, and women with an eye on social mobility either had to marry a clever man who could improve his social class through employment as a clerk or a civil servant, or, as depicted in

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the 2011 musical Betty Blue Eyes, marry an unambitious man and provide the drive herself. Working-class women had no choice but to join the labour market, but their work held lower status in a paradigm of power which equated the means of production with men. The attitude that women’s work was less valid than men’s was reflected in the kind of paid employment available to women – factory work, or domestic or piece work which could be done at home – and, in accordance with their lower status, women were paid less than men. The limitations placed on the employment on offer to immigrants and to women was related to concepts of nationhood as it restricted their opportunity to include themselves in the industrial labour markets which were regarded as intrinsic to citizenship. Thus the identity of the nation was reproduced as white and male. Interestingly, given that The Hired Man, Billy Elliot and The Last Ship are shows built on concepts of masculinity, these musicals do not reproduce attitudes which sideline the contribution of women to production and nationhood. The Hired Man is as much Emily’s story as it is John’s, Mrs Wilkinson and Grandma are key figures in Billy Elliot’s journey, and when Peggy announces in The Last Ship that ‘it’s what we do, we build ships’ she assigns herself, and the women around her, equal standing alongside the working men. This reinforces the notion that the working-class community stands as one, and that gender (or race) is secondary to the class struggle. That is not to say, however, that the female characters have the same level of agency over their lives as the men. When Emily in The Hired Man wishes for something more than ‘this’, she is not talking of wealth or its trappings, but of freedom from the traditional class expectations of her as a woman. Viv Nicholson in Spend Spend Spend is also fully cognisant of being trapped within the gendered expectations of her class. In breaking free of the fierce patriarchal controls of her mining community she incurs widespread societal disapproval which is not solely connected to her new-found wealth: Nicholson, like Billy Elliot and Gideon Fletcher in The Last Ship, has betrayed her class by not knowing her place and by too eagerly embracing the unexpected chance to escape.

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British musicals set within the framework of working-class communities tend to reproduce patriarchal values concerning the duty of women, more specifically, of mothers, to maintain the family unit. This reiterates the saintly, self-sacrificing ‘Our-Mam’ stereotype, so familiar in working-class representations in popular culture (and in the work of Alan Bennett). The absent mother in The Boy in the Dress, for example (although the working-class credentials of the show remain up for debate) is frequently condemned for having abandoned the family unit, leaving her husband and two sons to fend for themselves. The mother is depicted as the heart of the house – albeit a ‘nagging’ heart – who cleans, washes clothes and cooks favourite meals. The anger of the father towards his former wife appears to be driven by the fact that he now has to run the home as well as holding down a steady job – something working-class women have been doing for generations. In Billy Elliot, the mother is also absent (although dead, so sanctified) and both shows intimate that the wayward behaviour expressed by Billy and Dennis, boys who defy masculine stereotypes, is in some way associated with the absence of a mother. In serving the needs of the family, the women subsequently hold the working community together. The necessity of this is articulated in The Last Ship through the men who freely acknowledge that ‘We’ve Got Nowt Else’: without the yard – or mine, or factory or farm – there can be no community. The primary role of women, therefore, is to enable their men to work. Nowhere is this clearer than in Made in Dagenham, which has a narrative concerning the real and history-making strike by women machinists in a car factory in East London. Despite a narrative which contextualizes the personal identity of the female protagonists within their work in the factory, the show opens with a number outlining the importance of work provided by women inside the home, thereby reaffirming the alignment of ‘real’ work with men. Made in Dagenham was adapted from the 2010 film which retold the events of the 1968 strike by women workers at the Ford car manufacturing plant in Dagenham and fielded a host of star names including Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins, Geraldine James and Rosamund

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Pike. Possibly in an attempt to reproduce the success of the musical version of Billy Elliot, Made in Dagenham reminded the audience of the tradition of Unionism within British industry, and of the necessity of the community sticking together to enable the working-class, as a class, to progress. Unlike The Last Ship, however, the threat to the working community in Made in Dagenham comes from within, from women who dare to speak aloud the phrase, ‘equal pay’. The striking female factory workers display the same pride in their work as machinists as their male counterparts display in their work in the previously cited shows, and the women’s insistence that their work is skilled is a statement that their contribution to industrialized Britain is as valid as that of male workers. All comparisons end there, however, and the musical version of Made in Dagenham appears more intent on trivializing this seminal moment in the nation’s history than celebrating either the instigation of the Equal Pay Act, which was a direct result of the women’s strike at Dagenham, or any socialist traditions. Car manufacturing is not endowed with the same nobility as mining or ship building and, far from displaying a belief and commitment to the socialist struggle, the union leaders in Made in Dagenham are more preoccupied with the free lunch at a local restaurant prior to the regional meetings. The socialist passion of Billy Elliot, The Hired Man and The Last Ship, is noticeably lacking as the Union Leaders and the Prime Minister joke their way through Made in Dagenham with misogynistic remarks which feel decidedly more 2014 than 1968. In addition, an undercurrent of lewdness (the number ‘Cortina’ would not be out of place in a Benny Hill sketch) pervades the show and successfully undermines any attempt to site the feminist narrative centre stage. This was not the case in the 2010 screenplay by William Ivory, but the (male) key creative team members on the musical adaptation appeared to be of the opinion that either the 1968 strike was irrelevant to the class struggle because it involved female workers, or that the only way an audience would accept a musical with a feminist narrative would be to turn it into a joke. Not a comedy, note, a joke. This was achieved through dialogue which repeatedly made fun of the

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women and their demands, and through the use of self-reflexive ‘winks’ to the audience at given moments, a disparaging comment on the narrative onstage. When protagonist, Rita, the spokeswomen for the striking workers, is finally allowed a voice in the number ‘Stand Up’, it comes in the closing moments of the show, i.e. far too late to connect to any real commitment to either socialist values or gender equality, particularly as the previous two hours have essentially been devoted to trivializing women and their contribution to the workplace. The conventions of patriarchal working-class societies are reinforced in Made in Dagenham via subplots condemning the striking women for endangering the men’s jobs at the factory and for protesting on the picket line instead of carrying out family duties at home. Rita’s husband Eddie even removes the children from the family home in a last-ditch attempt to bring his erring wife back under his control. The workingclass context in this case, is treated as an amusing backdrop and although it is not exactly clear if the show is encouraging the audience to laugh at the women or at their class, the pervasive, slightly patronizing air resulting from the class gaze, reveals the gaze as a decidedly middleclass one. Impossible to know, of course, if the combined lack of authentic female and/or working-class voices contributed to the lacklustre five month run of Made in Dagenham in the West End but transforming a pivotal moment in the history of British working women into something laughable certainly revealed the attitudes towards working-class women held by the creative team, helmed by (Independently educated and Cambridge graduate) director, Rupert Goold. The irony of women onstage brandishing placards demanding respect and equal pay when the show had no discernible female voice onstage or off, was an unintentional meta theatrical outcome which clearly went over the heads of the male creative team. If the women in these onstage working-class communities are controlled by patriarchal rules dictating their class duties, the men around them are just as constrained by the masculine ideal which offers no alternative to the equation of physical labour with constructed ‘manliness’. Billy Elliot takes his first steps towards rejecting the

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masculine ideal by spurning boxing classes, and in The Last Ship, Young Gideon, who is an accomplished boxer, secretly teaches himself to waltz in order to impress a girl. In both instances, dancing and all its feminine associations, is mobilized to express the distance these two young males feel from the values of their own communities, worlds where physical aggression and manual labour represent masculinity. Even Michael, Billy’s cross-dressing friend, accepts that boxing is simply something he, as a working-class male, has to learn how to do. Young Gideon expresses his aversion to the values of the community by refusing to accept the workman’s boots offered by his father. Like Billy’s snubbing of boxing, Gideon’s dismissal of the boots symbolizes his rejection of his inherited place within the working-class community. In refusing the boxing/coal mine or boots/shipyard, both Billy and Gideon mark themselves as outsiders in their own community, and more prophetically, to their class. The boxing motif is also present in The Hired Man, and a wider association of sport with working-class masculinity is utilized in The Full Monty and Kinky Boots, shows which are both set in the workingclass communities in the North of England (but premiered in the USA). Football is regarded as Britain’s national sport, and traditionally it was a class signifier as its increase in popularity coincided with industrialization and the establishment of teams and informal competitive leagues amongst factory workers. It was also the spectator sport of the working classes and, owing to the lack of well-tended playing fields, the primary sport played in the playgrounds of state schools. In shows such as Bend it Like Beckham, The Beautiful Game and The Boy in the Dress, the context of football acts as a form of shorthand which makes it unnecessary to explain to the audience what class of community they are watching: if it was a middle-class community and an Independent school, the sport would more likely be cricket (except in Scotland, where it would be rugby). Because Dennis, the protagonist of The Boy in the Dress, is the star striker of the school football team, his cross dressing not only disrupts the accepted performance of gender but carries class implications within the familiar masculinity/working-class binary. For reasons which prove difficult to

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precisely identify, playing cricket in an orange sequinned dress does not produce the same middle-class repercussions as playing football in women’s clothes does for the working class – possibly an indication that masculinity is not accorded the central place as a class signifier in upper-class circles as it is in working-class communities. Rigidly defined, traditional gendered roles and the high status of the family unit is a familiar representation of working-class values within popular culture, most frequently reiterated by prime-time television soap operas. In the class ridden 1950s and early 1960s, soap operas were an easy way to reinforce the patriarchal values of conformity and sacrificial familial duty to working-class women who were unlikely to attend theatre. The conventional depiction leaves no room for deviation, either for women or men, inevitably resulting in a rejection of any level of homosexual behaviour and an easy acceptance of homo/trans phobia. Whilst not confined to a particular class, homo/trans phobia operates as a function of patriarchy and enables, even promotes, a definition of masculinity predicated on what men are not, i.e. they are not female or, more pertinently, not gay or trans. The script of Billy Elliot emphasizes the fact that although he likes to dance, Billy is not gay, and this is reaffirmed in The Boy in the Dress where the show is at great pains to divorce Dennis’s cross dressing from any association with homosexuality: Dennis might be enthralled by fashion magazines, but he is still attracted to Lisa James. This disassociation of drag from homosexuality is a frequent, and therefore recognizable, feature of British performance practices including the post-war BBC ‘light entertainment’ programmes and traditions such as pantomime and the Royal Variety show. These drag incarnations contributed to the normalization of a camp aesthetic within popular British culture, and a large appeal of drag comedians such as Paul O’Grady, and comedians who did drag, such as Les Dawson, was the overt vulgarity delivered in a broad working-class Northern accent. This exaggeration of both femininity and class was reminiscent of acts from the working men’s clubs (featured onstage in Billy Elliot) which were designed to appeal to the viewer through association. The three drag queens in the Legs

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Eleven club in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie also reflect this tradition, which has the additional purpose of reassuring any reticent audience member (parents, perhaps) that the gender fluidity defiantly paraded by the teenage Jamie is essentially just a bit of fun. Like a pantomime dame. The working-class drag queen was rough and crude and audience members who were already comfortable with the stereotype were subsequently able to disassociate the drag queen from homosexuality and claim him/her as ‘one of us’. A man engaged in a performance of a woman – albeit a vulgar caricature – is thus protected from summary dismissal from the hall of traditional masculinity, the working men’s club, due to his/her working-class credentials. The 2017 musical, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, was inspired by the 2011 television documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, which followed a teenager from a former mining village in County Durham as he fought to attend his final school prom wearing a dress. The musical relocated the story to Sheffield, a city in South Yorkshire which played a crucial role in Britain’s industrial revolution through the (now redundant) mining and steel industries, but the plot of the original documentary remained the same. The juxtaposition of an insubordinate performance of gender fluidity by a young man intent on being himself, set within a post-industrial landscape housing a community still fearful of such disruption, was a unique view of working-class England and one made possible by Billy Elliot more than ten years previously. It was a refreshing depiction of the depressed, industrial North, and when Everybody’s Talking About Jamie premiered at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre in February 2017, it was embraced by the local audience who enjoyed the unconventional representation of their community onstage. The show transferred to the West End nine months later where the initial enthusiasm was repeated, mainly by a younger audience who welcomed the anti-bullying stance and the contemporary depiction of gender fluidity promoted by the musical. In the show, Jamie lives with his single mother on a council estate and attends the local state school. His world essentially revolves around two communities, his school, where his desire to wear a dress to the final year prom is a cause of

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consternation, and the nightclub where he makes his first appearance as a drag queen. One community is supportive and one hostile, and how Jamie negotiates his way through both provides the primary narrative strand. The coarse Northern drag queens in the club establish their performance of drag as an act of defiant masculinity, and Jamie reproduces this rebellion at school with his announcement that ‘a drag queen is someone to be feared’. Ironically, it is through his taking on the persona of a drag queen that Jamie successfully imitates the aggressive bravura more often associated with working-class masculinity. Unspoken throughout Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is the sense that a considerable part of the opposition to Jamie’s desire to dress in drag is his social background, thus reaffirming the patriarchal conventions of working-class masculinity in the same way as Billy Elliot does. Billy and Jamie both challenge the traditional place in society occupied by the working-class male by refusing their designated ‘macho’ roles, and it is worth considering if the opposition to both boys would be more, or less, pronounced if they had middle-class backgrounds. Certainly, the (slightly fantastical) universal acceptance of Dennis’s cross dressing in The Boy in the Dress suggests it would be less. Despite Dennis’s onstage community describing themselves as ‘ordinary’ in an opening number which emphasizes their working-class credentials (they shop at the Lidl discount supermarket and have blue collar jobs) it is an RSC incarnation of ‘ordinariness’, the palatable Stratford-uponAvon version of the happy working classes. The townspeople live in pretty, ordered houses, they have jobs or run local businesses and their children attend what appears to be a selective school where the teachers wear academic gowns – all a far cry from the post-industrial bleakness of Blood Brothers or Billy Elliot. This community is more believable as lower middle-class living in a relatively affluent Home Counties town which is Disneyland compared to Jamie and Billy’s experience of a council estate and a single parent who struggles to survive financially. Like Made in Dagenham, The Boy in the Dress claims to tell a working-class story yet speaks with a distinctive middle-class voice, which is possibly intentional given the local audience demographic.

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This is perhaps an accurate, if unintended reflection of the theatres and the regions in England where these two shows were developed and premiered. The local community in Stratford-upon-Avon (and the enormous number of tourists who attend RSC performances) have different expectations as an audience to the one supporting the innercity Sheffield Crucible. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and The Boy in the Dress came out of theatres situated in English counties at opposite ends of the social scale and were specifically manipulated to appeal to the vastly different local demographics. If Jamie displays a more authentic representation of the social class it is depicting than The Boy in the Dress, it is due to the documentary source material which, like London Road before it, drew on the experience of real people. Regardless of class, both Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and The Boy in the Dress present an alternative performance of masculinity which challenges the assumption that only one performance, that of the heterosexual, physically aggressive working-class male, is worthy of inclusion in the ideal of nationhood. The musicals acknowledge the redundancy of the conduit of physical labour as a means of self-expression for men and suggest that the contemporary working-class male is not as restricted by class conformity as his forebearers. These shows proclaim that different avenues can be utilized to express class identity and political allegiance, albeit avenues which are definitively grounded in the individual, not the community. * Regional theatres in the North of England and in Scotland have a history of creating drama with a working-class focus, often reflecting and engaging with the concerns of local populace through community works or plays with local historical relevance. By the mid-1990s, the British megamusicals were attracting audiences in previously unheardof figures and it was only a matter of time before the subsidized rep companies, cognisant of the willingness of an audience to attend theatre if the show was a musical, began creating their own. Prior to its incarnation as a musical at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in

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1998, Spend, Spend, Spend had been broadcast by the BBC in 1977 as a one-off drama written by Jack Rosenthal for the Play for Today television series. The musical adaptation had the advantage of telling a local story – Nicholson came from Castleford, a town some ten miles from Leeds – and commissioning a musical with a narrative a local audience knew and remained intrigued by, was a shrewd move by the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Even thirty years after Viv Nicholson’s historical win on the pools, her story had not quite gone away and had perhaps even attained new relevance in the decade of overnight dot com millionaires and fledgling reality TV stars. Spend Spend Spend is essentially a cautionary tale about the sudden acquisition of wealth, but the fact that the protagonist is working class and ends life as an alcoholic inevitably invites judgement. Both in real life, and onstage, Viv Nicholson was subject to the class gaze and the male gaze combined, and paternalistic judgement is a pervasive undercurrent throughout the musical, as if the show is colluding with the audience in witnessing Nicholson’s downfall and asking, rhetorically, what else did we expect? Whatever the merits of the musical adaptation of Spend Spend Spend (and it is important to note that it drew on the book of the same name written by Viv Nicholson and Stephen Smith) it fell into the all too familiar trap of equating working-class women with a loose moral code. From her first appearance, Viv is presented as a young woman defining herself by, and seeking out, casual sex, and whilst this may be a faithful reproduction of the facts, the show does not delve beyond superficiality in exploring potential reasons behind her self-destructive behaviour. Viv’s pregnancy at sixteen and her tally of five husbands is presented in an offhand manner as an amusing inevitability which prevents the audience from gaining any real understanding of her failure to free herself from a cycle of abuse. The association of easy sex with the working classes draws on the constructed ‘cheeky’ British personality embodied by lewd seaside postcards and the topless Page 3 girls from daily tabloid newspapers aimed at working men. The depiction of working-class girls as oversexed and free with their favours was another staple of the Carry On

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film franchise and was a construct liberally recycled for easy laughs in the musical adaptation of Mrs Henderson Presents. The musical was adapted for the stage from the 2011 film of the same name, and directed by Terry Johnson, a man familiar with the formulaic working-classwomen-obsessed-with-sex cliche via his previous plays Dead Funny (1994) and Cleo, Camping, Emmanuel and Dick (1998) which had narratives concerned with Benny Hill and the Carry On films. In Mrs Henderson Presents, the character of Arthur functions as a pseudo narrator and his bawdy stand-up routines between scene changes are deliberately reminiscent of the Variety Hall and the End of Pier shows, setting England up as a society which sniggers at female nudity and regards viewing it – either at the Windmill Theatre or on Page 3 of The Sun newspaper – as the right of the working man. The middle-class characters driving the story, Laura Henderson and her theatre manager, Vivian Van Damm, frequently equate the desire to view nude women with working-class men, and the willingness to be on display, with working-class women. Much of the narrative of Mrs Henderson Presents is framed within the backdrop of the Second World War and the show unashamedly plays the patriotism card, highlighting the ‘heroic little England’ construct to divert attention away from the questionable moral ethics behind presenting naked women onstage for the pleasure of men – either in 1943 or 2015. The female characters performing at the Windmill, are, bar one, working class, and, Peggy, the one who is not, makes it clear that she is there purely to shock her middle-class parents. Peggy’s dabbling in a lower-class existence is thus an aberration emanating from a desire to rebel, and her character functions as the bridge between the classes. That her rebellion will be temporary is an unspoken certainty: Peggy will return to her correct and assigned place in society when the war is over, and the class divisions blurred by the crisis are rigidly reinstated. Peggy reaffirms the association of sex and nudity with working-class women purely by being the exception to the rule, and therein lies her value as a character: she enables the audience to enjoy the ridiculousness of a situation where a middle-class woman,

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protagonist, Mrs Henderson, is associated with liberal attitudes towards sex. A more recent outing of the oversexed, working-class girl stereotype appears in SIX , in which the reimagined wives of King Henry VIII appear to have few preoccupations beyond ‘boys’ and sexting. The six wives are given working-class accents, presumably to match their oversexualized appearance and constant sexual references and innuendoes, and the meanings contained within this are glaringly transparent – the show would not work in quite the same way if the characters dressed demurely and spoke like Kate Middleton. The rebranding of King Henry’s wives as lower-class good time girls does make certain assumptions about the value system of the audience the show is clearly designed to appeal to. The fact that the characters onstage marry royalty, however, enables the distortion of boundaries demarcating the class divide and diverts focus away from what could easily be interpreted as a patronizing and entitled view of lower-class women from two Cambridge University graduates. The show is, of course, tongue in cheek but the automatic assumption that overtly sexual young women will speak with working-class accents is proof, if proof were needed, that the class divide in the UK, and in British musical theatre, remains as deeply embedded as it was in the days of Noël Coward and Cavalcade. The middle classes of Britain are frequently immortalized in popular culture as laughable due to their obsession with upward social mobility. The misunderstanding that acquisition of wealth enables entry into the upper classes is a frequent misconception utilized for amusement (Me and My Girl, again) and regarded as an American delusion harking back to the late nineteenth-century days of railroad heiresses marrying into the English aristocracy. Nothing stings more in England than the term ‘social climber’ (except, possibly ‘new money’) and the 2011 Stiles and Drewe/Cameron Mackintosh musical, Betty Blue Eyes reflected this attitude through the social ambitions of Joyce, a lower middle-class piano teacher and her stereotypically henpecked husband, Gilbert. Joyce’s immediate ambitions are for Gilbert, a chiropodist, to obtain a

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shop on The Parade, the pinnacle of middle-class respectability. Betty Blue Eyes was another adaptation of a film, this time it was Alan Bennett’s A Private Function from 1984. Set in a small Northern English town in 1947, the main plot concerns the theft of a pig which is being fattened up for a gala dinner to be held to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Phillip. The show, like the film, presents the idealized vision of ‘good old England’ as populated with amusing and snobbish eccentrics acutely aware of their place on the social scale and in thrall to Royalty (a construct more readily associated with England than the other three nations of the UK). This is the fondly regarded image of the English that they themselves enjoying seeing as it confirms the ability and willingness of the English to laugh at themselves. Producer Cameron Mackintosh was perhaps aiming to cash in on the Royal fever surrounding the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton which took place two weeks after the opening of Betty Blue Eyes, but he overlooked the fact that what was regarded as funny in 1984 had, some twenty-five years later, lost much of its appeal. The show reflected values which felt outdated in a nation only one year beyond fifteen years of a Labour government committed to social inclusion and closing the gap between those who have, and those who have not. Characters desperate to ingratiate themselves with the local doctor or businessman, and a small child making derogatory remarks about the failings of ‘poor people’ was viewed in a more critical light in 2011, the decade in which ‘equality’ (as an aspiration, not necessarily in practice) would become the latest political and social buzzword. Admittedly, Betty Blue Eyes did not set out to interrogate the class system, instead, it reinforced a set of class values familiar to the audience and shrouded them in a nostalgic haze intended to amuse. But the changing of attitudes towards class entitlement since the premiere of A Private Function in 1984 rendered the focal point of the humour slightly redundant, and, as had been demonstrated with Billy Elliot, the new generation of musical theatregoers included those who wore the working-class label as a badge of pride and were unlikely to be amused by the snide observations concerning the hygiene of ‘poor people’. Betty

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Blue Eyes crossed the fine line between laughing at ourselves, and mocking others, sacrificing the gentle humour of A Private Function for a faintly derisive tone which served only to reveal that the creative team lacked any awareness concerning the widespread shifting societal attitudes towards class, race and gender. Joyce’s thwarted ambitions and driving need for recognition in Betty Blue Eyes is never equated with the suffocation of her voice as a woman and her subsequent inability to contribute to society – it is always related to her class. She thus becomes someone so obsessed with upward social mobility that she is reduced to a pitiable caricature and ultimately becomes someone to be scorned. In the 2002 Madness musical, Our House, protagonist Joe is cut from the same cloth as the social climbing Joyce, with one notable exception: Joe’s ambitions – in an accurate reflection of the show’s 1980s setting – are focused on money. Unlike Joyce, Joe is not in the least bit concerned by class or social status, he is focused purely on getting rich in the belief that wealth is the new status symbol. So determined is Joe to be ‘better’, i.e. richer, that he engages in shady property deals in the belief that wealth will buy him entry into the upper strata of the Greed is Good hierarchy. His subsequent downfall is inherently associated with his desire to improve his lot in life and attain a higher standard of living than the one he experienced as a child on a council estate. That he associates an increase in status with wealth displays his ignorance of societal power hierarchies and reveals how wholeheartedly he has bought into Mrs Thatcher’s mantra that hard work combined with capitalist values guarantees success, regardless of social background. Like Joyce, Joe ultimately becomes a pitiable figure as his desperation for status not only drives him to corruption, but exposes a deep insecurity born out of belonging to a class he is ashamed of. Both Joe and Joyce are manifestations of the ambition to be more than their birth right condemns them to be. Joe is the antithesis of the socialist mantra of solidarity – his aspirations are purely focused on himself and he has no interest in what becomes of the community where he grew up. His struggle is not the class struggle, but an individual battle out of which only he will benefit. Joyce’s ambitions are, in one sense, more

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limited than Joe’s, but in another, on a much grander scale as she envisions nothing less than the disruption of the natural social order by infiltrating a higher class. Neither Joe, nor Joyce’s goals are in any way related to confronting the inequalities inherent in the structures of power reaffirmed by the class divide, and in moving up the social ladder, Joyce will do little more than exchange one set of restrictions for another. The message of these British two musicals may be more subtle but it remains the same message: beware the perils of not knowing your place. * Even up until the last decade of the twentieth century, theatre in Britain struggled to free itself from the framework of the class gaze which assumed that the audience was middle class. The megamusical introduced the notion that theatre was, and should be, accessible to all (at least, all who can afford a ticket) with the result that the audience at a West End show is now more likely to be cross-class as well as crossgenerational. Despite practitioners creating shows with a particular audience in mind, the democratization of access brought about by The Phantom of the Opera and national tours of Cats and Les Misérables has not produced many shows with a distinct working-class voice. It is interesting to note that Billy Elliot and The Last Ship, which both had socialist viewpoints and depicted the struggles of working-class communities in the dying days of the industrial age, made it to the stage because of the involvement of global rock icons, Elton John and Sting respectively. Ultimately, the British musical should have moved on from the likes of Flowers for Mrs Harris with its patronizing class cliches. The fact that it has not, is a telling indictment on the values of those who continue to wield power over the industry, including incidentally, the critics who appeared unaware, or at least found no fault with, the outdated values reproduced by the show. Apologists may contend that many people go to the theatre purely to be entertained and they welcome this sort of whimsy, but the excuse of placating a subscriber base is no justification for a show which displays such obvious

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condescension towards a working-class woman who desires a beautiful object. The source material is partly to blame (why do it? would be the obvious response) but it is possible to set a show in the 1940s without actually reproducing the outdated societal codes and rules of the era. Perhaps it is the fault of the lingering perception of the function of the British musical as being purely to entertain and not to question or interrogate, yet the idea of an archaic narrative as the one on display in Flowers for Mrs Harris passing without comment in a drama is unthinkable. If the British musical as a mode of cultural production is to withstand critical examination within the context of national identity, then musicals such as Betty Blue Eyes and Flowers for Mrs Harris must be regarded as reproducing a construct of nationhood in which social class either limits or enables full participation. In not challenging this ideal, these shows perpetuate, and thus endorse it. The narratives of The Hired Man, Billy Elliot and The Last Ship are framed within communities defined by physical labour, and whether that work is farming, mining or shipbuilding, the powerlessness of the worker is a central theme. Yet the imagined perfect state where resources and power are equally distributed can only be attained through the exertions of the working man. Undeniably, these musicals exploit patriotic pride by reinforcing the vision of Great Britain as a founding industrial nation and wiping clean the stain of colonialism, but the shows do give voice to a section of the population frequently trivialized by British musicals. The shows may, to a degree, mythologize the socialist heritage in the North of England, but they also acknowledge that it belongs in the past: once they were heroes, once they were kings. In doing so, they raise the question of how the working man contributes to the nation if he has no work, and how he subsequently includes himself within meanings of nationhood. In addition, these musicals do not shy away from confronting notions of failure onstage. Personal failure, like that of Mickey in Blood Brothers and Joe in Our House, exacerbated by societal inequality. Failure of the fantasy, or hope, as in The Last Ship, and failure of society at large, as in Billy Elliot: Billy escapes, but his friend Michael is left behind in a community facing

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social disaster. The closing minutes of Blood Brothers demonstrates the stark reality, and the tragedy, of the class system. In a land riven with class divisions, the British equivalent of the American Dream does not always come true. And at the end of it all, even the saintly Mrs Harris is left with a ruined Dior dress. But at least she is, physically, emotionally and metaphorically, back in her rightful place.

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Too many years lost in his story: The absent female voice

Until the Covid-19 global shutdown, it seemed as if nothing could halt the meteoric rise of the musical/concert SIX, created by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Imitative in style of Hamilton, the show collapses history and reimagines the Tudor court of King Henry VIII and his six wives by viewing the period through a contemporary lens. Henry is banished to the fringes of his royal court and the spotlight is refocused on the wives, thus reclaiming the narrative as her-story. The premise of the show is slight: the wives compete against each other in a reality style TV sing off to ascertain which wife was Henry’s favourite, and who suffered the most in their love for this charismatic, handsome, admittedly flawed but ultimately forgivable, serial abuser who had two of his wives beheaded. In the finale, the wives sing of their triumph in repossessing the male narrative and the women in the audience (and they are nearly all women) wildly cheer this demonstration of female agency in a post #MeToo/Time’s Up societal landscape. It is an indication of how starved women in Britain are for musicals with a female perspective that a show filled with hypersexualized young women competing for the prize of a narcissistic and murdering husband is heralded as the embodiment of female empowerment. And that a show which reduces women to little more than passive beauty specimens within an active male world is claimed as evidence of the strides towards gender equality currently being undertaken within the British musical theatre industry. The show is, in fact, a clear example of the consequences of the ongoing absence of women from the production of musical theatre in the UK: no one is able to accurately identify what an authentic and empowering female voice sounds like anymore. Unless, of course, 115

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they’ve been to see Mamma Mia!, which, let’s not forget, is now over twenty years old. Creator, Lucy Moss describes SIX as ‘feminist’1 which is difficult to reconcile with a show which reduces six individual and sophisticated women of history into a gaggle of sexting air heads who pout overglossed lips and snipe catty remarks concerning their fellow wives’ ‘hotness’. Far from being empowered, the women onstage reproduce the worst kind of demeaning stereotype, shaped by the male gaze and cliches of the dumb blonde and the intelligent/unattractive binary. Yet the British critics insist this is a step forward, both for women and the British musical – Fiona Mountford of The Evening Standard even claims it is ‘quite the most uplifting piece of new British musical theatre I have ever had the privilege to watch’.2 The reason behind this breathless enthusiasm is partly a result of the dearth of any recent truly gender-inclusive British musicals, as well as the inability of supposedly informed commentators to see beyond the visibility-equals-empowerment dead end and mistakenly equate numbers with genuine agency. More significantly, it is related to a need for commentators to be seen in step with current political trends: no one wants to be the person who questions the integrity of an all-female musical. SIX has been elevated to stratospheric success not because it is, as certain commentators insist it is, ‘The British Hamilton’, but because it performs a political function at a time when Inclusion and Diversity are buzz words in the wider British theatrical Establishment. SIX has nine women onstage and Lucy Moss credited as co-writer/ director, thus enabling the show to be mobilized as apparent proof of gender equality and inclusive practices within the industry when nothing could be further from the truth. In other words, SIX enables extremely useful box ticking, and in doing so, it diverts attention away from the urgent issue of the ongoing exclusion of women from British musical theatre and the absence of any truly authentic female voice. Historically, there has never been more than a handful of female directors and producers active in British musical theatre, most notably Leontine Sagan, whose staging of five Ivor Novello shows in the 1930s and 1940s is credited as saving the Theatre Royal Drury Lane from

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financial disaster. Joan Littlewood took the British musical in a new direction in the 1960s, and for three decades Wendy Toye was at the helm of musicals playing in London, including Robert and Elizabeth (1964), Cowardy Custard (1972) and The Sound of Music (1992) which she directed at Sadlers Wells when she was in her late seventies. Despite her integral contribution to Cats, choreographer Gillian Lynne had her request for a co-directing credit denied, and Kate Flatt, who created the iconic movement sequences in Les Misérables has now been written out of the show’s history. There was Maria Björnson, who won an Olivier, a Drama Desk and two Tony Awards for her scenic and costume designs for Phantom of the Opera, and Kate Young who was musical director on Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man and Girlfriends. But even with the addition in the last decade of Marianne Elliot, these few women remain a tiny minority in a British industry quite blatantly operating within a sexist paradigm. What is particularly strange with regard to the male domination of the genre in the UK, is that musicals hold more appeal to women than men. Women dominate audience figures, both in the West End and at the regional theatres, and coach parties of women on a hen night or a birthday celebration are defining characteristics of Mamma Mia!, Dirty Dancing and We Will Rock You. These ‘girls nights out’ result in women making up the fan base which develops around particular shows: Wicked and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie strike a chord amongst teenage girls and middle-aged women return again and again to see Les Misérables and Mamma Mia!. For decades now, British women have demonstrated their willingness to travel hundreds of miles to see musicals and yet no artistic director or producer has deemed it necessary to cultivate an authentic female voice to create and stage the shows which the female audience supports. Not even with the multi-million pound evidence of Mamma Mia! as to what can be achieved when women create a musical which genuinely resonates with the women in the audience. * The arrival of the megamusical in the 1980s was a serious blow to women’s presence in the industry as the spectacular stage machinery

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dwarfed the female characters onstage rendering them inactive, and only the male characters interact with technology: the women leave the barricades before the battle ensues, Christine sits passively as the Phantom manipulates the boat, the male soldiers climb into the Miss Saigon helicopter. This enabled the pervasive view that women were not capable of either understanding or controlling the technological aspects of a major musical production. The association of technology with men initially provided the perfect justification for keeping women out of the creation and production of new shows, but the current musical theatre landscape in the UK proves that no excuse is required any more. From the beginning of the new millennium, British shows with all-male creative teams (and by that, I am referring to the key creative roles of writer, director and composer/lyricist) include, but are not limited to: The Beautiful Game, Taboo, Billy Elliot, The Big Life, Mrs Henderson Presents, Mary Poppins, Our House, Dreamboats and Petticoats, Sunshine on Leith, Matilda, Betty Blue Eyes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, American Psycho, Made in Dagenham, Stephen Ward, The Band, Cilla The Musical, Calendar Girls, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, The Last Ship, The Boy in the Dress and Local Hero. No critic, commentator, funder or theatre board member has ever challenged this state of affairs, suggesting they are so accustomed to the male-dominated status quo that it never occurs to them to question it. With the notable exception of Judy Craymer at Mamma Mia!, producers of commercial musicals in the UK have consistently demonstrated an entrenched prejudice against female creative personnel – Cameron Mackintosh in particular, returns again and again to the same all-male teams to create his shows. The message from the top that this sends to the wider industry, including the rep companies, is that women have no place in the creation of musical theatre in the UK and it is perfectly acceptable to exclude them. And neither is this exclusion limited to the key creative roles: the design team, choreographer, musical director and supervisor are frequently male, and when they are not, it is a safe bet that the female creative will either be in the dance or wardrobe department – skills traditionally assigned to women. Young women are slotted into assistant roles to tick

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the inclusion box, but they rarely progress beyond assisting and they have no creative input – their role is to enable the male creatives. This prejudice is by no means confined to the commercial sector – no woman has directed a musical (or been the musical director) on a production on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre since Julia Mackenzie restaged her Watermill Theatre production of Stiles and Drewe’s Honk! in 1999, and despite the inclusive practices on the RSC classical productions, The Boy in the Dress was the third mainstage musical the company produced without a woman on the key team. Matilda may have told the story of a little girl discovering her burgeoning power, but it took eight men and a man playing a character originally written as a woman to bring it to the stage.3 That is not to say that the production houses of Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Ambassador Theatre Group as examples, are any more enlightened, but they are not subsidized by the female taxpayer. When viewed against the frantic scramble to manage the issue of the under representation of non-white practitioners in British theatre raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, the continuing exclusion of women from musicals renders their marginalization a calculated move by men determined to retain their grip on the industry. A male drama director of average ability will always be given the opportunity to direct a musical over a highly capable female director with a track record in the genre. This is a set of circumstances not limited to theatre – inadequate men have always been given preference over highly capable women – and the ready excuse that there are no female writers or directors with the experience required to be entrusted with a big budget musical is not only incorrect but overlooks the inexperienced men who are given the opportunity to step up. The preceding claim of a lack of female creatives should serve only to raise the subsequent question of what moves are being made by commercial producers and artistic directors in the rep companies to develop the female voices in line with the support given to male voices. Because over one-third of the members of Mercury Musical Developments – the UK organization dedicated to the development of new musical theatre voices – are women, and

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postgraduate courses in directing and/or musical theatre receive as many applications from young women as from young men. This points to a set of existing practices and factors within the industry, including personal preferences, which are conspiring to keep women out. Worryingly, this situation shows no sign of improving, far from it, in fact. Highly talented female practitioners are still not being given the same opportunities as their male counterparts to develop the body of work which will bring them to the attention of artistic directors at rep theatres or commercial producers. This subsequently ensures that the pool of creatives who are considered when a new musical is being put together, remains a pool of men. This Catch 22 situation illustrates another consequence of the domination of the UK industry by men who are upper-middle class and were educated at single sex, Independent schools. Their attitude towards women is the inevitable result of a system in which women simply do not exist. And where they do – at university or in the workplace – they do not exist as equals. This is the manifestation of the Old School Tie network which unapologetically creates Conservative government cabinets made up of men who went to Eton together or who knew each other at the Universities of Cambridge or Oxford. It is a world view formed within a male-centred environment which, being the only life experience these men know, they consciously recreate. Onstage and off. Women cannot be accommodated into this world as there is, quite simply, no space for them. More to the point, there is no desire to create a space for them as the male-only environment is the preferred state. In terms of gender equality, then, musical theatre in the UK currently languishes in the place inhabited by drama in the 1980 and 1990s, when female playwrights and directors had their work relegated to the studio theatres or the fringe: the box was ticked, but inclusion, in reality, was a myth. The ‘women’s play’ was clearly less-than: something that had to be accommodated into a season to keep funding authorities happy, but not taken terribly seriously by any (male) artistic director. Times have changed in drama, mainly due to the steady trickle of determined women with such impressive CVs they can no longer be denied artistic

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directorships, but musical theatre may as well be in the 1930s as far as women’s creative control and input is concerned. Female assistant directors and costume designers are all very well, but unless women are writing and/or directing the show, the production will not authentically reflect the female experience or present a narrative from a female perspective. In other words, the depiction of womanhood onstage is a male version of what women are and how they behave. Or simply women as men would prefer them to be, i.e. passive victims or oversexualized vamps. The entitled male voice makes no apologies for assuming the right to speak for women, occasionally to them, but never with them: the notion that women could actually speak for themselves is categorically dismissed as that would entail inviting women to share the platform. The majority of shows created by male creative teams operate on a number of assumptions concerning female behaviour and femininity, resulting in a set of clichéd behaviours, and labels, rather than three-dimensional characters prevailing: love interest, girlfriend, Mum (Divorced, Beheaded, Died) and best friend, whose sole purpose is to support the male protagonist as he achieves his goal. The Boy in the Dress and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie both have female ‘best friends’ who never question the desires of both titular characters to appropriate female identity but unconditionally support it, both, naturally, supplying the make-up their male friend requires to complete their pastiche of femininity (where Jamie’s Muslim friend, Pritti, acquires her extensive knowledge of make-up given her father’s control over every aspect of her life is never explained). When Miss Saigon premiered on Broadway in 1991, the show attracted public demonstrations against what was perceived as a racist depiction of Asians and Asian Americans, compounded by the presence of Jonathan Pryce wearing prosthetics to play the Eurasian Engineer. In the intervening thirty years, producers and directors have developed cultural sensitivity around racial issues, employing non-white creatives on shows with non-white narratives and striving to ensure racial authenticity in casting. In August 2019, a group of Jewish actors and playwrights signed an open letter accusing the producers of a new

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production in London of Falsettos of ‘a startling lack of cultural sensitivity . . . overt appropriation and erasure of a culture and religion . . .’ due to the casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles.4 Yet male directors control female narratives in musicals, male writers create female roles, male actors even play those female roles, and it is not condemned as either insensitive or appropriation. The resulting pervasive message is that while a white creative team on a production of The Big Life or Get Up Stand Up!: The Bob Marley Musical is unthinkable, it is perfectly acceptable to have male voices in charge of a female story. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rehashing of the 1963 Profumo political scandal, Stephen Ward, is surely the most pernicious demonstration of the consequences of an all-male creative team in charge of a narrative in which gender and power, and the abuse of power, intersect.5 Stephen Ward replayed a political scandal from 1961, in which John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, had an affair with a teenage model, Christine Keeler, who he had been introduced to by Stephen Ward. Ward was an osteopath with connections to high society and the aristocracy, and Keeler and her friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, subsequently became sexually involved with a number of men introduced to them by Ward, including a Soviet naval attaché who was also a spy. When Profumo was exposed in 1963 as having lied to Parliament about his previous liaison with Keeler – which had allegedly compromised national security – he was forced to resign. Stephen Ward was arrested and convicted of living off immoral earnings but died from an overdose before his sentencing.6 Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of the scandal was loosely based on a book by Caroline Kennedy and Phillip Knightley entitled, ‘How the English Establishment Framed Stephen Ward’ (2013), a re-examination of the events clearly intended to posthumously clear Ward of his conviction relating to the charges of procuring women. The show unapologetically reiterates the position put forward in the book: Ward was framed by the Establishment who used him as a scapegoat to divert attention away from their own illegal antics and betrayed by a couple of untrustworthy working-class girls who were little more than prostitutes.

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The show makes no attempt to interrogate the unequal class and societal power structures which had enabled the whole sordid Profumo Affair, i.e. wealthy and powerful men who viewed women as playthings, and uneducated, working-class women with few options in life for ‘getting on’. Ward is presented as predatory in the opening scenes, but his blatant grooming of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies is depicted as consensual, as is Keeler’s subsequent exploitation at the hands of a string of deeply unpleasant and controlling men. Never in the show is it suggested that the women had little choice in the matter, or that Stephen Ward enjoyed the control he had over the two women as much as he welcomed the elevated status he gained from supplying them to highclass sex parties. The Profumo Affair is well represented in British culture (Christine Keeler even makes an appearance in season 2 of The Crown) and to give it another outing would be understandable if the narrative took advantage of the historical distance to re-examine the affair from Keeler and Rice-Davies’ perspective. Instead, Stephen Ward repeated the familiar tropes of oversexed working-class girls manipulating helpless and unsuspecting men with the intention of either blackmailing or shaming them publicly. The young women, whose lives were subsequently ruined, are dismissed as an irrelevant by-product of Ward’s narrative. The irony of Stephen Ward was that the power inequalities at the heart of the narrative were replicated by the production itself. The women onstage were minor bit players in a show created by men which appeared intent on keeping not only British history and narratives male-centric, but also British musical theatre. Nowhere was this power imbalance more blatantly on display than on the poster for the show which featured a naked Christine Keeler with her back to the viewer, being eyed by a fully clothed and smirking Stephen Ward. Ward restrains Keeler with a hand on her shoulder, thus controlling and objectifying her at the same time. Whilst this was an accurate reflection of the societal structures which enabled the historical events, the poster had a tinge of exploitation clinging to it: it is not necessary to see the actress playing Keeler naked and restrained to understand the narrative. The male gaze fixated on the show from the

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production desk was clearly replicated in the publicity material, thus reinforcing certain assumptions about what the viewer will find appealing. The poster exemplified how the domination of British musical theatre by men has a fundamental impact on not only which stories are told but, more pertinently, how they are told. The consequences of a male voice supplanting a female one is visible with monotonous regularity throughout the British musical, from the sacrificial Kim in Miss Saigon to the recent adaptation of Bill Forsythe’s delightful 1983 film, Local Hero, in which the all-male creative team wrote out the central female character of Marina. It is manifested in the parade of manipulative and scheming women in Lloyd Webber shows, the excruciatingly dependent mother/wife stereotype in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and the sexualization of women in Stephen Ward, We Will Rock You and Made in Dagenham. It is embodied by the premieres of no less than three British musicals in the last two years with all-male creative teams and narratives concerning boys assuming female identity7 and not one show depicting the opposite gender disruption. And all this is endorsed by critics such as Michael Billington, who sees nothing wrong with this latter emphasis on the young male experience. In his review of The Boy in the Dress, Billington stated that, ‘the boy who defies tribal expectations is becoming a recurrent theme in the British musical’,8 without pausing to question why girls are excluded from this equation. Or why narratives concerning gender fluidity are brought to the stage with no input from women. The frequency of problematic portrayals of women in British musicals and the ongoing exclusionary practices with regard to female creative practitioners becomes more significant when contextualized within the notion of culture reflecting the values of the nation. Given the evidence cited, is it subsequently correct to regard sexism as a national trait, i.e. a value system so embedded in British societal structure that, like class, it is accepted as immutable? If that is indeed the case, then the contemporary British musical is, in fact, searingly accurate in its reflection of the gender and power hierarchies within the nation. In 2014, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Violence

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Against Women, Rashida Manjoo, noted that Great Britain had a pervasive sexist ‘boys club’ culture which resulted in damaging perceptions about women and girls being widely accepted.9 The fact that Manjoo’s comments were greeted with indignant fury from politicians and the general public alike suggests that the reality witnessed by Manjoo was not the image of the nation Britons prefer to embrace. An alternative interpretation is that attitudes of the dominant sexist boys club that Manjoo identified have become so wholly normalized and absorbed into British culture as to be unremarkable and pass without comment – as in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, for example. Manjoo’s findings draw attention to the intersections between misogyny and British national identity which result in a particular brand of sexism – fuelled by the Carry On/Benny Hill backdrop which regards objectification as harmless fun, and the ‘kicks like a girl’ sporting milieu – being embraced as a national signifier. * The first (albeit delayed) show out of the starting blocks following the Covid-19 industry shutdown was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, another new British musical which embodied Manjoo’s findings. Despite a title which suggests a female-centric show, the narrative proves to be more concerned with Prince Sebastian than with Cinderella – which may explain why there is a male director at the helm. Cinderella’s problem, in the eyes of the village, is that she ‘doesn’t give a toss for her appearance’ and has ‘no sense of fashion’. This indicates another show concerned with an individual asserting their non-conformist identity, but Cinderella’s rebellion against the constraints of society involves little more than not wearing mascara or using deodorant. Other than that, she conforms to the dependant, love struck female stereotype, telling the Godmother, ‘There’s a boy I’ve set my sights on’, undergoing a makeover in order to be beautiful enough for the prince to desire her, and running off to the church to stop his wedding to another woman. The show reinforces the notion that women just want to be beautiful and be loved – no mention anywhere of a career or independence – and

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exploits the tired cliché that two women alone in a room will always reduce the conversation to catty remarks concerning age and appearance. A series of female characters defined entirely by men populate the cast and when Prince Charming reappears on the scene with a husband in tow, the Queen ecstatically shrieks, ‘what could be better than one handsome Prince, than two?’ One intelligent woman, perhaps? This then, is the musical that Andrew Lloyd Webber spent so much of his time in lockdown extolling on Tik Tok and Instagram for its inclusive and diverse credentials, and for its subversive retelling of the traditional fairy tale. But apart from the gay Prince who is celebrated as ‘a man’s man now’, i.e. he has no need of a wife, it is difficult to unearth anything in Cinderella which offers an empowering message for women. And far from challenging myths regarding gender and the beauty construct, the show consistently reinforces them, even having the stepsisters play an entire scene dressed in their corseted underwear. There is an attempt to subvert toxic masculinity in a number involving half naked men parodying a Chippendales routine, but it does little more than reinforce male presumptions as to what women desire. The Godmother warns Cinderella that beauty has a price, which involves not being able to run in high heels: the fact that this manifests exactly how the beauty ideal is mobilized to control women is neither explained nor explored. In this show, the female characters appear quite happy to submit to these male controls. The eleven o’clock number, ‘Marry For Love’, exhorts us all to live with and love whoever we want and is suitably worthy of the woke credentials trumpeted in the programme. It would, however, hold more authenticity if a lesbian couple was included in the onstage couplings, or if a trans or gender queer character had a place in the narrative. And the song does reiterate that marriage is the one goal we all aspire to – hardly a progressive, twenty-first-century sentiment. Andrew Lloyd Webber appears convinced that this is a modern show, wholly in touch with a post #Me Too/Time’s Up (and Black Lives Matter) landscape and yet the show reproduces stereotypes of vacuous, beauty- and men-obsessed women, supplemented by a trio of scheming

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matriarchs. If anything, Cinderella affirms that Rashida Manjoo’s findings concerning the pervasive sexism in the UK are far from an exaggeration. It confirms, in fact, that a misogynistic foundation is so entrenched within British culture that it is not recognized either as demeaning or damaging. It is just the way it is. * Gender disruption has a long history in British theatre encompassing Shakespeare, music hall, pantomime, variety, circus, end of pier shows and the working man’s club. During the Victorian era, actresses playing male roles was a common occurrence and male impersonators were an enormously popular music hall act, often regarded as embodying class disruption in their ‘dandyish’ representation of the upper-class male. From the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the anxiety provoked by women’s rising influence resulting from the Suffrage movement resulted in women no longer being offered male roles in West End dramas and fewer female-to-male impersonators appearing on music hall stages. By the late 1920s, the trend had all but died out, but male-to-female impersonators remained a staple of British theatrical performances and later, television light entertainment programmes thereby establishing drag as characteristic of a unique British performance sensibility. In endowing male to female drag with the status of a quirky national identifier rather than a politically motivated act, the male desire to imitate women was reconfigured as an entitlement of nationhood, thereby rendering women and girls powerless and voiceless within the drag/patriotism binary. In the 1990s, the fashion for all-male productions of Shakespeare plays was justified by assertions of historical authenticity and artistic exploration resulting in new theatrical meanings produced by the destabilization of accepted notions of gender. The homoerotic framework created by a cast of men made a political point in an era dominated by the AIDS crisis, but the underlying message absorbed by women – especially female performers – was one of being unnecessary to the production of theatre in the UK. Given the upsurge in narratives concerning gender disruption by men,

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or instances of men playing female roles, this message appears to now be rearing its head within British musicals. The ‘diversity’ justification is proving to be a useful card to play when it comes to utilizing men to displace women onstage and, as with the all-male Shakespeare productions of the 1990s, no arts commentator takes the time to reflect on the ethics behind replacing men with women. Reimagining Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, for example, as a drag act when the role is clearly drawn as female in the original material, is a straightforward example of a male political agenda (or personal preference) being imposed on an existing text. With the proliferation of roles available to men in musical theatre compared to those available to women, the removal of even one role from a female performer should be thoroughly scrutinized, yet, as ever, no critic questioned it. Interestingly, the upcoming film version of Matilda has reverted to Roald Dahl’s original intentions for the character of Trunchbull, who will be played by Emma Thompson. Whether this is purely a box office issue or if the film producers are reluctant to court controversy by having a male actor play a female role in an international movie aimed at a family audience, is impossible to know. It does, however, suggest that global media organizations (the film is produced by Sony Pictures and Netflix) are more aware of the negative connotations inherent in male to female drag than the original RSC production team was. Instances in British musicals where roles written for women are played by men in some form of drag – Lily Savage as Miss Hannigan or the series of Gilbert and Sullivan revivals with all-male casts10 – are justified as a nod to the national tradition of the Pantomime Dame, thereby affirming drag as a performance practice with a definitive place within British culture (let’s not forget Kinky Boots was a British film before it became a Broadway musical). Regardless of whether the use of drag is a novelty act designed to sell tickets or an integral part of the narrative, this easy substitution of men for women needs to be interrogated beyond universal acceptance, as it contains far reaching implications for women. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie has been universally hailed by critics in four-star reviews liberally peppered with the words, ‘heart-warming’,

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‘uplifting’ and ‘joyous’. Unlike Dennis in The Boy in the Dress, whose desire to cross dress is associated with the memory of his absent mother, Jamie’s desire to dress as a woman is a political act as Jamie is fully cognisant of the negative associations of a boy wearing a dress to the school prom. Jamie is very clear that he is not trans or experiencing body dysphoria, he is simply a boy ‘who sometimes wants to be a girl’, and best friend Pritti is compelled to support him in this (the character of Lisa James in The Boy in the Dress exists solely to perform the same function). Thus Jamie, and the show, assume two things: first that the appropriation of femininity is an entitlement of masculinity, and second, that girls/women are obligated to support boys/men in this – silence being a requirement of the post-modern girl if she is to hold on to the freedoms won for her by the previous generation. Given that this show is clearly aimed at the teenage demographic, these messages are extremely disturbing ones to impart to the legions of young women in the audience. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie has at its core, a view that men are superior to women, but the critics are so enamoured with the inclusive credentials that they absolve the unrestrained misogyny permeating the narrative and instead applaud the on-message gender fluid narrative. None of the women in the show – the mother, teacher, classmates – have been bestowed with any agency. Jamie’s friend, Pritti, repeatedly has her scholarly hopes dismissed by both her father and her teacher because she is a girl, while Jamie’s ambitions are indulged by everyone around him, presumably because he is a boy. The view that a woman’s power resides solely in her looks is reiterated by drag queen, Loco Chanelle, and subsequently by Jamie, who conflates womanhood with the trappings of constructed femininity, and interprets ‘female-ness’ within the context of glamour and the male gaze. Like the contestants in RuPaul’s drag race who are judged on exaggerated distortions of womanliness, Jamie’s success as drag queen is judged by how successfully he can carry off a performance of (exaggerated) femininity through his interpretation of gendered norms. This trope is reiterated in The Boy in the Dress when Dennis, dressed by his new best friend, Lisa James, goes

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to school wearing a sequinned dress, a chic wig and make-up, rather than the less conspicuous school uniform which his fellow female pupils are wearing. He is subsequently deemed a success as a ‘girl’ because a male schoolmate finds him attractive. Young women in the audience at Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and The Boy in the Dress are therefore subjected to male directives on how they should look and behave – even from vulgarized drag queens – doubly reinforcing restrictive patriarchal conditions and the idealized beauty myth which denies women their power. Pritti and Lisa James are fully cognisant that their worth as women comes down to their attractiveness and they are subsequently trapped by their female bodies. Jamie and Dennis, however, are liberated by their gender fluid bodies, and their worth as boys/men is defined by a broad range of factors: Dennis has elevated status due to his skill as a football player (which also enables his access into a national identity discourse through his participation in the national sport) and Jamie reproduces the central tenet of male bonding – degrading and humiliating women – through his dismissive attitude towards Pritti and his mother. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie has amassed a fan base of teenage girls who refashion Jamie as a heroine/diva and bestow on him the kind of adulation formerly reserved for Elphaba in Wicked. The teen girls overlook Jamie’s maleness and select him to speak for them because his drag persona has foundations in a traditional reading of the diva as empowering. As a consequence, Jamie, as a character, reinvents the traditional diva for a new generation of female fans who do not have such rigid definitions of male and female as the older generation does. Jamie as a diva is neither definitively male nor female, he exists in an in-between stage, but his defeat of patriarchal bullies in the form of the teacher, the school thug and his father speaks to girls in the audience of conflicts with male authority they are likely to have encountered themselves. Jamie subsequently becomes a heroic figure with whom teenage girls can identify, and someone they can utilize to act out their own needs and fantasies. As a collective, they accept Jamie as a woman (or gender neutral) and become so smitten with his drag persona that

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they fail to see the negative connotations of having a man stand in as their representative. They are effectively duped by the inclusivity/ diversity message into supporting a self-absorbed male who displays little reciprocal emotional investment in any of the women around him who, Jamie appears to believe, exist purely to serve his needs. The displacement of the fans diva worship onto Jamie is also a consequence of the lack of any strong female characters in the show with whom the young women could better identify. This embodies the attitude pervasive throughout British musicals which deems boys/men more important to the narrative than girls/women. British critics have a habit of dismissing musicals which attract a teenage female following as low-brow entertainment aimed at people who wouldn’t know any better: Wicked is the obvious example, where the appeal to teen girls is read as evidence of the banality of musical theatre. This is not the case with Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, in which the teen girl following has been refashioned as an affirmation of the integrity of a show which utilizes an anti-bullying platform to imply allegiance with youth concerns. The teenage audience is aware of this stance prior to seeing the show (they have already bought the wristbands in the foyer) and the cheers when Jamie kisses the school bully on the mouth suggest a learned and anticipated response (one which ignores the fact that, had the bully been female, Jamie’s action would be classed as sexual assault). The show has thus been accredited as ‘speaking’ to teenagers in a way that Wicked apparently never did, and it is not too difficult to understand that this conclusion has been reached because the character at the heart of this show is male, not female. The Boy in the Dress also reconfigures Dennis as a hero to the girls in the audience who are encouraged to cheer his identity defiance as emblematic of the power of being true to oneself. His ‘bravery’ in putting on a dress, however, is never analysed in terms of being tied up in Dennis’s willingness to humiliate himself by pretending to be an inferior girl. That women are universally viewed as less-than is at its most glaringly apparent at the end of the show when all the boys/men in the town wear dresses to indicate support for Dennis. By the time

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shopkeeper Raj appears wearing his wife’s sari it is clear that when men wear dresses, it can only be for amusement – presumably because women are inherently laughable. Director, Gregory Doran, is adamant that the show is ‘celebrating individuality’,11 and while this is indeed the case where Dennis is concerned, it in no way relates to the compliant and passive Lisa James, who is the only female role model in the show for girls. Possibly the most troubling moment of this deeply questionable show (at least where women and girls are concerned) is Dennis’s assertion that wearing a dress is no different to dressing up as Spiderman. Although obviously intended to divorce Dennis’s cross-dressing from a political statement or relate it to sexuality (the show is aimed at preteens), the statement imparts a message to the girls in the audience that their female state is little more than a costume, one that boys can try on and play with whenever they choose, then discard when they are bored. Because the show fails to include girls in a definition of gender fluidity – no female school pupil experiments with wearing boys’ clothes – the message that gender is fixed for girls and something that they have, but fluid for boys and something that they do – further enables the sexist ideology pervasive throughout the show. This clearly implies that the message of acceptance allegedly at the heart of The Boy in the Dress is limited to boys. The show adds a codicil which is not in the book and has headmaster, Mr Hawtrey, also a cross dresser, announce that as it is now acceptable for boys to wear dresses to school, girls will be allowed to play football – which hardly carries the same implications. The codicil does suggest that the male creative team was well aware that the show held few positive messages for girls and the addition of the postscript was a superficial attempt to rectify this. Which does raise the obvious question of ‘Why do it’? Especially when there are over twenty other David Walliams titles the RSC could have chosen. The Boy in the Dress and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie are examples of how the increasing preference for stories highlighting the unconventional male is being mobilized to further eradicate the female voice from the British musical. There is a conscious attempt by the creators of both shows to stimulate audience collusion in the

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replacement of a female voice and body with a male one through performance signals which prompt audience members to display support for the unconventional protagonist. Dennis’s team-mates break the fourth wall and encourage applause from the audience when they first appear in women’s clothes, and while Jamie’s performance style may not actually break the fourth wall, it certainly bends it, thereby enabling the performer to establish a knowing relationship with the audience and exploit it to inspire empathy. In blurring the boundaries between the audience and the performance, both shows create an opening for the audience member to enter and position themselves as part of the tolerant and broadminded community onstage. But this metaphorical space in Jamie and Dennis’s world has no room for girls, and the emphasis on the message of acceptance for all boys intentionally diminishes the validity of the few girls and women in the shows by bestowing higher status onto Jamie and Dennis and, by association, all boys/men. Just as Bend it Like Beckham enabled members of the British Indian community to include themselves in a nationhood discourse, so The Boy in the Dress and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie excludes women from full citizenship by rendering them irrelevant to national narratives. In The Boy in the Dress, the players in Dennis’s football team are encouraged to demonstrate their allegiance to his ‘individuality’ by donning women’s clothes and joining in with the collective ‘joke’. The meanings contained within this have obvious parallels with the use of blackface and yellowface which enabled a derisory white definition of African Americans (or Black British) and members of the Chinese communities, to prevail. Through the appropriation of race, the performer in black or yellowface delivered an unmistakeable message to the non-white viewer concerning the structures of power, and in doing so, asserted his entitlement to control the depiction of nonwhites. It is not a stretch to acknowledge that male to female drag enables the delivery of a comparable message regarding the inferiority of women and the right of men to control the representation of women onstage.

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As discussed, the practice of drag within a British theatrical landscape is established as a national tradition – an indication of the quirky British ‘character’ – and therefore related to national identity, but a conversation has not yet begun which recognizes that the imbalance of power at the heart of the practice is harmful to women. Far from it, in fact, as the critical approval of The Boy in the Dress and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie proves beyond a doubt. And yet a corresponding message relating to power which was at the core of black and yellowface, is unmistakeable within those two new British musicals. Loco Chanelle and the drag queens in Jamie’s world are performing femininity, understood, but it is a performance which has at its heart a sneering disrespect for women who are ridiculed and dismissed as little more than an irritant be tolerated. Black/yellowface enabled white performers to inflict their power over immigrants by lampooning a stereotype which exaggerated the constructed ‘failings’ of the immigrant group: the drag queens in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie reassert patriarchal power by interpreting women as a ridiculous parody and no more than the trappings of femininity. Dennis, in The Boy in the Dress, does not mock femininity (unlike his headmaster, Mr Hawtrey, whose drag portrayal of women is offensively belittling) but in the same way as black/ yellowface consolidated the white skin of the performer, Dennis’s wig and sequinned dress draw attention to his maleness. The audience knows he is not a girl but a boy wearing girls’ clothes, and any investment they have in his ability to successfully convince those around him that he is a girl emanates from their knowledge of his essential male state. The amusement this situation subsequently generates is a direct result of a conviction of the superiority of boys over girls. If the narrative of The Boy in the Dress concerned a white boy donning black or yellowface and triumphantly parading his new identity around the school, encouraging all those around him to do the same to demonstrate solidarity, would the show receive four-star reviews and be described as ‘heart-warming’? The point is, that whilst race is quite rightly no longer up for appropriation, gender appears to be an issue undeserving of the same level of respect because the male

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creators of new British musicals continue to regard women either as fair game or as irrelevant. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and The Boy in the Dress should be interrogated beyond the surface gender disruption narratives to uncover and hold to account the scornful depiction of women at the heart of these musicals created exclusively by men. And to answer the question as to why drag caricatures of women are not called out as sexist when black and yellowface is rightly condemned as racist. Lines such as ‘He looks better in a dress than I do’, from Jamie’s mother, reminds the audience that all men are innately superior to women in everything they do, even being a woman, and rebukes Jamie’s mother for ‘letting herself go’. Jamie is a hero for compensating for his mother’s lack of femininity by wearing make-up and high heels: he, not a woman, demonstrates to the girls in the audience how to be female. Is that so very far removed from a white actor playing the Engineer, or Akaash in Bombay Dreams? The ‘drag as a British tradition’ justification should no longer be accepted an excuse for sexist practices, just as the citing of a music hall tradition was a wholly unacceptable justification for the continuation of The Black and White Minstrel Show in the 1970s. Commentators who have, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter, made a plea to artistic institutions to disregard race are missing the point: in removing race from consideration, the view that whiteness is raceless is reinforced. To disregard gender onstage, i.e. to suggest that it scarcely matters if female roles are played by male performers, does not render gender invisible but similarly reinforces the male as normative. There is very little that is empowering for women in seeing a male actor perform a female role, as it reasserts the claim espoused by The Boy in the Dress that male identity and/or sex is malleable and therefore superior to female, which is fixed. Until a collective awareness of an authentic representation of femaleness has the same urgency and status as authentic representation of race has, the practice of slotting male performers into female roles, or telling stories which deify boys for wearing women’s clothes whilst other women look silently on, will continue. Basically, what everybody is not talking about is the fact that men in the British musical theatre industry

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are controlling not only how women are depicted onstage, but what it means to be female. * It is curious that the extraordinary success of Mamma Mia!, which premiered in 1999 and has now played in over fifty countries on six continents (not to mention two enormously popular films12), legitimized the jukebox musical – would We Will Rock You and Our House exist without Mamma Mia! – but did not open doors for women in musical theatre in the UK. Had director, Phyllida Lloyd, and writer, Catherine Johnson, been men, it is hard to believe that they would not have been deluged by offers from both commercial producers and the subsidized behemoths. Mamma Mia! undoubtedly owes its success to the female voice driving the show. It is a voice that women in the audience, across generations, immediately recognize and identify with, and this contributes enormously to the vast numbers of women sharing the experience in girls night out groups and/or mother and daughter bonding treats. The concerns of the women onstage mirror the concerns of the audience members, enabling the sense that the show is ‘my’ or ‘our’ story: ‘our’ being related to sex, and not class, race or nationality. Given the style and nature of the show, it is hard to label Mamma Mia! political theatre, but the number of women on the production team transformed the very existence of the musical in the West End into a political statement. Why the show remains political is due to the fact that in twenty-two years, nothing has progressed with regard to gender equality in British musicals. Mamma Mia! should have ushered in an era of change and the reason it did not can only be ascribed to the men holding the power in the West End ensuring that it did not. Independent producers readily embraced the stylistic innovation of Mamma Mia!, creating almost twenty jukebox musicals drawing on such polarizing musical tastes as Queen to Susan Boyle, the Proclaimers to David Essex, for lucrative UK tours with West End aspirations. Yet no producer was willing to make a similar leap and produce a show which was unashamedly aimed at women, created by other women. There

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were regional tours of work which had undoubtedly been created to capitalize on women’s eagerness to engage in female solidarity via a night at the theatre – Cilla the Musical (2017), Sunshine on Leith and Calendar Girls – but they were the products of male creative teams and had distinct male voices. Of these, Calendar Girls was the most successful, certainly amongst an older audience who were already familiar with the 2003 film, which had Julie Walters, Helen Mirren, Penelope Wilton and Geraldine James amongst its drawcards. A drama adaptation had originated at Chichester in 2008 and embarked on a lengthy national tour prior to a West End run in 2009, followed by another national tour which was notable for the revolving door of cameo appearances by various TV stars. By the time the musical version premiered in 2017, there appeared to be little left that could be said with regard to the true story of a group of women from a Yorkshire branch of the Women’s Institute posing topless for a calendar to raise money for cancer research, and the fact that the musical was originally titled The Girls, an English vernacular terms for women’s breasts, suggested that the (male) creative team had definite priorities where the storytelling was concerned. The musical, like the film and the play, had undertones of the Carry On films – an insidious view of the female body as an object of titillation offering multiple opportunities for the kind of jokes which produce sniggers, not laughter. But it was also, without a doubt, built on the notion of female solidarity forged through friendship and shared experience – concepts which resonated with the predominantly female audience. The male voice in control of the narrative, however, was easily discernible. The humour of Calendar Girls emanated from the class and the age of the female characters who were not cut from the pattern more usually associated with behaviour linked with sex. The narrative subverts the message that a woman’s power resides solely in her body as the characters are well aware that they are setting themselves up for ridicule given their age and their untoned bodies. They are, in fact, reclaiming pervasive media messages which require young women to present themselves as sexual objects in order to gain agency within a sexualized

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culture. The women of Calendar Girls destabilize these messages by appropriating them for all women, regardless of their age and body shape. In doing so, they sabotage the male gaze by wresting control away from men and utilizing the exploitation of the female body for their own purpose. The subtext that women gain power when they present themselves as sexual objects is mobilized to support a different interpretation, one where women willingly strip to expose the insidious nature of messages which provoke women into behaviour which satisfies men. But any retelling of this story poses a conundrum in that on one hand, the women are objectified, and it is their objectification which provides the principal source of amusement. On the other hand, the women choose to be objectified, indeed it is their idea, and their willing participation in their own limited exploitation renders it benign and therefore questionable as exploitation. There is no denying that the show is voyeuristic: the calendar the women are creating will trade on its value as an object which enables voyeurism in order to raise money. It is interesting to note, however, that the women in Calendar Girls are empowered by the release of their bodies – indeed it is their sense of joy that the women in the audience react and relate to – and this could be linked to the belief of women’s innate power increasing with age. There is always the danger that any interpretation of this story will reduce the women to jokes, but the altruistic motive behind their action acts as a counterbalance: their nakedness does, in fact, hold immense power as proven by the phenomenal amount of money they raise for a cancer charity. It is difficult to fully ascribe a definition of feminist theatre to Calendar Girls due to the unavoidable – however justifiable – voyeuristic foundation. Undoubtedly it gave the women in the audience a night at the theatre which was intrinsically female, and it imparted a more positive message regarding body image than can be found in mass media. But it is also not difficult to pick up on the male voice retelling the story – the show was written and directed by Tim Firth, with music and lyrics by Gary Barlow. Why this essentially female story had a male creative team is difficult to fathom and although, in terms of audience enjoyment, it did

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no harm, it does again raise the issue of why men are in control of women’s stories. Hard to believe that in the entire country there was not one female writer and/or director available to take on the sure fire hit that was Calendar Girls. And perhaps the answer lies within the phrase ‘sure fire hit’ and the inevitable association with royalties. As proven by the megamusicals, a hit show can transform its creators into extremely wealthy men and the potential for this goes some way towards explaining why certain directors of drama, those who roll their eyes at the mention of Wicked or Mamma Mia!, ferociously guard the rehearsal room door when it comes to the annual musical at rep companies or a nationwide jukebox tour. Male power is intrinsically tied to financial power and the ongoing issue of the gender pay gap lays bare the assumption that financial rewards are the prerogative of men. It is impossible to know what impact a female writer would have had on the narrative of Calendar Girls, certainly a female director could have brought greater insight into the characters and the emotional heart of the show. Less emphasis might have been placed on the nakedness of the women – fewer jokes of the ‘bigger buns’ variety – in favour of a more considered exploration of the experience of widowhood and the unique concerns of middle-aged women. The burden of care, for example, is one which frequently falls on women, yet Calendar Girls brushes over the issue, referring to it only fleetingly. Having said that, there is no doubt that the show engaged with women and offered them a story they could relate to and empathize with. And it was undoubtedly a more empowering message with regard to the female body than the one on display in SIX. Regardless of the authors’ claims that the wives in SIX are enabled via the contemporary retelling of their lives, their obsession with snaring a man, looking hot and winning points for sexual prowess defines them as powerless and devoid of any individual agency (a precursor to the women in Cinderella). And, unlike the women in Calendar Girls who take control of a situation and use it to their advantage, the wives in SIX are passive and do little except sit around waiting for a man to materialize. Next to the disruption posed by the unassuming women in Calendar Girls, the modern preoccupations

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of Henry’s wives appear more in tune with the patriarchal conformity encouraged in the 1950s, which imprisoned women within domesticity and the constructed beauty ideal. The wives even go as far as to weaponize the beauty ideal and turn it against each other – an odd interpretation of female solidarity. And although the middle-aged members of a rural branch of the Women’s Institute are unlikely to instigate the fourth wave of feminist revolt, the action they undertake is for the greater good and involves a more empowering mobilization of the female body than anything on display in SIX. The British musical theatre industry has managed to separate the current demand for inclusion from gender equality: as far as the British musical is concerned, ‘diversity’ means stories about men who are not white and/or straight. What it categorically does not mean, is stories about women, hence the eagerness to parade SIX as proof of enlightened awareness of gender issues when the show should be critically reviewed as reproducing dangerous tropes regarding consent and complicity. A frequent consequence of the male domination of UK musicals is that female characters are frequently trapped into playing characters imagined by men, hence the proliferation of victim or bimbo stereotypes. Critical appraisals of SIX frequently (deliberately?) overlook the fact that Lucy Moss’s co-director is male: to do so would challenge the preferred narrative of a female voice driving the show. The overt sexualization which has branded British popular culture since the days of the saucy seaside postcards and Benny Hill is subsequently reproduced in SIX under spurious claims of Girl Power or reviewer Dominic Cavendish’s ‘cheeky British personality’. The highly glamourized look of SIX has become intrinsic to the brand of the show and yet the original 2017 production was framed very differently. Publicity photographs from the original Edinburgh production reveal the wives dressed in sneakers, long trousers and baggy tops – an open challenge to the beauty construct. During the process of upscaling the show for a London venue, however, the producers (or creators) clearly agreed that ‘hot’ women were more marketable than the feminine defiance suggested by androgynous

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clothing and comfortable shoes, and the look of the show was redesigned. The new glittering and revealing costumes reiterate that the wives are to be regarded through a lens of sexual availability and that their currency resides solely in their physical attractiveness to men. Transforming the wives into a sexual spectacle reshapes them within the parameters of the male gaze as willing participants in an unequal relationship within the subject/object binary. The dominatrix style leather outfits clearly define the wives as subservient to the will of men and devoid of any agency in a world where male power reduces women to the sum of their body parts. But the critics have been so keen to claim SIX as proof of gender equality in British theatre that they have failed to point out the myriad of ways in which the show reproduces misogynistic ideals relating to male controls over women’s behaviour and appearance. Perhaps the women in the audience who scream their delight at the grooming number ‘All You Wanna Do’, really do equate power with sexual prowess, and it is this illusion of agency which enables them to overlook the abuse and violence perpetrated against Henry’s wives. But it is well documented that the quickest and easiest way of removing power from women is to reduce them to a semi-naked Barbie doll, existing purely for the pleasure of men. Which is exactly what SIX proceeds to do to six highly educated and multi-lingual women of history. Far from liberating the wives, the show limits them within a series of practices intended to control women’s behaviour. This is the show, let’s not forget, that has been hailed by the British critics as feminist. But interestingly, not by their American counterparts: Alexis Soloski, for example, notes that SIX reinforces the notion that female stories are only relevant when they are stories of suffering, and describes the feminism of the show as ‘empty and unexamined’.13 Why British critics were unable to identify both of these issues speaks volumes concerning the universal acceptance of the insidious sexism in the UK which was identified by the UN representative, Rashida Manjoo in 2014. Possibly the British critics are labouring under the misapprehension that anything with a woman on the creative team cannot possibly reproduce a sexist set of values, but it is equally possible that women

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who create and/or support the reproduction of demeaning female sexual cliches – such as Lucy Moss and the thousands of women who scream approval at SIX every week – have become so inured to the institutionalized sexism that they reproduce it, effectively acting against themselves. Misogyny is frequently presumed to be overt displays of bias, but an unspoken prejudicial foundation which normalizes discrimination against women to the degree where it is not even acknowledged or, in the case of SIX, utilized against itself, is equally damaging. And it is this prejudicial foundation which is at the heart of the British musical theatre industry, resulting in shows which prioritize a sexist narrative being excused from critical condemnation due to a superficial reading of the terms equality and inclusion. This is particularly disturbing when, as is the case in Cinderella, SIX, Mrs Henderson Presents, Stephen Ward and Made in Dagenham, it is female bodies which are being utilized to perpetuate a demeaning depiction of women. And in a growing equation of sexual attractiveness and prowess being equated with female power. Female visibility is undeniably an issue within the British musical theatre industry and while creators of new shows have demonstrated their willingness to bring working-class and non-white voices to the stage, as well as narratives concerning unconventional boys and men, female narratives and voices remain a much lower priority. This, despite the gender breakdown of the audience. It is a sobering fact that, even in 2021, anyone searching for an authentic and empowering female voice in the British musical has to return to Mamma Mia!. This is even more depressing when Howard Goodall’s (dare I say feminist) musical, Girlfriends, is added to the mix. Girlfriends debuted in 1986 at Oldham Coliseum, a rep theatre situated in the Greater Manchester catchment area, and the show recounted the experiences of a group of young women in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1941. Richard Curtis (of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually fame) is credited as having written the first draft of the script, and music and lyrics are by Howard Goodall. Musical director, Kate Young led a mainly female band on a show which featured female characters who

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were believable, rather than clichés, and active, rather than bystanders. In the opening number, the women describe their sense of freedom in having joined up, describing their actions in terms of ‘escape’, ‘running away’, ‘not wanting Mum’s life’ and leaving behind the dependent and controlling men in their lives. They sing of their pride in doing the jobs previously assigned to men – changing tyres, repairing engines, lighting flares – and note that here, at an RAF Bomber Command Base on the East Coast of England, they are more than spectators or Airmen’s wives. They are proving that they are made of ‘stronger stuff ’. The narrative is admittedly slight and heavily weighted towards heterosexual romance, but these young women have taken control of their lives and have jobs which are crucial to the war effort including guiding the pilots back to the base following their missions. Despite being over thirty years old, Girlfriends portrays women as independent, strong and resilient, everything, in fact, that men are. And in doing so, it is a more contemporary depiction of women in a, supposedly, gender equal twenty-first century than in any show currently on the West End (Mamma Mia! excepted). The fact that the women are WAAFs and actively engaged in the war effort is vital to the wider discourse concerning nationhood, as their contribution to society is deemed every bit as crucial as that of the men who are on active service. When the woman talk of ‘sharing the weight’, the WAAFs are claiming their place in a historical narrative which all too often writes them out of it. The triumph of Girlfriends – aside from the score which was described by Irving Wardle in The Times (1987) as ‘blazingly dramatic’ – is in the recognition of women as equal, both onstage, playing complex threedimensional characters, and in the history of the nation. The tragedy of Girlfriends is not only that it remains one of a handful of British musicals featuring positive and authentic portrayals of women, but that it gives a glimpse of what the industry could have been had the malecentric megamusical juggernaut not ploughed through any notion of equality and forced women off the path. Possibly the most empowering and relatively recent accurate depiction of the archetypal ‘wise woman’ so lacking in British musicals,

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is Grandma in Billy Elliot. She is under no illusion that society expects women, particularly working-class women, to conform to patriarchal diktats which place ordinary men on pedestals and demand that women sacrifice their own needs and desires to serve them. Grandma states that her life was effectively over when she married at seventeen and is adamant that if she had the opportunity to relive her time, she would do it without men. ‘I’d be me’, she sings, ‘instead of somebody’s wife’. Perhaps it is her age which empowers her to speak, a sense of finally being able to say what must remain unsaid. And the fact that she sings it to her grandson Billy, illuminates the differing expectations for men and women. Although Billy has societal pressures on him to live his life in a particular way, he is still above Grandma on the hierarchical scale solely because he is male. No matter what Billy does in life, he will have more control over it and more power to determine the outcome, than Grandma ever had. Her honesty in reviewing what she considers to be a wasted life is heart breaking, and without a doubt, her sentiments resonate with some women in the audience. Throughout the show, however, there are indications that Grandma has dementia, and it is due to this that she is enabled to speak. Because the disease has robbed her of her awareness of the need to stay silent. * As a cultural artefact, the British musical reflects and represents the societal preoccupations of the nation. The absence of women from creative teams, and female characters who conform to outdated patriarchal stereotypes, is therefore an issue which should be given as much credence and provoke as much soul searching as corresponding issues concerning race, for example, or sexuality, or special needs. The fact that it is not, is a telling statement on the attitude towards women, and the position of women, not just in theatre but in the nation itself. The British musical will never arrive at the place where gender (mis) representation and depiction onstage is no longer an issue until gender representation offstage ceases to be the issue that it currently is. And this, in turn, will not happen until the industry agrees that it is as

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inappropriate for men to tell women’s stories as it is for white writers and directors to tell Indian and black stories. Perhaps one of the reasons the British musical is trailing so far behind its Broadway counterpart, is due to this persistent refusal to include women in the industry. Yet, as Mamma Mia! proves, women are not incapable of producing and creating high performing shows which become global brands. They are just rarely given the opportunity to do so. Where are the British shows with comparable empowering lesbian narratives as were on display in Fun Home or The Prom? And why is the transgender experience only represented by male to female narratives? In the years immediately following the American Civil War, the minstrel shows were more popular in the South than they had even been – entertainment mobilized as payback. The increasing prevalence of male narratives which write women off the stage could be seen as a form of backlash to the demands of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements which demand that women’s voices are heard and respected. In the end, it comes down to who has the power to name the sexism pervasive in the British musical theatre industry. Women do not have this power, and the men who do, are highly skilled at shutting down those conversations before they even start, often mobilizing Mamma Mia! and SIX as indicative of inclusive practices. If musical theatre is an accurate reflection of a nation’s cultural and societal preoccupations, then the calculated exclusion of women from the genre in the UK suggests a society which incorporates women grudgingly, and only in support positions. Four decades ago, Blood Brothers and Girlfriends gave audiences musicals with three-dimensional, individual, pro-active, strong and funny women at the heart. Two decades ago, this was reinforced by Mamma Mia!. The British musical today writes women out of the narrative or gives us glib, narcissistic visions of womanhood in SIX and Cinderella. The question has to be: what happened?

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A cat so clever: Andrew Lloyd Webber and the reinvention of the British musical

From 29 to 31 January 2021, in the middle of the second Covid-19 national lockdown, an entire weekend of programming on BBC Radio 2 was given over to musical theatre. BBC Radio 2 is the most popular station in the UK and regularly draws over 15 million listeners a week, attracted by the wide music content including specialist jazz, brass band, folk, soul, country, gospel, rock ‘n’ roll and big band programmes. Musical theatre stars Michael Ball and Elaine Paige both host weekly programmes on Radio 2 with Paige’s show, which has been running since 2004, focusing exclusively on stage and screen musicals. The January 2021 ‘Radio 2 Celebrates Musicals’ weekend involved, amongst other things, a reunion of the original company of Cats, a live (socially distanced) concert from the London Palladium, discussions on various aspects of musical theatre with stars such as Jennifer Holliday, Petula Clark, Roger Daltry and Sharon D. Clark, and presenters of specialist genre shows finding a musical theatre connection – Johnny Walker’s ‘Sounds of the Seventies’, for example, focused on musicals from that decade. In the weeks leading up to the musicals weekend, listeners nationwide voted in a poll launched on Elaine Paige’s show to find the All-Time Greatest Song from a Musical. Initial suggestions were whittled down to twenty, and these finalist songs were played in a countdown to the winner on Paige’s Sunday afternoon programme on 31 January. In a clear indication of just how thoroughly the megamusical has saturated the genre, ‘One Day More’ was announced as the winner and ‘Bring Him Home’ as the runner up. Other than Claude Michel Schöenberg, Andrew Lloyd Webber was the only composer with more than one song in the top 20, in fact, he had three: ‘Don’t Cry For Me 147

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Argentina’ at 8, ‘Memory’ at 11 and ‘Gethsemane’ at 16. But other than Lloyd Webber and Les Misérables, British musicals were notably absent: no Blood Brothers, Chess or Billy Elliot (although Tim Rice and Elton John were represented by ‘The Circle of Life’ at number 7). Bearing in mind the older listener demographic of BBC Radio 2, it was also surprising that there was nothing from Lionel Bart, or Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. British work was therefore represented by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the megamusical – the latter owing its existence to the existence of the former. The Radio 2 listener poll is interesting on two counts: first, because it demonstrates that the popularity of musicals throughout the nation is at odds with the dismissive attitude of the critics and the theatrical Establishment, and second, for the unequalled position that Andrew Lloyd Webber occupies within the theatre-going public in the UK. ‘Gethsemane’, for example, is one of the lesser-known songs from Jesus Christ Superstar and was never released as a single, whereas ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ from the same show, has twice been in the top 20 of the US Billboard charts and been recorded by artists such as Yvonne Elliman, Helen Reddy, Petula Clark, Barbara Dickson and Spice Girls’ Melanie C. For ‘Gethsemane’ to make it into the top 20 over ‘Food Glorious Food’ or ‘I Know Him So Well’ (which stayed at number one in the pop charts for four weeks in 1985) is not merely a triumph of longevity but a clear indication of the influence Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work has had on the British public over the last fifty years. Lloyd Webber has seared his mark onto the British public consciousness with chart hits including, but not limited to, ‘Any Dream Will Do’, ‘Love Changes Everything’, ‘You Must Love Me’, ‘The Perfect Year’ and ‘No Matter What’. In 1998, the much-loved Sunday television show, Songs of Praise, devoted an entire episode to the music of Lloyd Webber in honour of his 50th birthday, and in 2007, his music was included in the ‘Concert for Diana’ memorial tribute held at Wembley Stadium. There are also few adults in the UK who were school pupils in the 1970s and 1980s who cannot sing the closing number from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. It is arguable, therefore, that a line can be

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drawn from Joseph and Jesus Christ Superstar in the 1970s, directly to the ‘Radio 2 Celebrates Musicals’ weekend five decades later, and that without Andrew Lloyd Webber, there would be no British musical theatre industry in 2021. Or at least, a significantly different one. Without a doubt, Andrew Lloyd Webber is the most successful composer of musicals the UK has ever produced, and his domination of mass entertainment for the last forty years makes him a defining figure in British culture. Lloyd Webber is regarded as both the saviour and the executioner of the British musical and he remains a polarizing figure, his work often loathed by the critics but adored by the public. Since its opening in 1986, The Phantom of the Opera has been seen by 140 million people in thirty-five countries and 166 cities and has grossed $6 billion worldwide. The original cast album was the first of its kind to enter the charts at number one and in London, the show has played over 12,000 performances. That it is currently the longest running show on Broadway strongly suggests that audiences simply cannot get enough. Critics, however, frequently accuse Lloyd Webber of writing low brow entertainment which exploits superficial emotion and of being more interested in the profits of a show than the artistic quality. The vast wealth he has accumulated is a bone of contention with commentators who equate the popularity of his work with low artistic standards – a charge which is not always justified. The strength of feeling against Andrew Lloyd Webber is such that the RSC can align itself with rock star Robbie Williams and not provoke the outcry that a partnership with Lloyd Webber would invite. And yet this is the man partly responsible for the legitimacy of the rock opera in the 1970s, for the introduction of the sung through musical and the invention of the megamusical – stylistic innovations which redefined the global genre of musical theatre. However deeply Cats is derided in 2021, there is no denying that it was quite possibly the most influential show in British musical theatre history and undeniably a turning point for the genre. It was the moment when British practitioners did the unthinkable and produced a musical more inventive than anything on Broadway.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber has a reputation for being a person with a need for control and in 1977, he established his own production company, The Really Useful Group, in order to maintain complete power over his creative works. This makes him the only composer/ producer currently operating in the West End and/or Broadway. The result, of course, is that any dissenting creative voices on the production of a new musical which has been written by the person who is financing it, are unlikely to be listened to: an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is exactly that. In addition, having his own production company enables Lloyd Webber to control the product which fills his seven West End theatres. When he took part from 2006 to 2011 in reality TV talent shows to find new leading performers for West End productions of The Sound of Music, Joseph . . ., Oliver! and The Wizard of Oz, he did not do so purely to boost his own personal profile: all of the shows were produced or co-produced by the Really Useful Group and would play in theatres owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was therefore in his best interests, as a producer, to generate public fascination with the productions (one of which would produce royalties for him personally) long before they had opened. His unique position as a composer/ producer also endows him with the power to shut his shows quickly if they are not making a profit with no ramifications from stakeholders. When Stephen Ward proved disastrous at the box office in 2013/14, Lloyd Webber was able to serve a closure notice after a run of only three months with little argument from co-producers, Robert Fox Ltd. The downside, although Lloyd Webber is possibly unlikely to recognize it, is that one role (the composer) may overshadow the other (the producer), and without a dispassionate creative eye on the development of the production, decisions are taken to service one area in particular without regard for the overall production. I suggest Cinderella suffered from having Lloyd Webber as the producer and composer, and the separation of the two roles could have enabled an independent producer to challenge some of the more problematic areas of the show. Critiques of Lloyd Webber’s work tend to focus on either the music or on his ability to make a commercial success out of almost everything

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he touches, but his shows are seldom analysed within the framework of nationalism and for what, if anything, they reveal about British society and culture. Yet if the name Andrew Lloyd Webber can so seamlessly be substituted for the term, the British musical, then it is crucial to interrogate the meanings produced by his work within the context of national identity and the wider landscape of cultural production within the UK. It is curious that the work of a composer/producer so intrinsically associated with the British musical that he is frequently assumed to be the British musical, reveals so little about the nation it represents. For all that Lloyd Webber has reshaped and redefined the genre in Britain, his shows rarely attempt to capture the British character or to respond to the cultural and societal state of the nation. Indeed, few of his shows – Stephen Ward being a notable exception – are even set in the UK. There are occasional moments of Britishness – Bustopher Jones is a recognizable caricature of the London City gent (albeit created by an American) and the unnamed woman abroad in Tell Me On A Sunday has her quirky English habits – but for the most part, it is not necessary to have any understanding of either the culture of Britain or of what is implied by the term ‘Britishness’ to be able to engage with a Lloyd Webber musical. Arguably, the closest he has come to authentically representing British culture is his Requiem in 1985, which reflected the established English ecclesiastical choral tradition. In contrast, the mid-twentieth-century Broadway shows of Rogers and Hammerstein reproduced notions affirming the centrality of family and community in a (white) ideal of American identity. And in later years, Stephen Sondheim challenged the constructed American Dream in works such as Company, Merrily We Roll Along and Assassins, shows which suggested that the Dream was, for the people existing beyond the parameters of the Ideal, an unattainable fantasy. It is impossible to extract corresponding meanings from the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber: in fact, his work is notable for producing so few meanings within the context of national identity that his refusal to investigate the state of his own nation is a meaning in itself. His 1996 adaptation of the quintessential 1961 British film, Whistle Down the Wind,1 for example, relocated the story from the

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bleak English Lancashire hills to Bible Belt Louisiana. This may have been a response to the show opening in Washington DC and a view that an American audience would respond better to a tale they interpreted as their own, but it removed the central appeal of the story – that of the trusting naivety of the unworldly Lancashire farm children which was heightened by the original setting. The relocation may have been a manifestation of Lloyd Webber’s determination to stamp his own mark onto an existing text, but it did reveal a lack of allegiance to both the original material and to the country in which it was set. Not that there is anything wrong with adapting material to suit a specific market, but Whistle Down the Wind was an odd story to relocate given the innate British appeal of the original. Andrew Lloyd Webber epitomizes the previously cited white, upper middle-class, Independently educated male who dominates the British musical theatre industry, and while his shows may not seem overly concerned with national identity, there is no doubt that they reproduce the class values of their creator. His adaptation (with playwright Alan Ayckbourn) of the work of English humourist and novelist, P. G. Wodehouse, which resulted in the musical Jeeves (1975) and a revised version, By Jeeves in 1996, was a case in point. The work of P. G. Wodehouse is firmly associated with a certain class and cultural stereotype within English society and the Jeeves novels are filled with flighty and ineffectual upper-class characters kept on the right track by the practical and all-knowing manservant. The books were enormously popular amongst the class Wodehouse so lovingly caricatured because they depicted a stereotype built on an exaggerated set of peculiarly English values and habits without condemnation. The reader recognized the caricature and at the same time was able to regard it from a distance and view it as an embellishment designed to amuse. Because the formulaic depiction of class cliches was designed as entertainment and had no foundation in reality, the Jeeves novels reinforced a national construct which was already accepted as a cartoonish representation: it was the English as the Americans like to see them, long before Richard Curtis repackaged and updated the stereotype in popular films. Neither

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the 1975 nor the 1996 Jeeves musical incarnations were terribly successful – a rare example of Lloyd Webber’s failure to correctly read the public mood. If P. G. Wodehouse was seen to embody a class and value system which was regarded as stuffy and out of date in 1975, it was even more irrelevant twenty years later amidst Royal scandals and rising nationwide support for the left-wing Labour party. Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of the Jeeves novels was almost inevitable given the upper middle-class background he was prone to display even back in the Jesus Christ Superstar days. Indeed, in the formative years of his career he often appeared at pains to consolidate his Establishment credentials, rushing through his first divorce in order to be able to introduce his second wife, Sarah Brightman, to the Queen at a charity preview of Starlight Express, and employing Prince Edward at his Really Useful production company. His choice of the choir of Winchester Cathedral for his Requiem (as opposed to the choir of a multicultural or working-class community) could not signal his background more effectively, and this was reinforced by having Margaret Thatcher attend the premiere and the Archbishop of Canterbury – possibly the second highest Establishment figure in England – present gold albums to Lloyd Webber and soloists Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston. Created a life peer in 1997, the Lord Lloyd-Webber, or Baron LloydWebber of Sydmonton, sat as a Conservative member of the House of Lords until his retirement in 2017. Perhaps the combination of his enormous wealth2 and his secure position within the English Establishment limits his understanding of Britishness and subsequently accounts for the fact that his two forays into (pseudo) social realism – The Beautiful Game and Stephen Ward – have been his least commercially successful shows (running eleven months and three months respectively). He is at his best as a composer and a producer when he separates himself from his class and identity and immerses himself in the realm of fantasy. Stephen Ward and The Beautiful Game expose just how out of touch Lloyd Webber is with societal reality, and Cats and Sunset Boulevard reveal a man far more comfortable with material which requires him to disclose nothing of himself.

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If the Andrew Lloyd Webber’s glitzy spectaculars of Cats, Starlight Express, The Phantom of the Opera or Love Never Dies are considered as theatrical manifestations of the national psyche, then it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that Britons are a shallow, unthinking crowd, favouring fantasy over reality and satisfied with easy and manipulated emotions. And there is an element of truth in that – the British have never been known for effusive displays of emotion, and the characteristic English ‘stiff upper lip’ is not entirely a construct. Like the act of the mass laying of flowers in public spaces following the death of Princess Diana, Lloyd Webber offers the public a safe conduit to an acceptable, if superficial, engagement with emotions often regarded as a threat or as a sign of weakness. In addition, the longevity of his shows reproduces the British dislike of change and the national tendency towards nostalgia. In 2010, Love Never Dies was enveloped in a nostalgic yearning for the style and era of The Phantom of the Opera, in the same way as Noël Coward’s Operette in 1938 invoked his previous hit, Bitter Sweet. Both men were not simply repeating themselves artistically but consciously quoting from their own work to remind audiences (and perhaps themselves) of the success of past shows which were now regarded as stylistically dated. In a wider context, it is the association of Lloyd Webber’s shows with previously unheard-of profits which has had an irrevocable impact on the British musical theatre industry. In the USA, musical theatre is regarded as an art form – the manner in which the British view drama – but musicals in the UK are viewed, and developed, within a paradigm of profitability. The jukebox musical was not created to challenge the artistic form but to capitalize on a growing desire by the British public to attend musicals and, as previously discussed, neither are rep companies developing new work with the intention of pushing the boundaries of the genre. Within the British theatrical Establishment, the musical is frequently regarded as a slightly vulgar licence to print money and as commercial Entertainment which must not, under any circumstances, be confused with British Theatre. The conflation of musical theatre with profit is, without question, a result of the popularity

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of the shows of Andrew Lloyd Webber which, in turn, is a result of his shrewd manipulation of the public taste and of a global marketing machine. Three songs in the final twenty of Elaine Paige’s nationwide quest to find the All-Time Greatest Song from a Musical suggests that Andrew Lloyd Webber has become expert in supplying the public with exactly what it is they want, without them being aware that they even wanted it. His influence on British and global musical theatre is therefore not restricted to the material onstage (although he has spawned a generation of imitators) but infuses the structure and the organization of the genre itself, i.e. what British musical theatre in the UK actually stands for. He has, almost singlehandedly, imposed a sensibility onto the genre which has redefined the output by recategorizing it as a product, and which has only recently begun to be challenged with works such as The Last Ship and Girl from the North Country. In other words, his shows are less relevant than the bigger picture which appears to be nothing less than the global redefinition of musical theatre. * In 1986, the highly influential television arts programme, The South Bank Show devoted an entire episode to Lloyd Webber to coincide with the opening of The Phantom of the Opera. This treatment of the work of a British musical theatre composer as not only legitimate, but worthy of artistic examination, was previously unheard of and a good indication of the impact Lloyd Webber was beginning to exert on the British theatrical landscape. In the course of The South Bank Show special, New York critic, Frank Rich, observed that before Andrew Lloyd Webber, there were no British musicals of any consequence. This is a matter of opinion – shows by Lionel Bart, Joan Littlewood, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley were nominated for Tony Awards – but it is an oftenrepeated assertion, and one that quite clearly equates the British musical with Lloyd Webber. This is partly a consequence of Evita being the first British show to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1980, thereby ending the long-held view of British practitioners as incapable of

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creating shows of equal artistic quality to those originating on Broadway. A fact that is frequently forgotten today is that Evita was also notable for establishing a defining characteristic of what became recognizable as the megamusical (as distinct from the rock opera), the sung through style. Dispensing with the book writer within a text-driven theatrical heritage was a bold statement and signalled a break with tradition and a new way of doing things. It consolidated the notion that the Lloyd Webber/Rice partnership was a step in a radically new direction and, more to the point, it established the music as paramount. In the absence of a book writer, the sung through show bestowed greater power onto the music and songs to dictate the mood and pace of the action, to supply the subtext and to control the emotional delivery of the work. The reaction of the audience was now effectively controlled and manipulated by the music which acted as an emotional signifier. When The Phantom of the Opera premiered in 1986, only fifteen years had passed since the original concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar had first brought Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to public attention. Back in the early 1970s, the media attention had focused on the controversy surrounding the subject matter of the album and the fierce division between youthful devotees who identified with the hippie make-over applied to Jesus and his Disciples, and irate church figures and campaigners who considered the work blasphemous. The double album reached number one on the US billboard chart on two separate occasions in 1971, and number twenty-three on the UK charts. By late summer of 1971, over twenty unauthorized stage productions of the album had been performed throughout the US and Canada, and producer, Robert Stigwood, moved quickly to obtain injunctions against these (and future) illegal productions which denied Rice and Lloyd Webber a share of the royalties from profits generated by their own work. The rush to stage an official production of the show on Broadway was designed to put an end to these illegal performances, and also to secure profits for the original creative team (including Stigwood). Directed by Tom O’Horgan, the Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar opened on Broadway in October 1971, with the protests

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between the fans and religious campaigners serving as free publicity. Stylistically incohesive, the US production was not a hit (although Lloyd Webber did win a Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Composer) but by the time a London production was on the cards the album was so popular in the UK that potential audience members already knew the score by heart and were eager to hear it played live. The idea that an album could be released prior to a show being produced was a new one, and apparently the outcome of the reluctance of theatrical producers to engage with a show with potentially volatile material. When viewed from a position fifty years later however, the release of the double album prior to the production does suggest a more calculated move than Lloyd Webber now cares to admit. He was already clearly shrewd enough to see the potential in commodifying the album/ show, regarding it dispassionately as something to be packaged, marketed and sold like any other commercial product – although in 1972, the idea of a British musical being equated with a highly profitable, mass-produced commodity, was faintly ludicrous. Jesus Christ Superstar was not the first time a British rock opera concept album had been embraced by a global younger generation – The Who’s Tommy had debuted in 1969 and Rice and Lloyd Webber could not have been unaware of its phenomenal critical and public success: number two in the UK album charts and number seven in the USA, where 200,000 copies were sold in the first two weeks following its release. By 1971, The Who had played excerpts from Tommy at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight Festival and the Metropolitan Opera House, and a stage production had been developed at the Seattle Opera. Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice would have been extremely ingenuous not to picture a parallel trajectory for Jesus Christ Superstar which at the time, was appealing to the same audience that had embraced The Who’s Tommy. Although it is incorrect to attribute the rise of the rock opera solely to Jesus Christ Superstar, the albums which followed in its footsteps – David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust (1972), Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds (1978) – were certainly as

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influenced by the Lloyd Webber/Rice album as they were by Tommy. But none of the later concept albums quite caught the public imagination in the way Jesus Christ Superstar did. The British stage production opened at the Palace Theatre in London in 1972, heralding the first major step of a journey which would revolutionize the modern musical. Whilst it is a myth that Andrew Lloyd Webber created the British musical, there is no doubt that from the opening notes of Jesus Christ Superstar, he signalled his determination to lead it away from Lionel Bart and his musical hall influences, and far from the folk music roots of the socialist plays with music. By the mid-1980s, Lloyd Webber had established a new style of musical, one which would come to be intrinsically aligned with a contemporary and original British voice. It is difficult now to fully appreciate the impact of Jesus Christ Superstar on popular culture at the time. It was the closest the British had come to producing their own version of Hair and it appeared to encapsulate the corresponding British version of the American youth revolution. In Britain, the American flower power and anti-Vietnam war movements translated as the Swinging Sixties, with Swinging London at the centre. The music of The Who, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles had led the way, and fashion – Mary Quant, Twiggy, Carnaby Street and Biba – followed suit. The mod subculture, the rise of the antinuclear movement and the sexual revolution all seemed to point towards a Britain which was, finally, emerging from post-war gloom and darkness into a new, brightly coloured and youth driven era. Despite their solidly upper middle-class credentials, Lloyd Webber and Rice appeared to epitomize this modern, liberated nation whose youthful populace was openly challenging the values of the previous generation and calling for an end to the class, gender and racial dividing lines which so rigidly demarcated British society. Bearing in mind the later robust denigration of Lloyd Webber as conformist Establishment and money fixated, it is important to remember that Jesus Christ Superstar was hailed as the voice of the new generation. The later denigration of Lloyd Webber, particularly from co-practitioners in straight/classical theatre, appears to be linked to the fact that his wealth

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came from musical theatre: no one publicly objects to Paul McCartney making millions from pop music or criticizes Sir Kenneth Branagh for eschewing classical theatre for the more lucrative film industry. Lloyd Webber was cool when he was writing a rock opera, but not so hip when he was amassing a fortune from T. S. Eliot poems and racing trains. There is also the possibility that his conspicuous financial success during the Greed is Good decade was viewed as selling out by those who believed that they had heard subversion in both the music and premise of Jesus Christ Superstar. * The British invasion of Broadway and the birth of the megamusical were two theatrical milestones driven by Andrew Lloyd Webber and producer Cameron Mackintosh. The shows which constituted the British Invasion took advantage of technological advances in theatre machinery to present large-scale spectaculars in which the central role of the performer (and the narrative) was displaced by moving set pieces and over amplification: The Phantom of the Opera was as inexorably linked with the chandelier as Miss Saigon was with the helicopter. With Cats in 1981, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh began refining the branding techniques which regarded a show as a product to be sold and consumed worldwide, stamped clearly on the underside with ‘Made in Britain’. Although Cats had only a tenuous connection with British identity, and Phantom, five years later, even less, the shows accurately reflected the 1980s capitalist ideals of Margaret Thatcher’s government. In this, the work of Lloyd Webber was wholly reproducing the British culture of the moment. While Thatcher developed her ‘special relationship’ with Ronald Reagan, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh cultivated their own affiliation with the US, exporting shows which redefined the British musical as global currency, thereby positioning musical theatre as one of the UK’s most valuable commodities. This was wholly in tune with the Thatcherite view of the arts as a business, one which should operate on corporate sponsorship instead of public subsidy, and one where success was judged on profitability, not artistry.

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That is not to say that Lloyd Webber’s work was defined by low artistic standards, but its ability to make money was the more significant characteristic. Mackintosh may have contributed the greater share of the business expertise, but it was Lloyd Webber’s name which the public associated with the new phenomenon of the megamusical. Lloyd Webber thus came to personify both the capitalist values and individualism advocated by Mrs Thatcher, who famously announced in the Women’s Own magazine in 1987, that there was no such thing as society. While new writing movements in UK theatres in the late 1980s and early 1990s produced a wave of plays excoriating the social decay which characterized inner-city communities under Thatcherism, corresponding Andrew Lloyd Webber productions reflected the excesses of the era with spiralling profits and a reproductive potential which embodied (and enabled) the Thatcherite value of commercialism. These lavish productions sowed the seeds of resentment against a handful of men, Lloyd Webber being the most visible, who were becoming extremely wealthy from a product which was viewed by many as the antithesis of the crippling poverty and social deprivation raging throughout post-industrial areas of the country. As a result of the unexpected success of Cats, Lloyd Webber had the financial freedom to go his own way within the industry without relying on financial or artistic support. Although his work as composer and/or producer on Cats, Starlight Express, The Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love (and Mackintosh’s Les Misérables and Miss Saigon) effectively divided British theatre, and theatregoers, into two camps, the success of the megamusicals indisputably raised the profile of British musical theatre at home and across the Atlantic. Andrew Lloyd Webber was regarded as the voice of a new era of musical theatre in the same way as Lin Manuel Miranda is today. Away from the technological wizardry dominating the stage, the real gamechanger ushered in by the megamusical was the adoption of marketing techniques more usually associated with high profile brands such as Calvin Klein or Nike. The previously ineffectual British musical suddenly became the hottest ticket of the moment, resulting in a waiting period for Phantom seats on

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Broadway of up to twelve months and scalpers selling tickets for anything up to ten times the ticket value. A carefully crafted global publicity machine started rolling at the announcement of each new production, guaranteeing that by the time the copycat Phantom opened in a blaze of glory six to twelve months later, few inhabitants of the chosen city, or country, could have been unaware of its presence. This drip feed strategy enabled excitement to build, arousing curiosity from even the most reluctant of consumers as to what exactly the fuss was about. Global city leaders and local media endorsed the notion that the populace was fortunate to have this show in its country, and opening night performances frequently dominated the local evening news bulletins and front pages of regional newspapers. In the beginning, Mackintosh went to considerable effort to encourage international productions of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon to reflect elements of the culture of the host nation, even adapting the iconic waif emblem on marketing material to have a local identity (this is still visible in the schools’ version which has the waif dressed in school uniform and carrying books). This encouraged a sense of ownership and dissipated the notion that a British artistic sensibility was being imposed on another culture. Productions of Lloyd Webber shows which did not have Mackintosh as producer were less inclined to follow this lead: apart from the language, Sunset Boulevard was the same show, with the same marketing strategies, whether it was in London, Germany or Australia. In the UK, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh brokered new agreements with West End theatre owners which removed the touring restrictions which had previously limited audience participation to those geographically or financially able to travel to London. The subsequent national tours of hit shows which were currently playing in the West End enabled the nationwide British population to engage with a high status cultural artefact and to position themselves within the current craze for West End musicals without having to leave their home town. This consolidated the view of Lloyd Webber shows in particular as intrinsically British, as the entire country was now included in a

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phenomenon which was successfully representing the nation on an international platform. The megamusicals were regarded as accessible to all and in the regional cities which hosted the UK tours the shows attracted a wider cross section of society than would normally make up the audience (except for the Christmas pantomime). It is often forgotten that it was the ultra-Establishment Andrew Lloyd Webber who was largely responsible for breaking down the perceived class barriers associated with theatre attendance in the UK. The fact that he subsequently made a vast fortune out of the new audience members is neither here nor there: the more pertinent point is that people up and down the country who had never before included theatre-going as part of their lives, now gained enormous enjoyment out of a night at one of his shows. And perhaps a percentage of those new attendees were sufficiently intrigued to investigate their local repertory company. It is difficult not to connect the disdain in which Lloyd Webber and his crowd-pleasing shows were held by the critics and theatrical Establishment in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with simple snobbery. And frustration that British theatre was being represented globally not by the Royal Shakespeare Company or a new irate Royal Court playwright, but by big budget spectaculars which traded on their mass appeal. At the beginning of the century, music hall and Variety catered to the audience who had little interest in classical plays or modern drama, and a strict dividing line separated the two forms, even allocating venues according to form and content. Post-war, musical theatre filled the gap left by the death of music hall and the decline in Variety, but these were often beyond the financial reach of the descendants of the music hall audience. By the 1990s, the combination of higher wages and double income households resulted in a working population with more money to spend on leisure activities, and a willingness to spend greater amounts on what was perceived as a special night out. The hype surrounding the regional tours of Cats, Phantom or Les Misérables played up the notion of the evening as An Experience, something to remember, and this was a huge part of the appeal for the new consumer:

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these were the days when dressing up to go to the theatre was part of the ritual and served to heighten the sense of being part of something special. What was onstage was only one part of the evening as a whole. Attending a Lloyd Webber/Mackintosh show enabled a section of society to engage with a form of culture they had previously felt excluded from due to their class or their own perceived lack of education. The grandeur of the marble staircase and the red velvet of the plush Grand or Theatre Royals of the regions contributed to the sense of occasion that seduced these new spectators. The easy accessibility of the show itself functioned to reassure the novice viewer that there was nothing intimidating about theatre and that they were more than welcome here. * Lloyd Webber has made some odd choices with his source material – it’s hard to know what appealed in the novels of Aspects of Love and The Woman in White – but he is undeniably a master of marketing strategies and expert at anticipating audience trends. His creativity is structured around the concept of supply and demand: he first creates the market by supplying the product, then responds to the growing demand by supplying more of the same, albeit in a slightly different format. While he cannot be held responsible for the public taste driving the insatiable appetite for his work, he consciously manipulates the demand for it, to the point where it is often difficult to distinguish which is more important: the content of the production, or the show as a brand. From as far back as 1971 and the reflection of the counter-culture hippie movement in Jesus Christ Superstar, Lloyd Webber has seized the moment and run with it – exploited it, some might say. Starlight Express tapped into the rollerblading mania of the 1980s, Bombay Dreams exploited Bollywood-mania, The Beautiful Game premiered a year after the Good Friday Agreement began the peace process in Northern Ireland, and Stephen Ward was a response to the craze for all things retro. His rhetoric concerning his most recent show, Cinderella, frames the show in language wholly in tune with current issues relating to

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female empowerment and the pressures on women to conform to the beauty ideal. All of which does raise the question of Lloyd Webber’s motivation. Is he writing from the heart, as he claimed he was with Requiem in 1985, or is he simply creating what he knows the public will respond to and will therefore be profitable? In 2006, Lloyd Webber took advantage of the popularity of reality TV and instigated a series of TV talent shows, beginning with How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, in which the viewing public voted to choose the young woman who would play Maria Von Trapp in his Really Useful Group’s new production of The Sound of Music. The series attracted negative critical reviews and the actors’ union, Equity, claimed it was demeaning to performers and not the correct way to cast leading roles. Lloyd Webber and the BBC were also accused of engineering free publicity for the forthcoming production, an accusation which grew in strength as the first TV series was followed by a second in 2007, Any Dream Will Do, to cast the leading role in a new production of Joseph. Then a third in 2008, to find Nancy and the three boys who would alternate the lead in Oliver!, and a fourth in 2011, Over the Rainbow, in which viewers not only chose Dorothy for the new Wizard of Oz, but also the dog, Toto. The increasing censure was water off a duck’s back to Lloyd Webber who pointed out that the series were providing a platform for musical theatre in the UK that it had never had before, enabling previously unimaginable numbers (the Oliver! episodes regularly drew over 6 million viewers) to engage with the genre from their own homes. The series had the required effect of boosting ticket sales amongst the voting public who developed a sense of ownership over the production, particularly if their preferred choice had won. An unforeseen benefit was the high level of engagement from the younger generation who were already familiar with the reality TV format and the personal investment required in the participants. The younger television viewer became the younger audience member, a crucial development given the consistent failure of British musicals (Jesus Christ Superstar aside) to appeal to the generation that would provide tomorrow’s audience. The reality TV series proved once again that while commentators may have

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had issues with Lloyd Webber’s relentless commercialization of the art form, audiences had no such reservations. They loved being included in the process, and they flocked to the resulting productions. Whether they made an association between the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber and constructs of national identity is impossible to know, but undoubtedly, there were concepts of ownership tied up in the production of commercial musicals in the UK: an acceptance that this is what ‘we’ do. What ‘we’ are good at. A perception led and fuelled by Lloyd Webber. Michael Billington suggests that the rise of the megamusical in the 1980s perfectly captured the ‘philistine spirit’ of the decade,3 and was directly responsible for subsidized theatres increasingly programming musicals in the repertoire. It is hard not to interpret Billington’s disapproval as a manifestation of his core belief in drama as more relevant to a British theatrical heritage than musicals, and perhaps a touch of impatience at Lloyd Webber’s insistence that theatre should be entertaining and open to all. Or at least those who could pay. Billington may also have been slightly piqued at the fact that, regardless of what he or any other critic thought of Starlight Express (Billington referred to it as ‘Theatrical Star Wars’ and John Barner in The Telegraph opined, ‘this is only playing trains on a gargantuan scale’) the audiences would still go. In time, this led to the audience dictating the direction of the form as Lloyd Webber, Mackintosh et al responded to a demand for greater spectacle and an even easier emotional fix, laying the groundwork for Disney to move in. There is an argument to be made that the Disney stage musicals were a direct result of the commodification of the genre by Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh who offered a vision of musical theatre as undemanding, mass entertainment which was in perfect alignment with the foundations of the Disney corporation. Aside from Disney, Broadway producers also realized that the product they were offering was no longer enough for audiences who had been seduced by the megamusical, and the style which had, for generations, defined the Broadway musical and separated it from the British, morphed into a generic imitation of Lloyd Webber/Mackintosh shows. Proof, again,

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that Lloyd Webber’s influence on the genre reaches far beyond the orchestra pit. In contrast to the exuberant reviews for the London production of Cats, many of which noted it as a watershed moment in British musical theatre history, the arrival of the show on Broadway in 1982, was damned with faint praise, Prior to Cats taking over the Winter Garden Theatre, the last musical in the building had been a 1981 revival of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, thus the premiere of Lloyd Webber’s feline dance musical appeared to encapsulate the changing of the guard. The reluctance of the American critics to fully embrace the new British style of musical theatre was more than cross-Atlantic rivalry, it was a belated acknowledgement that a bell was tolling, admittedly somewhere in the distance but tolling nevertheless, for the conventional Broadway musical comedy. And to rub salt into the wound, its replacement was not even American. By the time Les Misérables won eight Tony Awards in 1987, including Best Musical, a certain patriotic fervour was beginning to be associated with the British musical. The global success of the new British musicals appeared to symbolize the regeneration of Britain promised by Margaret Thatcher who had, almost two decades previously, vowed to Make Britain Great Again. The domination of Broadway by British musical theatre practitioners symbolized the newly confident and brash Thatcher’s Britain, the reinvigorated nation which had retaken the captured Falkland Islands in 1982 with a display of military might calculated to invoke the glorious days of the Empire. The British musicals and their creators had a corresponding swagger (personified by John Napier holding the 1987 Best Scenic Design Tony Award for Les Misérables and using his acceptance speech to question why Starlight Express had not been nominated) which did not endear them to American commentators. By the early 1990s, Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh wielded such power over Broadway that both men could threaten to cancel Broadway transfers of their hit shows if their demands to import their stars from the London productions were not met, secure in the knowledge that American Equity would eventually give way.4 *

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The restyling of Andrew Lloyd Webber during the Covid lockdowns as a national icon is slightly incongruous given his reluctance to reflect the nation, particularly the contemporary nation, in his onstage narratives. That is not to say that local content is obligatory in order to qualify as a national icon – the Spice Girls did not sing songs about the experience of being British – but Lloyd Webber is so intrinsically associated with the British musical that his consistent failure to analyse the nation becomes intriguing. Cosseted by his wealth and status, does he simply have no interest in the state of the nation? The activities of his charitable foundation would appear to challenge that, given that it offers financial support to cultural, arts and heritage projects throughout the country and is in partnership with the Music in Secondary Schools Trust, an organization dedicated to supporting music tuition in schools in disadvantaged areas. Perhaps it comes down to what he considers to be a good subject for a musical, and fantasy narratives offer greater opportunities to be grandly theatrical. Stephen Ward, which premiered in 2013, is the only Lloyd Webber musical which thematically explores a defining moment in British social history, the moment when the morally upstanding upper classes were exposed as perpetuating a duplicitous double standard where sex was concerned. The Profumo Affair seemed a bizarre choice of subject matter to refashion into a musical and it may have been a calculated attempt by Lloyd Webber to challenge the perception of him as a purveyor of lightweight, fantastical entertainment for the masses. Perhaps he also saw an opportunity to put his own stamp onto the historical events by presenting Ward as a victim, betrayed by his Establishment friends who deserted him to save their own reputations. Lloyd Webber has a tendency (not unrelated to control issues) to claim established narratives as his own by offering an alternative interpretation – Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind and Cinderella – the inference being, that he knows how to tell a better story. Which may indeed be the case, but it is up for debate as to whether the Profumo/Keeler narrative was a story worth giving another outing in the first place. Unlike Cats or Starlight Express, Stephen Ward is a

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show where it is imperative to have prior knowledge of the 1960s political scandal before attending the theatre. The script by Christopher Hampton is littered with allusions to cultural moments and characters from this period in British history. An audience member lacking extensive knowledge of either the period or the events in question would, in all probability, be left baffled by references to the masked man, the ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ political slogan, Viscount Astor, Lucky Gordon, Peter Rachman and MI5 head, Roger Hollis. The show was clearly aimed at a British audience, but the requisite knowledge of politics and current affairs from fifty years previously severely limited its appeal. Lloyd Webber’s fan base is predominantly middle-aged women, yet the pervasive misogyny of Stephen Ward would have tested even the most committed devotee. And with a titular character as thoroughly unpleasant as Stephen Ward undoubtedly was, it was difficult to ascertain who exactly Lloyd Webber envisaged buying tickets for this show. Stephen Ward depicts 1960s sexually liberated London in all its seedy underworld and swinging glory. This is a landscape where powerful male politicians and titled aristocrats regard women as fair game, using (and rewarding) them for sex, then returning to their upper-class wives and respected positions in society. Familiar tropes regarding working class women and easy sex are recycled within a framework not too far removed from the nudge and winks of Mrs Henderson Presents or the Carry On films. And perhaps that was indeed what Lloyd Webber regarded as the appeal of the show – the insatiable British appetite for sex. Especially forbidden sex. Because however loudly the populace had tutted at the sexual shenanigans of cabinet ministers, peers of the realm, soviet spies and teenage showgirls in 1963, they had universally obsessed over the seedy revelations, eagerly poring over the morning newspaper for the latest sordid crumb. Stephen Ward gave the viewer nothing new with regard to the representation of national culture or identity: a series of race and class stereotypes populated the stage in a narrative which, for British audiences at least, had all been heard before. The show was, in essence, a more sophisticated version of that national delight peculiar

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to British seaside resorts, the saucy postcard. But it lacked the ‘cheeky British personality’ ascribed to SIX by critic Dominic Cavendish.5 If anything, the fact that Lloyd Webber appeared to believe the show would have immediate appeal solely within the context of Britishness, only served to expose his disconnection from any real understanding of how societal shifts with regard to race, class and gender were redefining constructs associated with national identity. Lloyd Webber’s previous brush with a British narrative, The Beautiful Game, had posted equally disastrous results. The show focused on a teenage football team in Belfast in the early 1970s and utilized the individual emotional journeys of the players as a metaphor for the increasing civil unrest in Northern Ireland. It is another example of how thoroughly removed Lloyd Webber is from issues relating to national identity, either his own or that of the populace, that he believed two Englishmen, himself and lyricist/book writer, Ben Elton, could produce a show with an authentic voice representing the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In creating The Beautiful Game, both Ben Elton and Lloyd Webber demonstrated an appalling ignorance of the fact that, to the Catholic population of Northern Ireland, the English were the Troubles. For this narrative to be told through an English lens was, therefore, highly problematic from the outset. In addition, Lloyd Webber’s social background and public admiration of Margaret Thatcher formed a foundation layered with bias and reeked of yet another entitled Englishman assuming the right to speak on the behalf of one of the smaller nations of the United Kingdom. The casual indifference towards the feelings of the local population – encapsulated by two non-Catholics telling a highly emotive story about the Catholic community – was cultural appropriation at its most arrogant. And yet, possibly because the narrative concerned a white British community and engaged with a highly contentious topic, not one critic offered an opinion regarding the inappropriateness of this tale being relayed by two men with no experience at all of the cultural and religious divisions built into the very foundations of Northern Ireland. In 2000, the Good Friday Agreement, which had brought an uneasy ceasefire to Northern Ireland,

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was only two years old, and a musical which reopened old wounds so soon was more than a touch insensitive. But Lloyd Webber appeared to regard Belfast with the same eye as he cast over the young women at the heart of the Profumo scandal, i.e. as little more than a prop in the tale he had decided to tell. Both The Beautiful Game and Stephen Ward do more than simply confirm that Lloyd Webber is not suited to social realism (however superficial), they corroborate the perception that the combination of his class and wealth has rendered him completely out of touch with any concept of British identity, and apparently unable to empathize with anything other than his own elite experience. If Andrew Lloyd Webber is synonymous with the term The British Musical, then he is required to be held, at least to some degree, as accountable for the fact that the industry remains so resolutely white, male and middle-class. This may seem unfair, but Lloyd Webber has for over four decades dictated the direction of the genre in the UK and influenced new generations of writers, producers and directors who follow his lead. Admittedly, Lloyd Webber has done more than Cameron Mackintosh or producers at Ambassador Theatre Group, for example, to tackle the racial inequality within the industry. He produced Bombay Dreams, of course, and funds scholarships at training institutions for non-white and/or disadvantaged students. In addition, his Foundation commissioned research in 2016 which examined ways of tackling the racial inequality in the industry in the UK. Which is all extremely laudable but does not quite cancel out the fact that his creative teams continue to be white, and his shows tell stories told through a white lens: casting a handful of non-whites performers in roles in Cinderella does not negate that. More impactful support would involve a longterm commitment to an initiative dedicated to discovering and developing culturally diverse voices to create musicals which reflect the broad racial make up of the UK. Exactly the initiative, in fact, that existed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East before a lack of funding made it impossible to continue. When Starlight Express opened on Broadway in 1987, Frank Rich was the only critic who recognized and called out the misogyny at the

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heart of the show, writing. ‘. . . all the women are subservient carriages vying for the favours of mostly abusive male locomotives, with only an androgynous male caboose occupying lower social status.’6 Misogyny is a pervasive thread throughout Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work and yet, apart from the Frank Rich review over thirty years ago, it has gone unacknowledged by commentators. Since his break with Tim Rice, Lloyd Webber has worked with numerous lyricists and book writers including Richard Stilgoe, Don Black, Charles Hart, Ben Elton, Jim Steinman, David Zippel, Glenn Slater, Christopher Hampton, Frederick Forsyth and Julian Fellowes. In a forty-year career, only one female director and two female book writers have contributed to a Lloyd Webber musical, which does explain the endless parade of passive victims and/or deranged women who populate his shows. Characterization is not the part of the composer’s remit, understood, but within the hierarchy of composer/lyricist/book writer it is safe to assume that it is Lloyd Webber who takes the lead in the creative process (he has a book writing credit on Whistle Down the Wind). Indeed, it would not be inappropriate to wonder how much of a say anyone on an Andrew Lloyd Webber production has on the development of the show. It is easy to blame Don Black for the fact that the female character – the only character – in Tell Me On A Sunday does not even have a name (we know who Sheldon Bloom is) and defines herself solely in relation to men. Or Ben Elton for characters who exist only to further the male narrative. Or Christopher Hampton for depictions of women as either manipulative or mad. But Lloyd Webber has allowed all of this to pass in shows carrying his name, suggesting he did not consider it either relevant or problematic. Not even a female book writer on Cinderella could reverse the inclination towards sexism discernible in all Lloyd Webber musicals and it is impossible to ignore the fact that the common denominator is Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. From Potiphar’s wife who seduces the innocent Joseph, through Rose in Aspects of Love who sings the excruciating victim ballad ‘Anything But Lonely’, to all the female roles in Cinderella, the women in Lloyd Webber shows embody an outdated set of patriarchal clichés which no British critic has found

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disturbing enough to challenge. That is either an indicator of the level of power Lloyd Webber wields over the industry in the UK, or it suggests that no critic deems his work relevant enough to seriously analyse as social commentary (the appalling racial stereotypes in Steven Ward also passed without comment). The enormous attention given to the fact that Cinderella has a female book writer in Emerald Fennell – a phenomenon so unusual as to be noteworthy (and surely that is the more pertinent issue?) – has diverted attention away from the fact that it apparently requires a male director and lyricist to explain the perils of the beauty construct to contemporary women. Possibly the overriding reason why the, predominantly male, UK critics do not take issue with Lloyd Webber’s consistent demeaning depiction of women, is that they simply don’t notice it. Stephen Ward, for example, is a show which dismisses male abuse of women as a minor aberration, yet in his review of the show, Michael Billington’s only comment on the female characters read: ‘Charlotte Spencer looks good as Keeler without ever suggesting she was half as much fun as her pal, Mandy Rice-Davies, whom Charlotte Blackledge endows with a bubbling bounciness.’7 Bear in mind that Billington was, at that point, regarded as the leading arts critic in the nation, yet he ignored issues concerning the grooming and abuse of young women, and reduced the female characters (and performers) to their looks and ability to have a good time. * There is a curious parallel with work and careers of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Noël Coward which is worth noting for its synchronicity, if nothing else. Both men created a distinct style of theatre which the critics loathed but which was enormously popular with audiences – by the end of the 1920s, Coward was amongst the wealthiest writers in the world. Coward frequently co-produced his works for theatre and film (although he never founded his own production company) and both men were, in their own time, regarded as the voice of the British musical: Coward established it and Lloyd Webber reinvented it. Whereas Lloyd

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Webber has tended to steer clear of narratives which engage with concepts of Britishness, Coward unashamedly exploited patriotic inclinations and consistently reproduced national constructs and characteristics, particularly with regard to class. Coward had a mania for control, often writing both the script and the music as well as directing and/or starring in the production. Lloyd Webber’s removal of the book writer from his work was only the start of the complete control he came to have over all aspects of his work, even building his own production company to ensure no outside interference. Like Lloyd Webber, Coward’s work was dismissed as lightweight and pandering to the masses, but his talent for self-promotion ensured that he was a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. The criticism which was heaped upon the overblown and patriotic Cavalcade in 1931 – style over substance and spectacle over heart – was a precursor of the censure directed at Lloyd Webber fifty years later. And, like Lloyd Webber, it was increasingly difficult to know what, if anything, Noël Coward stood for. Other than himself. Coward’s highly successful reinvention of himself as a cabaret artist in the 1950s was a result of the stalling of his writing career, due partly to his inability to accept the fact that the theatrical landscape in which he started out had irrevocably changed. In 1946, twenty years after his dazzling success as the writer and star of Andre Charlot’s musical revue, London’s Calling, Coward wrote and directed Pacific 1860, an operetta with a narrative steeped in Colonialism and a conventional theatrical style. Coward’s work was undeniably dated by this time – Oklahoma had premiered in 1943 and Broadway was only four years away from Loesser’s Guys and Dolls – but he clung to the form which had worked so well for him in 1929 with Bitter Sweet, refusing to acknowledge that it had had its day. The same charge could be levelled at Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose production of Cinderella reveals him as woefully out of touch with the stylistic innovations which have redefined the genre in the last decade. The narrative is clearly intended to strike a chord with audiences in tune with the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo social movements, but those viewers are unlikely to be impressed with a form

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of storytelling which had its moment back in the 1990s. Cinderella is so stylistically and musically conventional that it could be mistaken for a revival of a 1950s musical in which the text has been updated to accommodate contemporary concerns but all other areas of the original show remain under copyright. It is reminiscent of Patrick Garland’s staging of a musical version of Goodbye Mr Chips at Chichester in 1982 as Cats and Blood Brothers marched ominously over the horizon. It is a categoric denial that anything has changed and a defiant refusal to accommodate new ideas, either out of an artistic inability to do so or in the absolute belief that no one knows better than Andrew Lloyd Webber as to what makes a good musical. The fact that Phantom continues to sell out across the world fuels this conviction and renders the progressive strides taken by Hamilton or & Juliet irrelevant, both to him, and to the amber-encased theatrical landscape he inhabits. Cinderella appears to confirm that Lloyd Webber is no longer interested in artistry or innovative storytelling in the way he was when he started out five decades ago. His previous enthusiasm for reflecting the zeitgeist which started with Jesus Christ Superstar has mutated into a calculated exploitation of current trends within the context of profitability. Lloyd Webber is so intent on replicating societal preoccupations that his shows are beginning to have the feel of a manufactured boy band – a bland and dispassionately created artefact designed to serve a specific purpose. In Lloyd Webber’s case, that purpose is not solely to make money but to consolidate his position as the Voice of British Musical Theatre: in touch, on message and serving the populace. The glaring lack of any authentic creative aspiration behind Cinderella ultimately renders the show, like so many of its characters, a synthetic Barbie Doll: outdated, conventional and devoid of any heart. Beyond his shows, Lloyd Webber’s reincarnation of himself as the elder statesman of the British musical is fast becoming his latest brand. Just as Coward reinvented himself during the Second World War, entertaining the troops on a gruelling overseas tours and writing, producing, starring in and co-directing (with David Lean) the intensely patriotic film In Which We Serve (1942), so too has Andrew Lloyd

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Webber engineered his own public re-assessment due to his actions during the Covid-19 pandemic. He very publicly lobbied on behalf of British theatre and the theatre-going public to ensure theatre and the arts were not excluded from national reopening plans which, unsurprisingly, focused on sport. His efforts to keep theatre in the national consciousness throughout the pandemic resulted in him being awarded a place in The Stage 100 list in 20218 under the category recognizing artists for their Lobbying and Campaigning efforts. He became the media go-to person for any theatre and lockdown related issue, offering constant updates on how and when theatres could operate safely and vowing to chain himself to Downing Street railings if that’s what it took to reopen theatres.9 He maintained an aimable profile on Tik Tok during lockdowns, answering questions regarding his work, playing music from his shows onstage in a deserted theatre, inviting fans to watch music sessions at his home with the musical director of Cinderella, even introducing his dog. But perhaps more pertinently, he transformed his public profile – just as Noël Coward did – from a slightly pompous and out of touch member of the elite, to the nation’s theatrical saviour. Of course, Lloyd Webber was not the only theatre professional voicing fears for the industry and pleading for government support during the arts shutdown, but his particular concerns were the most widely publicized. His quarrel in June 2021 with Prime Minister Boris Johnson, regarding the extension of social distancing in theatres resulted in an enormous rise in public support for Lloyd Webber when he announced he would open Cinderella at full capacity regardless, and was prepared to be arrested if it forced the reopening of theatres. His actions were positively reported on the BBC Radio 2 programmes hosted by Michael Ball and Elaine Paige, and Lloyd Webber regularly tweeted the messages of support he received from the public including from one fan who offered to bring him a cake in jail. Whether he was truly prepared to be arrested is irrelevant, the point is that he calculatedly refashioned himself as the voice of the people. The constant headlines and updates were, of course, good publicity for Cinderella (shades of the

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religious protests surrounding Jesus Christ Superstar) but the fact remains that it was the belligerence of Andrew Lloyd Webber which caused questions to be raised in parliament regarding the suspension of social distancing regulations in UK theatres. He clearly revelled in his new status as the thorn in the government’s side but his claim that he ‘never wanted, never intended to be the sort of spokesman for the arts and theatre in Britain’10 would have been more credible if he had ceased giving press interviews and taking to social media. When Prime Minister Johnson announced that all restrictions would be lifted from 19 July, Lloyd Webber posted a statement declaring that the additional proceeds (from the seats now made available under the new rules) from the Freedom Day performance of Cinderella would be donated to the St John’s Ambulance service and the NHS. Remove the cynicism at his blatant attempt to align himself with ‘ordinary’ people, and it is impossible not to acknowledge his success in continually re-enforcing the crucial role of the arts in a post-pandemic Britain and ensuring that theatre was not excluded from debates which primarily focused on the hospitality industry and sport. But make no mistake, the ‘theatre’ Andrew Lloyd Webber was referring to, was large scale, commercial musicals, i.e. his own work. His primary concern, which he regularly and unashamedly expressed, was to reopen The Phantom of the Opera and to premiere Cinderella. How the regional rep companies would rebuild was not his concern. There is the possibility that Lloyd Webber’s entire quarrel with Boris Johnson was manufactured specifically to provide him with the stage on which he could play his new role of Theatre Activist. And after all the public squabbling, the much-publicized premiere of Cinderella was postponed due to a cast member testing positive for Covid and the company having to isolate. Clearly furious, Lloyd Webber blamed the ‘impossible conditions created by the blunt instrument that is the government’s isolation guidance’,11 omitting to acknowledge that his was not the only production forced to cancel performances due to cast or crew members testing positive for Covid (none of which had received the saturation levels of publicity he had engineered for Cinderella).

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Basically, what Andrew Lloyd Webber was demanding from the government was that the Great British public be allowed to exercise their democratic right to buy tickets to his shows. * Andrew Lloyd Webber epitomizes England and Englishness (not Britishness, note). He is nostalgic for former glory, and he aggressively exercises his influence in the belief that nothing has changed. His Establishment credentials may be better disguised now than in the days when he invited Margaret Thatcher to opening nights and ingratiated himself with the Queen, but his sense of upper-class entitlement has not diminished. His shows quite blatantly reflect the sexist culture pervasive in the UK as identified by UN representative, Rashida Manjoo, and he accommodates new definitions of nationhood in a manner which suggests the intent is more to be noticed than to effect change: he may fund scholarships for ethnic minority students, but Cinderella remains white. Viewed from a different perspective, perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber is, in fact, on a mission to make the British musical more relevant by reflecting current trends. He is knowingly mobilizing a cultural artefact, admittedly his own, to give an artistic voice to the zeitgeist. Cinderella is undoubtedly intended to appeal to a youthful, activist audience – the same committed, enthusiastic and rebellious spirits who heard revolution in Jesus Christ Superstar. There is, however, a fine line between reflecting a mood and exploiting it, and it is increasingly apparent that Lloyd Webber has crossed that line, with the result that it is now almost impossible to identify any real convictions or value system in his work. The young man with a point to make with Jesus Christ Superstar, and the artistic vision so apparent in Evita, appears to have been replaced by the veteran who knows exactly what the public will respond to and who has ceased to question the way of the world. What is more disturbing, is the growing suspicion that critics are becoming so wary of incurring the wrath of a man as powerful within British theatre as Lloyd Webber has now become, that they are reluctant to say anything which would reflect badly on him. In their

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reviews of Stephen Ward in 2013, UK critics universally failed to challenge Lloyd Webber, Don Black, Christopher Hampton and director, Richard Eyre on the truly appalling racial stereotyping in the characterizations of Johnny Edgecombe and Lucky Gordon (a startling contrast to the Damascene conversion Lloyd Webber has apparently since undergone and signals so virtuously in Cinderella). A common thread throughout the press reviews of Cinderella is the underlying sense that no critic honestly thinks this is a good show, but they feel obligated to treat it kindly – Sarah Crompton even says as much in her WhatsonStage review, writing, ‘it would be churlish to welcome this Cinderella with anything other than pleasure’.12 Prior to that, she states that ‘not everything works’ and exhorts readers to ‘forgive it’s failings’, yet ends by giving the show four stars. Whether this obligation emanates from sympathy for Lloyd Webber’s battles throughout the pandemic to get the show open or genuine appreciation at his efforts in keeping theatre in the public (and political) consciousness during lockdowns is anyone’s guess: it could also be a result of the reluctance of any critic to find fault with a show which so blatantly parades woke credentials in tune with the times, and thus risk the outrage of the cancel culture generation. Whatever it is, Crompton’s views were echoed by Nick Curtis in The Evening Standard, who admitted the show was not perfect, would quickly date and that the ‘story stutters to an awkward halt’, yet he also gave the production four stars.13 And despite Suzy Evans’ observation that Fennell’s script ‘wanders off course’, she too awarded the show four stars.14 It would, of course, be wrong to suggest that the British critics are either in collusion with Andrew Lloyd Webber or terrified of the consequences of upsetting him, but it is impossible not to register the free pass increasingly awarded to Lloyd Webber shows by critics who are not so forgiving of offerings from other writers, composers and producers. Vanessa Thorpe, media correspondent on The Observer, noted the post-pandemic impulse from critics to be kind to recent mediocre work, including Cinderella, to encourage audiences back into British theatres,15 but she also noted that treating productions with kid gloves ultimately does the show, and the industry, a disservice.

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With regards to Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, Thorpe wrote that, ‘many of those in the industry have quietly raised an eyebrow at the warm blanket of praise thrown over the cast’. None of this would matter quite as much if Lloyd Webber’s shows were not global brands, intrinsically associated with British culture, and assumed to be representative of the British musical as a genre. As was noted at the beginning of the chapter, Lloyd Webber has so successfully infiltrated the genre that he is frequently assumed to be the British musical instead of one thread in a much bigger tapestry. This has resulted in a global audience presuming that a sung through, heavily marketed, technological fantasy is the only kind of musical Britain can produce, and audiences at home expecting nothing less. Or at least, nothing different. This, an Andrew Lloyd Webber show, is how the British do musicals. Which is not entirely correct: it is how the British have learned to do commercial musicals from Andrew Lloyd Webber (and Cameron Mackintosh). And while there is no doubt that his easily accessible style of theatre has encouraged new audience members in previously unimagined figures, it has cut off the audience who appreciated musical theatre as more than cheery chappie cliches, glitzy spectaculars and jukebox shows, i.e. the audience who cheered the socialist values in Blood Brothers and appreciated the artistic ambitions of The Hired Man. Lloyd Webber’s work may have little to contribute to debates concerning national identity but its place as an artefact within British culture has been secured by the long West End runs of Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express and The Phantom of the Opera and popular regional tours of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (including a sing along cinema version), Cats and Whistle Down the Wind. When Cats became a British cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, Lloyd Webber was frequently found on the couches of television chat shows and on the society pages of the print media elevating the British musical into a new level of public consciousness. His profile received an enormous boost via the reality TV talent shows and his celebrity status is enhanced by his regular presence on social

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media. In short, Andrew Lloyd Webber is as much a British cultural product as his own shows. In 1982, his theme for the Jellicle Ball was recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and used as the theme tune for the BBC Grandstand coverage of the World Cup football tournament. Given the central position of football within British culture, the act of associating Lloyd Webber with a sporting event which brings the UK to a standstill every four years, was an indication of the pride and excitement which initially surrounded his work, not least because it was positioning a British product in an international spotlight. Even for the members of the population who had no interest in his music or his shows, the sense that here was someone doing something positive for Britain and showcasing the talent of the nation, was palpable. Love him or loathe him, he had transformed the nation into a gold medallist in a field where, only a few years previously, it had not even been a serious contender. And in all fairness, none of his musicals can be classed as bad theatre – Cinderella (and Phantom) are simply out of touch artistically – not that his audience appears to notice. The shows, even the music, are not the issue. The brand of Andrew Lloyd Webber is what, arguably, has become damaging to the British Musical as a genre. Because it is a brand which show no signs of disappearing or even modifying itself, or, more pertinently, making way for new voices to pick up the baton. In 2018, Michael Billington, in an apparent volte-face, acknowledged the debt owed by the British musical to Lloyd Webber, writing: . . . he deserves credit for his careful stewardship of the theatres he owns and for taking the British musical out of its cosy backwater and, by choosing a range of unlikely subjects, sending it spinning round the globe. You don’t have to like all his shows – I could cheerfully live without seeing Starlight Express again – but post-war British theatre without him would have been a duller place.16

Undoubtedly, Andrew Lloyd Webber agreed.

6

I can smile at the old days: Nostalgia and the British musical

Ian Bradley’s assertion that musical theatre holds a mirror up to society and reflects the current political preoccupations1 is correct up to a point, but it overlooks the tendency towards nostalgia favoured by the creators of British shows from as far back as Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet in 1929. Neither are British dramatists immune to this tendency, and in the early 2000s a series of history plays pointed towards the retrospective theme infusing British theatre, an inclination that critic and researcher Aleks Sierz refers to as, ‘a flight from the contemporary, a refusal to look reality in the eye’.2 Sierz cites Alan Bennet’s award winning play, The History Boys (2004) as a prime example of the penchant amongst British audiences for nostalgic re-imaginings of the recent past. The drama was set in an all-boys secondary school in the North of England in the 1980s but dispensed with the reality of a state education system crippled by Thatcher’s funding cuts and social deprivation, in favour of a fantastical reimagining of what appeared to be a selective grammar school from the 1950s. In doing so, the play presented the era (and state education) in a way the audience would prefer to have it remembered, thus enabling a conviction that this is how it had really been. It was, in essence, a staged photograph, where a chosen part of the story was visible but only the posed and retouched part of the story that the photographer wanted the viewer to see. The less photogenic details had been cropped from the image. Britons tend to give more weight to a (perceived) glorious past than a promising future and British musicals frequently present a wistful tone – witness how many reviews begin with the phrase, ‘a loving salute to . . .’ The purpose of the nostalgic interventions which pervade the British 181

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musical may vary, but the use of nostalgia as a thematic framework is becoming a given. The entire point of the jukebox musical, which was popularized by British practitioners, is to incite longing for the fondly reconstructed past by engaging with the music of a lost youth. Shows which celebrate a deceased performer such as Underneath the Arches (1981), Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (1989) and Jolson (1995) capitalize on the yearning to revisit a performance which is no longer available. This yearning to revisit is also harnessed by British musicals adapted from fondly remembered films such as Goodbye Mr Chips, Scrooge, Whistle Down the Wind and Local Hero, but in these instances, the viewer revisits the emotions associated with a particular cultural artefact. The fantasy musicals such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Mary Poppins and Matilda exploit this desire a step further by mobilizing nostalgia to create a bond with the audience through the invocation of childhood and/or memories of childhood. Such is the pervasive influence of nostalgia on the British musical that even the gritty evocations of the North in Billy Elliot and The Last Ship are infused with longing for the industrial might and great days of the vanished Glorious Empire. Nostalgia presents the past as an idyllic space, one which no amount of longing will recreate, but a narrative and/or music of the era touches a nerve and enables this romanticized remembered space to re-emerge for a limited period thus satisfying an emotional need in the viewer. The question, of course, is one of what exactly it is that we are nostalgic for? More to the point, what is so disappointing about the present that we are compelled constantly to look back in the belief that this is where the answer lies? An interpretation of the past which is influenced by nostalgic interventions, such as the England depicted in Mrs Henderson Presents or Betty Blue Eyes, holds great appeal as a diversion from reality because the reconstructed past has been stripped of any threat or danger. This sanitization of history is evident in the heritage industry which commodifies the past and refashions it for contemporary purposes – warehouse conversions, art galleries in former prisons, the watermill café, etc. The appeal of the venue is in the historical association, but the building has been cleansed of any of the unpleasant historical realities: an

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audience can have a more fully immersive experience of a Shakespeare performance by attending the Globe Theatre secure in the knowledge that there are café facilities and clean restrooms. The nature of nostalgia requires that the past is presented, and thus viewed, through a rose-tinted lens – in other words, the past is mythologized, often to support a political position or purpose which frequently has associations with nationalism. The British musicals set in the Swinging Sixties – Spend, Spend, Spend, Made in Dagenham and Stephen Ward – trade on the national affection for the era when a British cultural aesthetic led the way in global fashion and music movements. The Second World War musicals Betty Blue Eyes, Underneath the Arches, and Mrs Henderson Presents trade on the ‘plucky little England’ construct to invoke patriotic pride. The latter two shows also invoke the past through stylistic interventions which are intended to remind the audience of Variety performances, or the end of the pier shows which encapsulated the British seaside experience. Betty Blue Eyes is reminiscent in comedic style of the post-war Ealing Comedies, a series of films including Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955) which were feted as reflecting the postwar British spirit as the populace negotiated rationing and a weakening of the class divide. The war musicals are intended to strike an imagined chord, and although the audience may be aware that what they are being presented with is a manipulated version of events, it is a reinterpretation which incites nationalistic pride and is therefore highly attractive, addictive even. Over time, the remodelled version of the past becomes so ingrained in the national consciousness that it is taken to be authentic. The representation of stoic Londoners singing songs whilst sheltering from the Blitz in Underground stations has erased the reality of the filth, the deaths and the trauma from collective memory. It also neglects to include the cities of Coventry, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow in a national narrative of prolonged bombing attacks with horrific death tolls, and instead reshapes the account to be London-centric. The Blitz in London has thus become the benchmark for Britishness, and the idealized sing-a-longs on the platforms of Leicester Square function as

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a means of uniting the contemporary population through the manufactured emotion of the constructed ‘Dunkirk Spirit’. This nostalgic intervention appeals to an imagined sense memory: the viewer comes to believe they remember the experience (despite never actually having had it) and consequently claims ownership of the ‘memory’. The commodification of the stiff upper lip and good-humoured resilience, which is claimed as the embodiment of the English spirit (not the British spirit, note), is a manufactured concept widely embraced throughout the modern nation – witness the popularity of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ brand of retro merchandising – as it reinforces an imagined national trait which incites pride. The ‘Our Finest Moment’ construct prevalent in the war musicals reiterates the triumphalist myths of one little island fighting off invasion and holding her own alongside larger aggressive nations, and this interpretation holds great appeal in a postcolonial era and an increasingly divided Britain. The beginning of the break-up of the United Kingdom began in 1999, when certain governing powers were transferred from Westminster to devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland, and to the National Assembly in Northern Ireland. The subsequent uncertainty surrounding English, or even British, identity could account for the increase in the use of nostalgia within cultural production. The idealized English spirit on display in the Second World War shows has Empirical overtones and reasserts England as divorced from any ideal of either a United Kingdom or a European Union: it is therefore unimportant that shows such as Betty Blue Eyes or Mrs Henderson Presents fail to resonate with the same emotional depth with Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish audiences. How the past is reshaped depends on the needs of the present, and a nation – in this case, England – no longer an Empire and spurned by Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is bound to reinforce a glorious past to forge a more palatable present. In this case, why the past is remembered and invoked, holds more relevance than how it is. The Plucky Little England motif is mobilized in present-day cultural artefacts to reassure the English that they were, and still are, an exceptional nation. In Mrs Henderson Presents in 2016, this theme acquired heightened relevance

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given that the show was playing in the West End in the year of the intensely divisive Brexit vote. On one hand, the mood and viewpoint of the show reaffirmed to Leave voters that England would thrive being independent of Europe, as it had done in the past. For the Remainers (and the Scots and Northern Irish) the show was narrow-mindedly English-centric and therefore, in terms of nationwide equality, embodied why a United Kingdom was better in Europe than out. Not that there is any suggestion that the show was designed to promote a political position, but the patriotic fervour it unashamedly displayed had an unforeseen resonance due to the Brexit debate. Collective memory is intrinsically linked with notions of national identity as the act of remembering, on Remembrance Sunday, for example, when the nation salutes its war dead with two minutes silence, unites the local and national communities with a shared understanding of the past events which have shaped the present. The sentiment provoked by the shared experience stimulates a sense of security in belonging to a community which recollects the same past, and the act of remembering thus produces identity. This emotional response is evident in the shared experience of jukebox musicals – Mamma Mia!, We Will Rock You, Sunshine on Leith – where audience members are encouraged to participate in the finale, singing and dancing in the aisles in a collective celebration of memory. Rewriting the past and presenting it as better, or simply more fun than it was (a familiar characteristic of high school reunions) serves to improve the present by offering a hint of the potential for the return of the ‘good old days’. * Nostalgia is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past’. Musicals often exploit this longing to entice an older audience by offering the chance to enjoy a gentle two and half hour amble down a manufactured Memory Lane. The attraction is in the ‘sentimental longing’ for the lost era which the show recreates, but it is also in the security of a familiarity with the product and knowing exactly what to expect. Chichester

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Festival Theatre principally plays to a retired, middle-class audience and new musicals from the company frequently mobilize nostalgic interventions to appeal to this demographic. In 1981, as Blood Brothers was starting life in a Liverpool comprehensive school, Artistic Director of Chichester, Patrick Garland, created a musical with writers Brian Glanville and Roy Hudd, which undoubtedly had the retired subscriber base in mind. Underneath the Arches was essentially a tribute to The Crazy Gang, a much-loved comedy troupe which began life in the 1930s and gained enormous popularity during the war when the group acquired the reputation for keeping the nation entertained against the odds. The Crazy Gang delivered musical numbers and quick-fire slapstick routines in an act which appealed across the generations and across the class divide. The troupe had a permanent show at the London Palladium during the war (famous for playing on throughout the Blitz), made numerous films in the 1930s and 1940s and had their own television series in 1956. Their popularity was such that they were stalwarts of the annual Royal Command Performance until their last appearance in 1961. In short, The Crazy Gang was a national cultural icon from a particular era, and to resurrect the troupe in a musical aimed at an audience who still remembered the original was an inspired move. Underneath the Arches took its title from a song which was instantly recognizable throughout the UK as inexorably linked with Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen, one of the three double acts which made up the Crazy Gang.3 Focusing primarily on Flanagan and Allen, the retrospective musical recounted the rise to success of the Gang and interspersed the narrative with classic routines from the troupe’s stage shows, recreated by cast member Peter Glaze, who had joined the Crazy Gang after the war as an understudy. Roy Hudd (also co-writer of the show) played Bud Flanagan, and Christopher Timothy, then at the height of his popularity as James Herriot in the television series All Creatures Great and Small, played Chesney Allen.4 The Hudd/Timothy onstage partnership delivered such an accurate reincarnation of the nation’s beloved Flanagan and Allen, that the show was able to demolish

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the historical distance and enable audience members to fully collude in the fantasy that this really was Flanagan and Allen, and 1981 was still decades away in the future. Underneath the Arches therefore did more than merely serve up the past as a dish to be savoured, it stoked the sense of security which often accompanies the act of wistful remembrance and delivered the same reassuring pat on the hand that the Crazy Gang had delivered during the war years. When the ageing Flanagan and Allen/Hudd and Timothy sang of ‘building flats where the arches used to be’, their yearning for a time when everything held the potential of youth, echoed the emotion of the older audience who shared their regrets for themselves and for the characters. And possibly even for the Nation itself. The Crazy Gang encapsulated the stoicism of the populace during the Second World War, the ‘greatness’ of the unified nation in a time of military and domestic crisis: a sharp contrast to the societal breakdown raging beyond the gentrified boundaries of Chichester in 1981 as the economic policies of Thatcher’s government relentlessly sowed seeds of division and resentment. A large part of the appeal of Underneath the Arches was that it enabled the audience to re-engage with a particular moment in British cultural history which was no longer accessible – exactly the sentiments at the foundation of contemporary jukebox musicals. The recreated Crazy Gang comedy routines were fundamental to the success of the musical and functioned in the same way as songs do in bio-musicals such as Buddy or Jolson. The routines were what the Crazy Gang was famous for, and the recreation of a very particular style of humour provoked emotions similar to those stimulated by hearing a wellremembered song sung live for the first time in decades. The show was a self-referential pat on the back for a distinctive British style of humour and engaging with the show reminded the viewer of the superior theatrical tradition of the nation – a sense that no one could do comedy like ‘we’ can. Flanagan and Allen and the Crazy Gang were the embodiment of a performance style which had roots in music hall and Underneath the Arches was therefore able to access nationalistic associations in a way that Jolson or Buddy could not do. The sense of

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national pride induced by watching depictions of iconic British comedians perform intrinsically British comedy was further enhanced by the patriotic sentiment stirred by the war scenes in the show. In Act Two, a Crazy Gang routine at the Palladium (the show within the show) stopped due to an air raid in the London streets outside. Audience members were given the opportunity to ‘leave’ the theatre to go to the bomb shelters, then the cast led the house in a rousing rendition of ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’. This was nostalgia blatantly exploited, packaged and marketed to an audience of a certain age, sprinkled with a liberal dose of the proud Dunkirk Spirit. But the show did more than lure an older audience into the theatre, it reminded those who had not experienced the war of the (apparent) stoic characteristics of the indomitable British: the unique features which made the British nation and populace, Great. It also served the purpose of introducing Flanagan and Allen and the Crazy Gang to a generation born too late to witness their performances, thereby affirming the impressive legacy of the British theatrical heritage. By 1981, the style of humour which was associated with the Crazy Gang had been out of fashion for well over a decade and Underneath the Arches breathed new life back into it. Flanagan and Allen were ‘National Treasures’, beloved by the Royal Family and Britons of all social classes, but by the time the show premiered in Chichester, Bud Flanagan had been dead for well over a decade and Chesney Allen was in his late eighties (he died the following year). The audience applause was not just for the exceptional performances from Roy Hudd and Christopher Timothy, it gave thanks for the memory of Flanagan and Allen and the Crazy Gang, and their role in supporting the nation during a time of crisis. On the occasions when Chesney Allen himself joined Hudd and Timothy onstage in Chichester for the final song, nostalgia and sentiment combined in an outpouring of emotion for the retired entertainer and for the memories he invoked. Buoyed by the success of Underneath the Arches in 1981, Artistic Director, Patrick Garland programmed and directed a musical adaptation of James Hilton’s 1934 intrinsically English novel, Goodbye

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Mr Chips at Chichester the following year. The novel had already been filmed twice, first in 1939, with Greer Garson and Robert Donat, and again in 1969, in a musical version with songs by Leslie Bricusse, starring Petula Clark and Peter O’Toole.5 Both films had departed from the novel in different ways but the essence of the simple story, a retired schoolmaster looking back over his life, remained intact. The book begins in 1870, when Mr Chipping arrives at the Independent Brookfield School for Boys as Master of classical languages, and follows Chipping, known as Chips, over the next six decades, through bereavement, the Great War, his appointment as Headmaster and into retirement. Throughout the narrative, Chips is forced to adapt to his changing personal circumstances and to the shifting social structures which define his rigidly class demarcated world. The novel contains strong hints of the inevitability of a more egalitarian society coming to pass, one in which there will be no place for the elite English public school system, but this subtext is superfluous to the central tale of Mr Chips and is not included in either filmed version. The musical adaptation which premiered at Chichester was a hybrid of the original novel and the Bricusse songs from the 1969 film. Leslie Bricusse had been trying for some time to have the show produced on the West End but had been thwarted by strict rules governing the hours that child performers were permitted to work. In rep, however, the show would play only three performances a week enabling one cast of thirty-plus boys to play every show. Chichester Festival had an established tradition of bringing a star performer into each season to perform in one production (previous stars had included Omar Sharif, Keith Michell and Topol) and Sir John Mills, then seventy-four years old, had harboured a desire to play the title role since appearing in the 1939 film version of Goodbye Mr Chips. The casting of Mills as Chips was in itself an exercise in nostalgia and guaranteed to bring in audiences who remembered him as much for his role as Pip in Great Expectations in 1946, as for his Oscar winning turn in Ryan’s’ Daughter in 1970. Goodbye Mr Chips is another much-loved cultural product in the UK, reinforcing an idealized and quintessential view of England which,

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at the time of the Robert Donat film in 1939, was a welcome vision of halcyon days as the nation stood on the brink of war. Thirty years later, the privileged world of a great English public school and the story of a repressed Classics master who devotes his life to his pupils and the values of upper-class England, should have been out of step with the progressiveness of the era, and yet the film was a popular success with widespread critical appreciation for the onscreen relationship between Petula Clark and Peter O’Toole. Perhaps it was the uncomplicated nature of both the characters and the narrative, as well as the portrayal of the early years of the century as a simpler and kinder time, which resonated with audiences in the liberated, yet complicated, late 1960s. In the summer of 1982, when the musical adaptation premiered in Chichester, Britain had recently emerged victorious from a war with Argentina fought over the distant Falkland Islands and as a result (and despite three million unemployed) Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative government were riding high in the popularity stakes. Goodbye Mr Chips is built upon a foundation which assumes England and the English to be superior – an accurate reflection of the view of Mrs Thatcher – and this status is reinforced by the class system which is embodied by English public schools. The world of Brookfield School for Boys is depicted as replete with class entitlement and regressive traditional values, and the narrative of the musical made no attempt to question this status quo: that was not the point of Goodbye Mr Chips. From the opening moments when the cast assembles to sing the anthemic school song, through the opening of Act Two when the boys dream of leaving school and entering the adult world, to the finale where the school song is reprised as the Battle Hymn of England as Chips lies dying . . . the white, middle-class audience is transported back to the boarding school world it remembers so well. What the show offered to the audience of middle-class retirees was a reassuring vision of the nation that was, to them, familiar, safe and attractive. Goodbye Mr Chips subsequently functioned on a nostalgic level as a site of longing which enabled an older audience to revisit their boarding school days, but on another level the show reinforced class divisions and reassured

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the middle-class audience that nothing had changed, and that this elite world of privilege was entirely justified. With this, the show faithfully reproduced the then current value system of Thatcher’s government which appeared intent on making the poor, poorer, and the rich, richer. Like Mr Chips, many of the audience members undoubtedly harboured ‘faith in England, in English flesh and blood, and in Brookfield as a place whose ultimate worth depended on whether she fitted herself into the English scene with dignity and without disproportion.’6 Goodbye Mr Chips played on nationalistic sentiment by referencing the classical education at the heart of an intellectual tradition throughout the nation, and the original book was another reminder of the literary heritage of Great Britain. Chips is the unassuming Great British Hero who endures through widowhood, two world wars and the death of friends, thus epitomizing the English Spirit. The show offered audiences a stroll through old photographs which presented a world which may not have existed in reality – the image may have been cropped – but which offered the suggestion, and the hope, that it had. In situating Goodbye Mr Chips at the centre of the 1982 Chichester season, Patrick Garland demonstrated either an inexcusable lack of awareness, or a blatant disregard for the current stylistic trends in musical theatre. Chichester is only 90 minutes on a train to London where Cats had premiered the previous year, and up in Liverpool, Blood Brothers was about to debut at the Everyman: one show was revolutionizing the form, another was mobilizing the musical to challenge Government policies. Goodbye Mr Chips was resolutely doing neither of those things. It was, in fact, so retrospective, both in style and narrative, as to be an exercise in defiance. It was the embodiment of researcher, Aleks Sierz’s, ‘flight from the contemporary, a refusal to look reality in the eye’, with its wistful longing for strict class segregation and days of the glorious Empire, and for a traditional style of musical theatre which was under threat from newcomers Lloyd Webber and Willy Russell. While the production did not quite relegate the British musical back to the 1930s world of Mr Cinders and Cavalcade, it did little to match the strides already taken to redefine the genre by the Rice/Lloyd

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Webber partnership. But Garland was not setting out to challenge the form, he was tailoring a product specifically to an older audience who would appreciate a conventional Leslie Bricusse work more than a ‘modern’ Lloyd Webber musical with rock undertones. And the show had not been created with the intention of issuing a political challenge to either the class system or the presiding government: in all probability, the project was created as a vehicle for Sir John Mills who, Garland must have been aware, was box office gold. It was an exercise in sentimentality and a rose-tinted reassurance that societal structures remained in place and the ‘Right’ people, metaphorically, supported the school. The underlying inference was that Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative government would ensure the survival of the superior, glorious England encapsulated in Goodbye Mr Chips. When the financial constraints that the repertory companies are operating under is taken into consideration, it is little wonder that narratives invoking nostalgic representations of the nation are popular choices of subject matter, particularly when the audience base includes a high proportion of retirees. The only real difference between Patrick Garland’s staging of Goodbye Mr Chips in 1982 and the Sheffield Crucible’s decision to create Everybody’s Talking About Jamie in 2017, is the age of the audience the producers are aiming to attract. And it is precisely because Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is aimed at teenagers that it is concerned with current societal preoccupations instead of fixating on the past. The choice of material for new musicals at regional theatres such as Chichester and Sheffield raises an interesting issue regarding the commissioning of new musicals in the UK. Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh aside, a good proportion of new musicals on the West End arrive there following premieres at a regional rep theatre which has, in all probability, developed a new show in the hope that it will solve the financial shortfall of the company. The show therefore has to, first of all, appeal to the local audience to attract the attention of the critics and investors who will ensure a London transfer. Chichester’s choice of Underneath the Arches and Goodbye Mr Chips (and, in later years, Half A Sixpence and Flowers for Mrs Harris) are vehicles which

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are perfectly suited for the local audience and will therefore pay dividends at the box office. Similarly, The Big Life was created with the intention of attracting the local audience in multicultural Stratford East by utilizing the unique musical influences present in the community. In a sense, then, the regional audiences are playing a large part in the development of new musicals in the UK, as they are dictating the material that they are prepared to engage with. No matter how well it is wrapped in a blanket of nostalgia, a musical based on the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in the 1980s would be a financial disaster at Chichester for the simple reason that the conservative, and Conservative-voting local audience would not pay to see it. A musicalized adaptation of Downton Abbey however, could potentially set a new box office record. Pleasing (or appeasing) a local audience consequently becomes an understandable primary objective for underfunded regional theatres. This becomes problematic when national narratives or histories which do not appeal to a specific demographic are disregarded in favour of a conventional vision of England which holds greater resonance. The result is a local cultural artefact which may go on to have national impact but is representative of the taste and political position of a tiny minority of the British population: the all-white Half A Sixpence which transferred to the West End’s Noel Coward theatre following the run at Chichester is a case in point. Underneath the Arches and Goodbye Mr Chips are musicals which utilize nostalgia to reinforce an emotional connection with national identity by reminding the audience of the unique qualities of the British character. Brookfield school represents a society and class system that could only be England, and unashamedly emphasizes the unchanging nature of the middle- and upper-class ideals on display in a malecentric world. Both musicals reinforce traditions which are at the heart of British culture – music hall humour in Underneath the Arches and the public school system in Mr Chips – and in doing so, they present a vision of the nation which the nation wants to see, because it enjoys seeing it. And whether that vision is two post-war Vaudevillians singing

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a gentle song about sleeping underneath the arches, or an old man recalling his part in shaping the golden youth who were lost at the Somme, it is an image which incites pride in being uniquely British. This pride is different to the Plucky Little England patriotic pride – this is grounded in the pleasure of recognizing the quirky signifiers that denote ‘British-ness’ and experiencing a sense of satisfaction as a result of owning those characteristics. Bearing in mind the ongoing deification of young men in the British musical and the predominance of white, middle-class men at the helm of the industry, Goodbye Mr Chips could, in all likelihood, be produced today without too many eyebrows being raised. That alone encapsulates the primary position nostalgia holds within the British musical both as an entity, and amongst the British theatre-going public. * The literature of Charles Dickens has a central place in British cultural heritage, and over the decades there has been screen adaptations of Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit, Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities. The Dickens canon has also provided the source material for numerous television and theatrical incarnations, as well as being a popular choice amongst British musical theatre creators. There was, of course, Lionel Bart’s phenomenally successful Oliver! in 1960, and aside from that there was Pickwick (1963), Smike (1973), Great Expectations (1975), Scrooge (1992) and Two Cities (2006). Of these, Scrooge, based on Dickens’ 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, takes second place after Oliver! as the most performed musicalized version of Dickens. The popularity of A Christmas Carol, the tale of the curmudgeonly miser, Ebenezer Scrooge who is visited by four ghosts over the course of Christmas Eve prompting him to re-evaluate his misanthropic outlook, has never waned. What began life as an extended short story is now the most common gateway to an encounter with Dickens, and whether that engagement is as fleeting as hearing the ‘God bless us every one’ section of the story read at a Christmas concert, the impact has never

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diminished. A Christmas Carol has had countless adaptations in every form including film, drama, musical theatre, animation, radio, television, mime, opera and ballet, and it is the one Dickens’ novel which is widely known in the USA. It is a widely accessible story which transcends race, class, religion and gender to become a morality tale of the ‘Do Unto Others’ genre, or, in twenty-first-century parlance, the ‘Be Kind’ mantra. In 1968, the film version of Oliver! proved that the combination of Dickens, a musical score and the big screen, produced a winning formula when the film collected six Academy Awards (out of eleven nominations) including Best Picture. A screen musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol was therefore only a matter of time. Retitled Scrooge, the resulting 1970 film had a script and score by Leslie Bricusse7 and was directed by Ronald Neame, an enormously well-respected Dickens interpreter who had previously produced screen adaptations of Great Expectations in 1946, and Oliver Twist in 1948. While there had been many screen versions of A Christmas Carol, including the now iconic Alistair Sim Scrooge in 1951, Ronald Neame’s Scrooge would be the first musical incarnation, and the first adaptation in colour. Sporting the publicity tagline, ‘What the Dickens have they done to Scrooge?’ the film garnered only lukewarm reviews in the USA, which could have been a reaction to the undeniable ‘quaintness’ of the British musical next to the biting contemporary feel of Sweet Charity, for example, which had been released the previous year. Scrooge proved more popular with British audiences and the vision of stalwarts Albert Finney, Alec Guinness, Edith Evans and Michael Medwin singing and dancing their way through Victorian London (on what looked suspiciously like the recycled Oliver! set) quickly became an established annual tradition on British television in the way that Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman is today. A Christmas Carol had already had a number of musical incarnations at Regional theatre companies throughout the USA, where, in many cities, it was an annual tradition as timeless as the panto in the UK. No one in Britain had yet thought of producing a musical version of the tale, which was strange, considering the lure of Dickens on home

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territory and the instant recognition a British audience had with the story. In 1992, independent theatre producer, Graham Mulvein, approached Leslie Bricusse with the (then) novel idea of adapting the film musical into a stage production. Director Bob Tomson was brought onto the project, and he and Bricusse spent several months refining a film script which was, in 1992, over twenty years old and undeniably dated. The stage version needed to reference the original in order to attract the ticket buyer who had fond memories of the film, but it also had to appeal to a new and contemporary audience. The production eschewed the current fashion for sung through musicals with spectacular technological effects and adhered to the structure of a traditional book musical, with the Victorian era stylistically invoked through the use of tableaux and illusions. The music hall foundation of Bricusse’s score was perfectly matched with the tale of Dickensian London, and once the orchestrations were reduced from the scale necessary for the big screen to a more intimate chamber sound and revised to produce a more contemporary tone, Scrooge looked and sounded like an original piece of work. The musical was an anomaly in that, just as Goodbye Mr Chips had done a decade previously, it existed beyond the parameters of what was current with regard to form, and it relied on a nostalgic attachment to a narrative (or film) to entice an audience. Working in its favour was the fact that Scrooge was a seasonal show and was therefore not competing with, nor could it be compared to, the behemoth megamusicals dominating the genre in 1992. Leslie Bricusse had been keen to have his great friend and writing partner, Anthony Newley, play the lead in the 1970 film, but the producers had disagreed about his suitability for the role. The 1992 stage adaptation now offered the previously denied opportunity for the great British partnership of Bricusse and Newley to professionally reunite. Anthony Newley was an extraordinarily versatile performer and writer who had begun his career as a child actor playing, amongst other roles, the Artful Dodger in David Lean’s 1948 screen version of Oliver Twist. As an adult performer he played roles in Idol on Parade (1959), Doctor Doolittle (1967) and Sweet November (1968) and he was

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also a prolific songwriter, penning hits for Sammy Davis Jr, Tony Bennett, Nina Simone and Shirley Bassey. Newley had been a highly successful recording artist in the early 1960s, with almost a dozen Top 40 entries in the UK singles charts, including ‘Why’ (written by Lionel Bart) which topped the charts in 1960. He was a regular on TV variety shows and the Royal Command performances and despite having lived in the USA for over two decades, Newley remained a firm favourite among the British public. The creative team of Scrooge was counting on the nostalgic appeal of Newley to his former fans to pay off at the box office, and advance publicity for the show made it clear that the stage adaptation of Bricusse’s Scrooge was as much about Newley’s return to Britain and the British stage, as it was about the premiere of a new British musical. Scrooge therefore, had no need to impose nostalgic interventions onto the physical production to elicit an emotional attachment from the audience, as both Newley, and the 1970 film, were already performing that function. In addition, A Christmas Carol holds such a central position in British culture that audience members who may not have seen the Albert Finney/Leslie Bricusse film incarnation certainly remembered either being read the story in school – perhaps even performing it – or seeing one of the numerous made for television versions as part of the build up to Christmas. With its very existence, the show was exploiting the unconscious lure of childhood memories and harnessing the desire to revisit them. Whether there was an additional nationalistic appeal in that the story was set in London and the characters were so inherently British, is hard to know, and it is highly possible that not every audience member at the stage musical version of Scrooge knew that it had been written by Charles Dickens. Or even who he was. But the mood and the music reinforced the sense that this, the narrative and the characters, is who we are. Or who we were. And ‘we’ were proud to claim ownership of this beautiful and resonant narrative which had come from a British literary Great. Scrooge opened at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham in November 1992, then played Plymouth the following Christmas, and Manchester at the end of 1994. In January of 1995, BBC Radio 2 broadcast a performance live

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from the Palace Theatre in Manchester, thereby establishing Scrooge onstage as a new national Christmas tradition and an alternative to pantomime. On the surface, the success of Scrooge can be attributed to the show as cross-generational, family Christmas entertainment, the catchy Bricusse score, the poignancy of the universal story . . . but the show produces meanings which intrinsically link the musical with nostalgia. In the tale itself, Ebenezer Scrooge is taken back in time to witness himself first as a child, then as a young man in love, and the missed opportunities he had to right the wrongs hover tantalisingly in front of him. This cannot fail to resonate with the viewer who, like Scrooge, is prompted to wonder what mistakes in their own life could have been, or could still be, rectified. The fact that it is a story, and consequently a show, intrinsically associated with Christmas enables the sense of longing produced by a season focused on family and childhood. The show simply would not work (nor be forgiven the overriding sentiment) at any other time of the year. In the same way as Underneath the Arches was designed to appeal to a very specific audience, so too is Scrooge – an audience fully prepared to indulge in wistfulness for the unattainable. Because it’s Christmas. And because the narrative of A Christmas Carol is so ingrained in British cultural memory, Scrooge becomes a signifier for childhood with all the associated familial connotations. The fact that the musical remains a constant throughout the UK, with at least one production at a rep theatre company every Christmas, indicates that it is not simply the narrative which holds appeal – the audience already knows the story – but something far more intangible that brings the same families back year after year. The stage adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which opened in the London Palladium in 2002, utilized the same elusive lure that Scrooge had taken advantage of, that of the subconscious need to reconnect with childhood memories provoked by a cultural product. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was released as a film in 1968, and its magical evocation of an eccentric England populated by beautiful people who live in windmills, own sweet factories and make a car which can fly, was

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another cornerstone of British Christmas television. Like Scrooge, the stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang consequently held as much appeal to adults as it did to children, stimulating the same emotions that are produced by an unexpected encounter with a childhood toy. The George Stiles and Anthony Drewe version of Mary Poppins harnessed this same sentiment in 2004, and the mining of films from the childhoods of middle-aged British adults shows no sign of abating with a production of Bedknobs and Broomsticks which premiered in Newcastle in August 2021. These stage shows have evolved out of a different intention than the Disney stage adaptations of animated films – Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Frozen et  al – because the animated Disney films are neither as old, nor hold the same place in national affection as Chitty and Poppins. This was evident in the Broadway run of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 2005, which closed after a mere seven months without recouping the original investment. In contrast, the London production remains the longest running show at the Palladium where it stayed for almost four years, before embarking on a three-year national tour. The stage productions of Disney’s animated musicals are clearly aimed at under tens and the meanings produced by these shows relate more to the infantilization of the Broadway musical than with the mobilization of nostalgia to entice an audience. Scrooge, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are not simply cashing in on the ‘kiddie pound’ (although that element is undoubtedly present), they are performing an emotional function for the adults in the audience. The shows produce meanings tied up in idealized memories of Christmas Day or Easter Sunday gathered around the TV as a family to watch a familiar film. The function of the stage show is to unify, just as the films did in idealized memory, and the musicals are therefore entwined within the imagined security of childhood for the adults who hold onto the memory. The nostalgic interventions which are present in The Boy in the Dress serve an entirely different purpose, one which could be construed as promoting a political position. Adapting a novel which centres around a schoolboy asserting his individuality by going to school dressed as a

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girl suggests that far from fleeing reality, the RSC’s latest musical is seizing a prominent current issue and offering an artistic response. But beyond the title, the production is so mired in a quixotic depiction of the incredibly tolerant inhabitants of a town somewhere in Middle England, that the show becomes so far removed from reality as to be fantastical. The highly fanciful image of contemporary England on display is perhaps the version which director Gregory Doran (or author David Walliams) likes to think exists, or would prefer to see, but it bears little resemblance to the, often hostile, polarization which is the reality of the gender self-identification debates in the UK. Doran utilizes a series of nostalgic signifiers throughout The Boy in the Dress to instil a sense of security amongst audience members who may be hesitant to fully embrace the concept of gender fluidity. Through the mobilization of reassuring images of 1950s England – day trips to the seaside, the pantomime dame, grammar schools with imposing wrought iron gates – he removes any perceived threat to the societal status quo from liberal political movements, encapsulated by a boy wearing a dress. This is all rather strange, given that the marketing material and the programme confirms that the musical is aimed at pre-teens who have no experience at all of the idealized past on display. The emotional security prompted by the visual nostalgic references does suggest that the message of acceptance of gender fluidity put forward by the narrative is not, in fact, aimed at the ten-year-old David Walliams fans, but at the parents and grandparents seeking solace from liberal political movements in reassuring manipulations of memory. Nostalgia frequently manifests as a defiant resistance to change, and the interventions in The Boy in the Dress are designed to calm fears concerning the societal changes which are at odds with the experience and understanding of a significant number of RSC subscribers. Doran is suggesting to hesitant audience members that they transfer the warm sentimental feelings they associate with these manufactured memories to the contemporary situation depicted onstage. In other words, he is assuring them that nothing has changed in the England that they know, and thus they can afford to be supportive of a little boy who wants to

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wear an orange sequinned dress to school. The nostalgic hue also functions as a reminder that quirkiness is a national characteristic which separates the English from other nations. The cross-dressing headmaster, Mr Hawtrey, reflects the performance signifiers of a Pantomime Dame thereby reminding the audience that a man in a dress is a British theatrical tradition and nothing threatening should be taken from Dennis’s desire to wear a dress to school. By presenting Dennis’s world as a utopian community with echoes of a reassuring and familiar recent past, The Boy in the Dress suggests to the viewer that the tolerant and progressive society onstage is one that they too, could create and inhabit: a society/nation where gender binaries are irrelevant and individualism is encouraged, commended even. The idealized England of the reimagined 1950s enables a positive reinterpretation of who ‘we’ are, and what we stand for, to prevail, thus convincing the audience that as part of this wider community, they hold the same tolerant and liberal outlook as the characters onstage. Because they are English. The production further exploits nationalistic sentiments by suggesting that it is England itself which is at stake with regard to Dennis’s cross dressing: will the community/audience do the ‘right thing’ and accept the boy in the dress, thereby displaying the open heartedness and moral superiority inherent in characteristic ‘Englishness’? Given the large percentage of foreign visitors to the RSC, the show serves an additional nationalistic purpose in selling this liberal vision of England to curious tourists. But it is a Richard Curtis version of England and the eccentric English, exaggerated and repackaged to consolidate an image based on idealistic and manufactured nationalist constructs – just as The History Boys was fifteen years previously. The political message the RSC is putting forward with The Boy in the Dress is a plea for inclusion and tolerance, an exhortation to the audience to accept both Dennis and a wider queer societal viewpoint. It is, of course, deeply ironic that a show parading it’s progressive and inclusive credentials so blatantly, invokes a longing for a deeply conservative period in British history. The ‘good old days’ which are utilized to support a political position of inclusion for all boys (girls are irrelevant

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here – it is a musical by the RSC, after all) would have, in all likelihood, consisted of a community which would have ostracized the boy in the dress and insisted on conversion therapy before he was allowed anywhere near the school football team again. And the inclusive credentials clearly do not apply to the all-white, all-male creative team. * It is impossible to discuss the purpose of the nostalgia which pervades the British musical without considering Mamma Mia!, the show often credited as inventing the ultimate exercise in reconnecting with the past, the jukebox musical. This assertion is not strictly correct as a musical celebration of Noël Coward, Cowardy Custard, debuted in London in 1972, and two years later, Willy Russell’s musical retelling of the story of the Beatles, John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert, premiered at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, opened in London in 1989, Five Guys Named Moe, featuring the songs of Louis Jordan moved from Stratford East into the West End in 1992, and in 1995, Jolson, based on the life of Al Jolson and featuring a score containing music from some of the greatest Tin Pan Alley songwriters, took over the Victoria Palace for eighteen months. The point is, Mamma Mia! was by no means the first show to harness the yearning of the British public to revisit the music of their youth. The primary difference with Mamma Mia! to the shows named above, was that it did not retell the story of the rise to fame of the Swedish sensation, ABBA, but incorporated their previous hits into a new narrative created by Catherine Johnson. Although the musical proved to be a launching pad for the creation of the genre of jukebox musicals, it did adhere to the traditional structure of a musical: for all its feminist credentials, heterosexual romance drove the narrative and the show ended with a wedding. The ABBA phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s relied on a predominantly female fan base, and Mamma Mia! was created by women with a female audience in mind. Not the audience of teenage girls who would later flock to Wicked and Everybody’s Talking About

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Jamie, but the middle-aged women looking for a girls night out to celebrate a milestone birthday or a hen night. In other words, the women who bought the ABBA records and danced to their hits at the school disco in the 1970s and early 1980s. The 1994 Australian film, Muriel’s Wedding (which launched the careers of Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths) had previously dipped a toe into the water which would reclaim ABBA for a new generation. To assert that Mamma Mia! capitalized on Muriel’s Wedding would be incorrect, but the film was the first indication that the appetite for ABBA music had not diminished over time. Due to the dominance of women on the creative team and the female-centric narrative, the show is often tagged as feminist, but the show debuted in 1999 in an era beginning to be named as postfeminist. Post-feminism decreed that the battles for equality highlighted by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960s, and given a reinvigorated outing in the 1980s, had been won. By 1999, demands for Women’s Rights were undermined as dated and redundant in a society looking forward to the new millennium. The phenomenon of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, which had appeared in book form in 1996,8 is often credited with kickstarting the post-feminist era which conferred permission on young women to dream about weddings, bake cup-cakes, decorate their homes with floral Cath Kidson retro tablecloths and disparage the ‘career bitches’ who employed other women to take care of the deathly dull household duties whilst embarking on a high-flying corporate career. Post-feminism reclaimed the 1950s patriarchal symbols of oppression as another right within the wider framework of women’s entitlement to access all choices, and marriage and childbearing was rebranded as a choice made just as freely as that of a career. Sophie, the daughter in Mamma Mia! who is seeking fatherly approval of her marriage, symbolizes this reclamation of patriarchal control as a choice. She wants to be married at twentyone, and it is her mother, Donna (who is the same age as most of the women in the audience) who attempts to dissuade her from doing so. The feminism on display in Mamma Mia! is therefore another strand of nostalgic yearning for a lost time. In this case, however, the longing is

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for the era of strident feminism and calls for equality which Donna, and her two best friends, are well aware is unfinished business. The three women who are the driving force of the show, Donna, Tanya and Rosie, are clearly products of the Women’s Rights movements of the 1960s and the 1980s. They are all single with sexual histories that have been formed through the choices they have actively made and not had forced upon them by societal conventions. The fact that Donna has three possible candidates as the father of her daughter is a pointed dismissal of the sexual double standard which insists that women should be sexually pure whilst men are encouraged to acquire experience. If we assume that the show is set in the time it premiered, 1999, then Donna, Tanya and Rosie have lived through the social movements which emerged from the feminist second wave: Rosie, at least, was surely a protestor at the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common. They are far removed from the Kath Kidson curtains and cup-cake baking generation, both physically and emotionally, and Donna in particular, is slightly baffled as to why a young woman would choose to marry at twenty-one. Neither Tanya nor Rosie has children or (current) husbands, which can be read as a further rejection of the conformist societal pressures on women. The three women demonstrate agency in all areas of their lives and, we assume, have jobs which give them sufficient financial security to be able to afford holidays on a Greek island. The female triumvirate embody the importance in women’s lives of female friendship, and the backstory of Donna, Tanya and Rosie having previously been in a band together engages with the memories of the women in the audience of singing pop songs in their bedroom with their best friends. The male characters intrude on this female world, and while they are not entirely unwelcome, they are not permitted full access to the emotional space the women share. This is replicated in the auditorium where the mainly female audience share a physical and emotional space which serves as a unifying force through the shared experience of being female. The ABBA songs in the show function as a meta theatrical device which enables the women onstage to access their youth at the same

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time as the women in the audience engage in a similar act of reminiscence. The act of remembering facilitates the associated emotion of the past, that of the invincibility of youth and a belief that it was possible to change the world. Like Scrooge, the show has one overtly nostalgic scene when Donna sings ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ as she pictures the little girl she has nurtured, now grown up and growing away. This song strikes an emotional chord with women of the same age as Donna, and it is this recognition of a personal experience which appears to speak directly to the audience and strengthens the bond between the stage and auditorium. A close reading of Mamma Mia!, one which credits the work as more than ‘chick theatre’, does reveal a feminist agenda which utilizes an unashamedly female-centric show as an, albeit mild, call to arms. This is not a position supported by a postfeminist society and the show is therefore supporting a political agenda, one which yearns for the days of feminist solidarity and a united front. In this, it is not so far removed from Billy Elliot and The Last Ship which provoke a longing for the days of commitment to the socialist struggle, now, like feminism, dismissed as a passé preoccupation and a battle which has been won. * As previously acknowledged, Mamma Mia! did not invent the jukebox musical, but there is little doubt that it was responsible for starting the trend of producers raiding the back catalogues of former pop artists to create a musical which had instant appeal due to the recognition of the star and his or her music. The most successful of these shows was We Will Rock You, which utilized the music of Queen and opened in London in 2002. Queen had been a phenomenally successful British band in the 1970s and 1980s but the partnership between Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Freddie Mercury was cut short with the death of lead singer, Freddie Mercury, in 1991. Mercury, and Queen, were British rock legends, and their performance at Live Aid in 1985 ensured their place in posterity as icons of British culture. More than a decade after his death, the British public still pined for Queen, and We

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Will Rock You offered an opportunity to hear the music played live again – albeit in a different form. Given that the band had sold over 200 million records (some estimates place the figure closer to 300 million), harnessing their back catalogue for a musical was a shrewd financial investment, one which subsequently saw the show run for twelve years in the West End and be reproduced in over fifteen international productions. Unlike Buddy or Jolson, We Will Rock You did not retell the story of the band – that would be done on the big screen with Bohemian Rhapsody in 20189 – but had a faintly ludicrous narrative centring on a group of Bohemians who strive to restore individuality and music into the conformist society of a dystopian future. The nostalgia in We Will Rock You, was therefore not concerned with harnessing childhood memories or evoking a rose-tinted cosy British past, it was mobilized purely to offer the legions of Queen fans the chance to re-engage with an act which was no longer performing. And, of course, to remember Freddie Mercury, whose statue adorned the hoarding of the Dominion Theatre. Despite its global success, We Will Rock You did highlight one of the main problems inherent in jukebox musicals which do not retell the story of the band but attempt to shoehorn songs into a conventional integrated structure. Whilst the show does offer a new way of seeing the songs by putting them into a new context, the book writer is limited in what they can do with lyrics that already exist and were written with the intention of standing alone. The songs cannot do what they are required to do in an integrated musical and support the plot or reveal character, and no matter how well they are manipulated to fit the narrative, they will always have the feel – to a greater or lesser degree – of impositions on the narrative. The other issue intrinsic to jukebox musicals is that the show will only remain popular for as long as the songs or the band being celebrated remains in the public consciousness. This is not a concern for ABBA or Queen given their global and iconic status, but shows such as Our House, which utilized the songs of Madness, or Taboo (2002) which celebrated Boy George and the New Romantics scene, will fail to resonate when the generation who bought the albums

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in the 1980s move on. Nostalgia is dependent on living memory and thus time is running out for Vera Lynn the Musical as her generation has almost gone. There are, however, infinite possibilities in the back catalogues of the likes of Boyzone and The Sugarbabes as the fans now approaching middle-age begin to yearn to reconnect with their youth. A notable exception to the rule of finite appeal was Dreamboats and Petticoats, a musical created from a compilation double album released in 2007, which celebrated songs from the 1950s and early 1960s. The album went platinum in less than two weeks and remained in the Top 40 Compilation Chart for over two years. Six more compilation albums were released on the strength of the success of the original and a show was created out of the original album, using the cover photograph of a young couple at a fairground in the 1950s as inspiration. The show premiered in 2009, coincidentally at the same time as the American TV series Mad Men was soaring in the popularity ratings and driving a desire for all things retro. This could have accounted for the fact that the audience demographic for Dreamboats and Petticoats consisted, unsurprisingly, of the generation who remembered the original hits and, completely unforeseen, their grandchildren, who embraced the songs as their own generation’s new classics. As a form, the degree to which the jukebox musical contributes to a discourse concerning theatre and national identity in the UK varies, depending on the show. Dreamboats and Petticoats included music from American artists and the show itself had clearly been influenced by Grease. We Will Rock You celebrated an iconic British rock band, but the narrative was as far removed from British culture as Starlight Express had been. All the Fun of the Fair (2010) utilized the music of David Essex to tell a fictional father/son story set against the background of an English fairground, and I Dreamed A Dream was the biographical ragsto-riches story of Scotswoman Susan Boyle, who shot to fame on Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. But other than endowing a sense of ownership over the British artists celebrated and inciting pride in the fact that they were British, the numerous jukebox shows which continue to tour the UK are more often concerned with the box office potential

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of the ageing stable of loyal fans, than with questions of ‘Britishness’. A notable exception is Sunshine on Leith, a small-scale musical which premiered at the Dundee Rep Theatre in Scotland in 2007. The show was created out of the hits of the Scottish rock duo, The Proclaimers, consisting of twin brothers Craig and Charlie Reid, who first found fame in 1987 with their hit, ‘Letter from America’. Since then, the duo has sold over 5 million albums worldwide and their fundamental Scottish-ness is undoubtedly part of their appeal. As a show, Sunshine on Leith functions as a means of consolidating a very specific Scottish national identity which has a foundation in Difference and is marked by a defiant stance of being Not English. It is not an exaggeration to describe The Proclaimers as a Scottish icon, i.e. a cultural symbol which is immediately recognizable as an embodiment of the nation. Cultural icons are an intrinsic part of the branding of a nation and a vital component in selling the image of the country and its populace to eager tourists. A haggis supper washed down with a single malt whisky serves the same function to visitors to Scotland as a seat at the Tattoo, or at a Proclaimers concert: it enables inclusion in a performance of Scottish identity. As discussed in Chapter 2, the constant conflation of England/ English with Britain/British produces a fierce emotional reaction from the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish. Centuries of historical oppression are cited by the Scots, in particular, to justify their ongoing mistrust of all things English, and the current renewed call for a second referendum on Scottish Independence has the air of inevitability clinging to it. This context is important to any discussion of Sunshine on Leith as The Proclaimers is a band intrinsically associated with Scotland, and a performance of Scottish-ness. Their thick Edinburgh accents – considered incomprehensible in many of the countries beyond Scotland where the band toured – were a large part of their appeal in Scotland as it was a pronounced cultural signifier which the duo steadfastly refused to modify to accommodate those who could not understand. This was easy to interpret as pride in both their heritage and their Separateness from Englishness. The Reid brothers grew up in Leith, a dockside area

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of Edinburgh with a notorious and violent past, and home to Hibernian (Hibs) football club, a team which plays in the Scottish Premiership league. The evidence that The Proclaimers are considered ‘Ours’ and recognized as embodying defiant Scottish-ness can clearly be seen on the football terraces where Hibs fans hold up their supporters’ scarves and sing ‘Sunshine on Leith’ as an act of ownership. Given the central place of football in Scottish culture, the act of mass singing of a Proclaimers hit at a football match imbues the duo with the same national status as is accorded to the national sport. Because The Proclaimers are so essentially Scottish, the musical, Sunshine on Leith was always going to be regarded as a Scottish cultural artefact and not a British one, and this pride amongst Scottish audiences in having something of their own in a genre dominated by Englishcentric musicals, partly accounted for the wildly enthusiastic displays in theatres across Scotland. As with many jukebox musicals, the narrative of Sunshine on Leith is less important than the music, and a conventional storyline concerning returned soldiers, romantic involvements, betrayals and a desire to explore the wider world (a nod to Scotland’s history of mass emigration) provided the platform for the songs. The Proclaimers style of music is hard to pin down to one specific genre, but there are elements of folk and folk/rock in their work which enables echoes of Blood Brothers to infuse Sunshine on Leith, both in a script centred on a working-class community and in the folk music roots which contributed to the overall feel of the show. The musical was more nationalistic than nostalgic as The Proclaimers had never really disappeared from the Scottish consciousness in the way that the Bay City Rollers – a Scottish band with enormous chart success in the 1970s – had done. Indeed, a seventh Proclaimers album was released in 2007, followed by an extensive American tour. The hit which consolidated the international fame of The Proclaimers was ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)’ from their 1988 ‘Sunshine on Leith’ album. In the two decades between its release and the production of Sunshine on Leith in 2007, the song had acquired a nationalistic status comparable to that of ‘Flower of Scotland’, which had lyrics celebrating the victory of the Scots over the

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English forces at Bannockburn in 1314. Both anthems have the power to unite a Scottish crowd at any occasion, from an international sporting event to a pub singalong, and both songs are intrinsically bound to a performance of national identity. To include ‘500 Miles’ in the musical Sunshine on Leith was knowingly mobilizing the song for the same purpose and the show thus exploited the nationalistic tendencies provoked by the band to consolidate the ideal of Difference inherently bound up with the sense of a separate ‘Scottish-ness’. One of the attractions of the jukebox show is the space that is frequently incorporated for the audience to join in, to sing and dance in the aisles to either the ‘final concert’ of the band being celebrated onstage, or in a staged finale where the performers step outside of their characters and lead the audience in a singalong which is recognized as having nothing to do with the narrative they have just played out. The removal of the fourth wall enables the show to be a shared experience, something a new musical is not able to do as the songs are not yet in cultural memory. Whether the audience is singing and dancing in the aisles to ‘Our House’ or ‘500 Miles’, they are unified by the shared knowledge of the song which also reinforces a collective social and/or historical narrative. This heightens the emotion produced by the sense of belonging to a community/tribe, and when the collective memory is focused on a British band – or, more intensely, a Scottish band – the sensation of unity becomes entwined with nationalism and identity. When the film adaptation of Sunshine on Leith was released in 2013, it coincided with the lead up to the national referendum on Scottish Independence which took place in 2014, and the inherent Scottish-ness of this cultural artefact was seen as a reminder of everything that was unique about Scotland and detached from England, including its music. Difference in this case, was certainly not equal, but separate. The popularity of the jukebox musical in the years following the debut of Mamma Mia! could partly be attributed to the new millennium giving rise to a desire to look back, but it is also due to the fact that musical theatre in the West End was, quite simply, a closed shop to new creative practitioners. The domination of the West End by Cameron

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Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber, who had by then, begun their theatre-purchasing sprees, made it almost impossible for new shows to compete on a playing field which was steeply tilted against them. New writers and directors were rarely given an opportunity by the Really Useful or Mackintosh production companies and independent producers could not compete with the megamusicals on tour in regional cities where the shows often bedded in for anything up to twelve weeks. The out-of-the-box solution was to provide a form of entertainment which did not attempt to compete but offered something just as appealing and accessible to all. A jukebox musical was cheaper to create and produce than a megamusical and could woo an audience with a cheaper ticket price than Les Misérables on tour. And there was the advantage for a reluctant regional audience of knowing what they were getting. The jukebox show proved to be a relatively straightforward way to make a profit, but it did hand the critics yet another reason to disparage musical theatre as low brow entertainment aimed at the masses. Because it often was exactly that: a series of almost forgotten hits held together by a flimsy plotline. It also served to reinforce the view that British musical theatre industry was primarily driven by profit rather than artistic integrity. But to dismiss the jukebox musical altogether is a mistake as it has, like the megamusical, democratized theatre attendance by offering entertainment which appeals to a new customer, often those who would not normally consider engaging with theatre. And no Scot who attended a performance of Sunshine On Leith in Scotland would describe the experience as either frivolous or meaningless. * Ultimately, the question at the forefront of the British fondness for looking back, is concerned with the present, and the future. If nostalgia infers a rejection, or discontent with the present, then is it fair to assume that the constant backwards glance collectively performed by Britons indicates that we, as a nation, do not like what we have become and prefer the memory of who we were? The jukebox musical accurately

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reflects the national preoccupation with what has been, and this ongoing love affair with the past is so ingrained in the national psyche that it could reasonably be defined as a signifying British characteristic. Underpinning the backward look is the notion that before was somehow better, that an untouchable something has been allowed to die in the intervening years. This sense of loss underpins the core emotion incited by the nostalgic interventions in musicals which have been deliberately mobilized to induce a sentimental connection to the era, narrative or music of the show. But there is an underlying danger in shows which incite this sentimental yearning that they manipulate the viewer into accepting a viewpoint which erases societal progress. Mrs Henderson Presents encourages an audience to regard the viewing of near naked women onstage as entertainment – a bit of fun – rather than labelling it objectification. Both Made in Dagenham and Stephen Ward mobilize the overused phrase, ‘The Sixties’, and a knowing wink to the audience to justify racial and gender slurs as being ‘of the period’. This is an issue which frequently occurs with revivals when outdated attitudes, particularly towards race and gender, are presented onstage with the excuse that they are authentic representations of the era and therefore justified. Perhaps one of the reasons that nostalgic interventions are so prevalent in British musicals is that they enable the preferred vision of the nation as white, heterosexual and populated by compliant women to prevail by masquerading behind a façade of the ‘good old days’. But what does the national obsession with nostalgia mean for the British musical in a post-Covid landscape? Because if the populace is really as terrified of change as the unceasing look back would suggest that it is, then the British public is doomed to eternal runs of Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera, a series of revivals of Oliver!, Joseph and Cats, and new shows based on already familiar texts which reproduce conventional modes of production. Or Vera Lynn the Musical. Undoubtedly premiering at Chichester.

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We can turn over and start again . . . : The way forward

At the end of the final episode of Britain’s Got Talent on 10 October 2020, Cameron Mackintosh presented socially distanced excerpts from Mary Poppins, The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables under the title ‘One Show More’. Following the performance, an emotional Mackintosh thanked programme hosts, Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, for enabling him to ‘show the country what they are missing’. In a precursor to Andrew Lloyd Webber vowing to serve jail time to force the opening of Cinderella, Mackintosh took it upon himself to issue a demand to the government to ‘reopen our theatres by next Spring’. His tone was unmistakably combative, as if the Government was prolonging the Covid-19 shutdown in a vengeful move directed against him personally and against musical theatre enthusiasts nationwide who were being deprived unnecessarily of their annual fix of The Phantom of the Opera. Cast member, Michael Ball, then announced the opening of a concert version of Les Misérables on 5 December in London, with an assurance to the almost 6 million television viewers that they would be safe in the theatre due to Mackintosh’s stringent precautions. As well as being a blatant plug for his shows in the middle of the biggest health crisis the UK had ever experienced, Mackintosh utilized his moment on Britain’s Got Talent to manoeuvre himself into the role of angry producer speaking on behalf of ‘his’ public who were being treated unfairly by the government. In doing so, he – like Lloyd Webber the following year – consciously conflated the term British Theatre with his own shows. ‘One Show More’ did not include an excerpt from Everybody’s Talking About Jamie or Matilda or SIX . . . only Cameron Mackintosh musicals. And only the 213

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British ones, i.e. no Hamilton (which Mackintosh co-produces). The inference was clear: British theatre is British musical theatre and these shows – Mary Poppins, The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables – and their creators, embody the term The British Musical. The domination of the British musical theatre industry by Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber over the past forty years could be regarded as a wider metaphor for the power structures of the nation: a monopoly of decision making and wealth in a very small number of hands. If the British musical as a cultural artefact is out of touch with the concerns of a progressive and multicultural nation and lacking artistic vigour and vitality when it comes to form and voice, it is impossible not to lay at least some of the responsibility at the feet of the two men who virtually control the industry. Certainly, the industry in the West End. Between them, Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber own fifteen theatres and are thus able, to a degree, to dictate which musicals play in the West End. In addition, Mackintosh’s involvement with the National Theatre, the RSC, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Chichester Festival Theatre ensures that his influence extends into the subsidized sector (although the relationships are undoubtedly symbiotic). As discussed in preceding chapters, the domination of one voice throughout the British musical is stifling multicultural, socially diverse, gender queer and women’s voices, resulting in a cultural artefact which is not only moribund, but passé. And perhaps this is, in fact, the succinct explanation as to why the British musical is not included in debates concerning cultural production and national identity: it has made itself irrelevant within those discourses. None of which is to say that The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables are not worthwhile examples of musical theatre, but they are nearing birthdays which define them as middle aged. And, as discussed in regard to Lloyd Webber, it is not the shows themselves that are the issue: it is what the shows are now being claimed to represent which is damaging to the industry as a whole. Because when these musicals are held up as either representative of the entire British genre, as they were on Britain’s Got Talent, or as the heights to which current new musicals must aspire, then the industry propels

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itself back thirty-five years and asserts that there is no need to look beyond that era. This is more than nostalgia for the glory days of the British Invasion, this is a defiant conviction that despite all the evidence to the contrary, the British musical remains a leading player in the global genre. Mackintosh’s post-lockdown, socially distanced concert version of Les Misérables, which was announced so triumphantly on Britain’s Got Talent, had little to do with uniting a beleaguered nation and was more concerned with reminding the populace that Les Misérables is the standard bearer for British musical theatre.1 Both Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber consistently refuse to consider a future for the British musical in which their stalwart shows are not metaphoric lighthouses shining a beam of light which offers safety and security whilst at the same time, repelling invaders. * In the heady days of the megamusical and the British Invasion, the one area of musical theatre where the USA remained streets ahead of the British was in education and training. The UK had independent institutions which trained performers to be the traditional triple threat, but unlike the study of drama which could be undertaken at respected universities, musical theatre was not regarded as a legitimate academic discipline. In the USA, where the genre did have academic status, musical theatre was analysed, deconstructed and written about at institutions such as New York University, Carnegie Mellon and Yale. In addition, alongside the training of performers, American universities offered post-graduate qualifications in writing, composing, musical directing and directing specifically for musical theatre. This not only ensured a future for the industry in the US, it also legitimized the genre of musical theatre as an academic discipline, situating it on the same level as drama or classical music. It is impossible to say with complete certainty that the prevailing view in the UK of musical theatre as entertainment (rather than legitimate theatre) contributed to the slow reappraisal of the genre as an academic discipline and that this had a direct impact on the flow of new creative talent into the industry. But

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there is undoubtedly a connecting line. A view that musical theatre was something not to be taken seriously enabled a perception that anyone with basic skills in theatre practice could transfer those skills to a musical. This led to a perception of drama training as superior or interchangeable with that of musical theatre practice, thereby consolidating the view that musical theatre was not an art form in its own right. The result of the absence of creative training and the lack of opportunities to deconstruct the genre academically enabled the same two or three creative teams to dominate the field in the UK throughout the megamusical era and beyond, unchallenged by new voices. It is only in the last fifteen years that British universities and performing arts institutions have included musical theatre training beyond performance, recognizing that a different skillset is necessary for writing or directing musicals than is required for writing and directing drama. In 1990, Cameron Mackintosh endowed the Chair of Contemporary Theatre at St Catherine’s College, the University of Oxford and although not specifically concerned with musical theatre, the gesture was clearly intended to convey a wider message by bestowing the highest cultural status upon theatre in the UK. Since 1990, the visiting Professorship has been held by luminaries including Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre, Tom Stoppard, Thelma Holt, Stephen Fry, Tim Rice, Alan Ayckbourn, Simon Russell Beale, Michael Codron and Ian McKellen, all, unquestionably, distinguished experts in their field but representative nevertheless of a particular group. And when the demographic of the student population at the University of Oxford is taken into account, the choice of the recipient for the visiting professorship has done little to challenge traditional perceptions concerning who makes theatre in the UK, and who for. Michael Billington refers to London in the 1980s as ‘the western world’s leading song-and-dance factory’2 – which is not intended as a compliment. At the height of the megamusical/British Invasion era, he could barely disguise his fury at the national companies utilizing part of their subsidy to stage American musicals – Carrie and The Secret Garden at the RSC and the series of classics at the National Theatre. Billington was not the only commentator or theatrical figurehead fuming at the

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mere thought of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the epitome of Britain’s (England’s) mighty theatrical heritage, and the National Theatre – home of Olivier, Stoppard and Hare – signing a pact with Cameron Mackintosh. The raised eyebrows at the seasons of American classics at the National had nothing to do with the fact these were American works playing on the stages of a theatre devoted to English dramatists, it was the fact that they were musicals and therefore could not possibly be worthy of gracing the South Bank complex: no one raised objections to Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller being produced on the same stages. In all Billington’s remonstrations against the ‘slavish obeisance to musicals’, which he noted as beginning to infiltrate the rep companies nationwide, he did not once consider the position that it was not the revivals of American musicals that was the problem (or, in later years, the ability of a Mackintosh and/or Lloyd Webber musical to tie up a West End theatre for years at a time thereby blocking new plays from coming in). It was the fact that out of all the wealth being generated by the megamusicals, no production company, or theatre, or institution was reinvesting even the tiniest percentage into nurturing new British talent. Oklahoma! at the National with Hugh Jackman, was all very well, but what would the company turn to when the Rogers and Hammerstein canon had been exhausted and Trevor Nunn had retired? The implications of the iron grip Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber exert over the industry in the UK are far reaching and extend beyond the determination of both men to prolong the lives of the shows which established their reputations and defined British theatre globally in the 1980s. The refusal by both men today to embrace a new way of seeing, with regard to both the musical theatre genre and the nation itself, is not purely the result of a sentimental need to hang onto the past in the face of advancing years. Despite their phenomenal successes and their position as emblematic of the British musical, neither Mackintosh nor Lloyd Webber has ever shown any inclination to consider the future of the industry beyond their own part in it. Their joint consistent failure to reinvest a percentage of their profits in initiatives to seek out and foster

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new talent is not unrelated to the current uninspiring state of the British genre. Back in 1984, Lloyd Webber nominally supported new work when he came aboard as co-producer of Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man to enable the show to transfer to the West End (although he excused himself from any financial responsibilities after four months). More recently, he attempted to atone for his earlier lack of investment in British work by devoting The Other Palace, one his seven West End theatres, to the development of new musicals. In May 2021, however, in a move described by a LW Theatres spokesperson as ‘strategic’, it was announced that Lloyd Webber was putting the theatre up for sale. Within a vague statement regarding ‘exciting, future plans in London’s Covent Garden’3 there was no reference to the creation of new British musicals, and it remains to be seen what future plans Lloyd Webber has with regard to the continuation (or otherwise) of the development work which had only just begun to pay dividends at The Other Palace. Cameron Mackintosh had financially supported the composer/lyricist team of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe for a number of years prior to their success with Honk! at the National in 1999. Following the show’s surprise Olivier win for Best New Musical in 2000 (in a field comprising Mamma Mia!, The Lion King and Spend Spend Spend) Mackintosh engaged Stiles and Drewe to write music and lyrics for his extravagant Mary Poppins. But other than sponsoring an annual composer placement scheme through Mercury Musical Developments which pairs an emerging musical theatre composer with a venue, Mackintosh has never shown any further inclination to look beyond further afield for new collaborators. And beyond enabling the Theatre Royal Stratford East to transfer Five Guys Named Moe to the West End in 1990, he has neither sought out nor promoted any multicultural creative voices within the industry. Neither has the RSC diverted any of the profits from Les Misérables or Matilda into developing new voices, particularly female voices which would counterbalance the all-male creative teams on both productions. One of the issues which became apparent when the Theatre Royal Stratford East instigated their Musical Theatre Initiative in 1999, was

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the lack of dedicated facilities and funding throughout the UK industry which would guarantee a consistent approach to the development of new work. A lack of studio spaces, for example, where shows in development could be workshopped over a period of time, free from the pressure of a looming opening night. A dearth of experienced practitioners with the capacity to lead writing initiatives and the desire to pass on knowledge and skills acquired from years of being involved in the creation of new work (most likely in the USA). The number of new shows in Britain which fail to ignite is partly due to inexperienced creative teams not fully understanding how a successful musical works within the parameters of the form and how long it takes to refine every moment to produce a cohesive whole, but it is also a consequence of the lack of resources, particularly financial where the rep companies are concerned, which would allow a longer and more intensive development period. The costs of a lengthy development process and the risk of the failure of an unknown entity in a rep season which is relying on box office to ensure the survival of the theatre, frequently results in a revival taking the spot allocated to the annual musical. This practice is apparent at the Curve Theatre in Leicester which loudly trumpeted its commitment to developing new British musicals when it opened in 2008, but which has consistently produced an annual programme of mainstream American shows. Even during lockdown, which could have been a time to experiment with shows in development, director Nikolai Foster chose to stream a new production of Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard – albeit an imaginative rethinking of the show but hardly a demonstration of a commitment to new writing. In the last twenty years, progress towards a cohesive strategy for the sustained development of new musical work has been slow, and although Artistic Director of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris, talks in vague terms of ‘a musical a year’,4 he has yet to unveil any long-term initiatives to support new musical theatre writing which corresponds to the support in place for new plays and dramatists. This work has, however, been started by Mercury Musical Developments, an independent organization which offers a number of events, masterclasses

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and courses for writers and composers throughout the year. Mercury administers the Cameron Mackintosh Resident Composer Scheme, as well as a mentorship award and a new song prize sponsored by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. In addition, Mercury hosts a biennial conference to examine issues pertaining to musical theatre in the UK, and runs the biennial BEAM showcase, which presents excerpts over two days of musicals in development. In other words, Mercury is doing the groundwork that Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber should have done three decades ago and which the National Theatre (and the RSC) needs to be doing today if either company is serious about a long-term commitment to new British musicals which has more than the box office in mind. Unfortunately, the cupboard storing the new (and good) British musicals has been empty for years and it will take more than a series of one-off masterclasses and a biennial showcase to restock the shelves: despite the undoubted passion and commitment from all those involved at Mercury, it is hard not to picture an open stable door and a bolting horse disappearing into the sunset. What this ultimately means, at least in the short term, is that the British musical is condemned to repeat rather than explore. In the USA, the engagement of some of the nation’s finest playwrights, including Neil Simon, Marsha Norman, Alfre Uhry and Terence McNally as book writers for musicals is a sharp indication of the higher level of respect the genre commands across the Atlantic compared to the UK, where an attitude of ‘anyone can do a musical’ is pervasive. The next new musical to premiere at the National, for example, will be Hex, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty with a book by Tanya Ronder, music by Jim Fortune and lyrics by Artistic Director, Rufus Norris. Which confirms a peculiarly British viewpoint that, despite Sondheim’s definition of lyric writing as a craft, there is no real skill involved, i.e. anyone can do it.5 The genre in Britain is also hampered by an ongoing misunderstanding, which frequently manifests as wilful ignorance, as to what exactly is involved in the creation of a new musical. Hamilton, for example, had a gestation period of almost seven years during which the material was workshopped, rewritten and refined. Even after the

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Off-Broadway premiere production at the Public Theatre in 2015 (which had the run extended twice to accommodate demand), Lin Manuel Miranda insisted on delaying the transfer to Broadway until the following year in order to rework some of the material. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the original London productions of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon were both updated and refined following Broadway premieres which exposed issues which were only visible with hindsight. Mackintosh’s original London production of Martin Guerre, which opened in July 1996, underwent so many revisions following the premiere that Mackintosh took the unprecedented decision to close the show for a week in October for a radical overhaul. The reworked production fared much better critically and went on to win the 1997 Olivier Award for Best Musical. Further changes were incorporated during the cast change the following year, and in 1998, a completely rewritten version of the show, with a new creative team, opened at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds prior to a successful national tour. Mackintosh is one of the few producers in the UK who can afford the extensive revision process which became the trademark of Martin Guerre, but British musicals today frequently fail due to the inability of the producers and/or creatives to recognize not only where the show is problematic, but why it is. Which is in turn, often a consequence of writers and directors who have no real interest in musical theatre (but have an eye on the profits) and who assume that to create a musical you just add songs. That is not to say that no clever or original shows have ever come from the pens of British practitioners – Oh What A Lovely War!, Oliver!, Evita, The Hired Man, Billy Elliot, The Big Life and London Road to start the ball rolling. But there are not as many in the mode of Sondheim, or Grey Gardens, Scottsboro Boys or Fun Home, and this is a direct result of the lack of sustained support for the development of new work in the UK. The lack of foresight three decades ago with regard to the future of the industry has not only denied fledgling practitioners the opportunity to hone their craft – who knows how many potential Lin Manuel Mirandas simply gave up – it also denied British audiences the opportunity to experience different interpretations of the meanings

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contained within the term British Musical. The great pity of this, as was proved by the Musical Theatre Initiative at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, is that the talent is undeniably there, just waiting to be drawn out. * History has proven that collective nostalgia is most likely to occur following a period of severe social disruption, such as an economic depression, or mass trauma, such as a war. A global pandemic fits these conditions and there has been lengthy discussion in the media with regard to the worldwide lockdown being a unique opportunity to reevaluate the societal status quo and replace it with more inclusive and environmentally aware practices: the impact of global air travel on climate change is the most obvious example. The way forward for British theatre following the national shutdown is a debate framed within the Reset vs Rethink argument. One camp is in favour of reopening as quickly as possible, driven by the utopian vision of ‘getting back to normal’. The opposing side regards the shutdown as breathing space and valuable time to reassess how theatre is produced, and who for. As has been examined in the preceding chapters, the British musical is long overdue a major renovation. Stylistically, as was so clearly demonstrated by the (eventual) unveiling of Cinderella, new British shows frequently struggle to escape the confines of parameters put in place three to four decades ago. The Boy in the Dress, Flowers for Mrs Harris, even Matilda all reproduce accepted conventions concerning form, and clearly have a particular audience in mind. The more racially, gender and socially inclusive new shows which are being created in regional theatres and in the British nations beyond England rarely make it to London, which means that one style and one voice is being held up as normative and as representational of British theatre and British society. This is consolidated by touring productions of largescale commercial musicals which reiterate the one voice perspective, and national tours (or even regional productions) of, for instance, The Big Life or Bend it Like Beckham regarded as a financial risk too far. It is the combination of these elements which result in British society being

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represented in musical theatre within a blinkered viewpoint. The fact that British musicals featuring non-white or female narratives populated by three dimensional characters who genuinely empower the viewer can still be counted on one hand is a manifestation of the inability of the industry in the UK to move forward and acknowledge that British society has changed. Cameron Mackintosh’s announcement on Britain’s Got Talent of the (ultimately premature) opening of the Les Misérables concert therefore had implications far beyond his desire to enable profits to flow again: it was a clear message that change was neither imminent nor desired by one of the most influential guardians of the British musical. The impact on future audience figures of the national shut down and ongoing uncertainty concerning socially distanced performances remains to be seen. A venue such as Chichester Festival Theatre, for example, has a retired subscriber base who may be reluctant to venture out into crowded places, and regional theatres in less affluent counties have audiences made up of the sections of the population which have been hit hardest, both financially and emotionally, by the pandemic. Subsidized theatres are in a critical financial position as a result of sixteen months (at the time of writing) of no audiences in the buildings, and reopenings plagued by productions having to close (or fail to open) due to cast or crew members returning a positive Covid test. The shift in work/lifestyle balance brought about by a population now seduced by working from home may have a future impact on inner city theatres, including the West End, as a result of fewer workers actually coming into the city centre to work in semi-redundant office spaces. And an ongoing reluctance of potential audience members to venture into confined crowded spaces is likely to be a major issue. This combination makes it crucial for theatres to produce work which sells, and one of the consequences of this could be that new musicals are jettisoned in favour of sure-fire hit revivals. The Covid-19 shutdowns offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to examine and rethink the way the industry operates, and the kind of theatre it produces. But if Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella is setting the precedent for other creative practitioners to

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follow, then it is apparent that the musical theatre industry in the UK will lean towards the reset, rather than rethink, school of thought. The question of the future of the British musical is bigger than audience figures. It concerns the kind of musical we want to see representing the nation in future years: an all-white cast in a revival of Half A Sixpence with all its outdated class cliches, or The Big Life, the show which focused on the experiences of the Windrush Generation? And if it is the latter, then an intersectional conversation needs to begin regarding what must be done by producers, theatre boards, artistic directors and training institutions to ensure that the British musical theatre industry is a space which can, and does, accommodate all the various voices and experiences which make up the present-day United Kingdom. It is a conversation which should consider the assumptions which need to be challenged to ensure more inclusive and equal practices resulting in balanced creative teams and diverse narratives and ask what producers and regional theatres can do to nurture and encourage new voices in the way that the Musical Theatre Initiative at Theatre Royal Stratford East did so successfully at the beginning of the new millennium. Without these conversations, the historic exclusionary practices towards non-white and female creative practitioners will continue, leaving the industry with few options in terms of a stylistic reimagining of the genre. In 2011, London Road proved that there are practitioners who are prepared to take stylistic risks, but ten years have now passed without a show which comes anywhere close in terms of challenging artistic boundaries and redefining the accepted vision of the British Musical. Which returns us once again to Ian Bradley’s assertion that musical theatre is an accurate reflection of the current state of the nation. The British musical in early 2022 reveals a nation which is blinkered, exclusive and so mired in nostalgia it is unable to move forward. Certainly, the refusal to open doors to newcomers who have not traditionally had seats at the musical theatre table is a faithful reflection of a society still in thrall to class structures which subsequently produce race and gender bias, and rose-tinted memories of the glorious days of the Empire.

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The one thing the national shut down has proved beyond a doubt is that more people than ever in the UK are engaging with musical theatre. The January 2021 celebration of musicals on BBC Radio 2 demonstrated that although the genre may still be sniffed at amongst the theatrical Establishment, it is a strand of theatre which plays an important role in the lives of many, many people throughout the nation. Which is why it is crucial that the meanings produced by new British musicals are critiqued and examined with the same thorough approach that is applied to other areas of the arts. Because if certain groups within the population are absorbing the message that there is no room for them within the definition of nationhood currently produced by the British musical, it will be interpreted as deliberate. And it is a message which is going out to hundreds of thousands of people nationwide on a regular basis. In these approaching times of austerity, musical theatre will have to reinvent itself in order to survive. The large scale, long running commercial spectacular may prove to be the exception as double casts and reduced audience capacities make it financially impossible for all but the biggest producers. Community based entertainment is likely to take precedence and outdoor performances could prove to be the kind of theatre which audiences are more willing to attend given the reduced risks of contracting the virus outdoors. Online theatre has become a feature of the pandemic, proving that the previous conviction which decreed the theatrical experience to be meaningless unless it was shared in the same space, is not the case. Audiences will willingly engage online, and practitioners are developing new skills as a result of having no option but to view the online space as a theatrical space. It is entirely possible, then, that a new understanding of what exactly musical theatre is, will be encouraged post-pandemic. Musicals created specifically for the online space are already available to view on Tik Tok, and there is a growing conviction that the theatrical environment no longer means a building with 800 seats, a proscenium arch and a passive – albeit receptive – seated audience. And it is only through rethinking how new work is created and produced, and what that resulting work is actually saying, that the British musical will move forward. An honest, one could

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even say soul searching, reappraisal of the British industry is imperative if the genre is to progress. One which endeavours to regard the musical as a creative entity beyond profitability, and a unique art form in itself. In spite of the stagnation of the British industry, there is a growing appetite for shows which do more than create a spectacle or access ageing back catalogues of previous hits. A younger generation of fans has taken ownership of shows such as SIX , Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and & Juliet. This is the social media generation, one which is not afraid to instigate change and challenge exclusive narratives. This is the generation most likely to question an outdated, racist and sexist depiction of their society and nation. It is also the generation the industry cannot afford to lose. Perhaps the younger audience members will be the group to demand that the British musical moves forward in a more interesting, inclusive and authentic direction. Perhaps we may yet see the premiere of a new Blood Brothers with its demand for social change. Or a re-emergence of the socialist plays with music touring to rural villages and playing in community halls and working men’s clubs. Who knows, we may yet see the premiere of a Stormzy musical at the National. If the constraints which dictate that there is only one way of doing musical theatre can be shaken off, then the future of the British musical could be as bright as it was in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when British productions led the way with stylistic innovations and created shows which continue to run today. But any appraisal of the industry has to involve honesty and a commitment to rethinking, rather than resetting. It involves looking forward, not back. In other words, it does not include Downtown Abbey the Musical.

Notes Introduction 1 On 18 September 2017, The Mousetrap played its 27,500th performance. 2 Sierz, A. (2021), Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre Since the Second World War, Methuen Drama, p. 14. 3 Holdsworth, N. (2010), Theatre and Nation, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 8. 4 ‘British musicals “at risk without subsidies like other theatre” ’, The Guardian, 22 January 2020.

Chapter 1 1 Jowell, T. (2004), ‘Government and the value of culture.’ 2 Bernstein, L. (1959), The Joy of Music, Simon and Schuster. 3 In 1965, Joan Littlewood became the first woman nominated for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for the Broadway production of Oh, What A Lovely War! 4 Quoted in Sheridan Morley’s Spread a Little Happiness: The First Hundred Years of the British Musical. Thames and Hudson, 1987. 5 It won the 2017 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. 6 7:84 referred to a statistic published in The Economist in 1966, which stated that 7 per cent of the population of the UK owned 84 per cent of the nation’s wealth. 7 Dickson had previously appeared in Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert and had connections with Liverpool through her mother, who hailed from the city. 8 Mitchell developed her 2010 album, Hadestown, into a musical which premiered off-Broadway in 2016. The show was staged on Broadway three years later and won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Musical. 9 Viv Nicholson won the sum of £152,319 in 1961, worth over £3 million in 2021. 10 ‘Dylan’s songs are Depression-era dynamite’, 27 July 2017, The Guardian.

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Notes to pp. 42–82

11 The Comedy of Errors had music by Guy Woolfenden and was awarded the 1977 Society of West End Theatre Award (renamed the Oliviers in 1984) for Best Musical. 12 Billington, Michael (2007), State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, London: Faber and Faber Ltd.

Chapter 2 1 Kumar, K. (2003), The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge University Press. 2 The Last Ship has (in 2021) yet to be presented in London. 3 https://www.capitaltheatres.com/about/stories/new-musical-hub-forscotland-announced 4 Bradley, I. C. (2005), You’ve Got to Have a Dream: The Message of the Musical, Westminster, John Knox Press, p. 32. 5 Book by Julian Fellowes, New Music and Lyrics George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, Co-Creator Cameron Mackintosh, Director Rachel Kavanaugh. 6 https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/people-nation-empire/ make-yourself-at-home/the-black-and-white-minstrel-show 7 Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer and Keith Burns as Thuy. 8 Co-produced by the Royal Court and Birmingham Rep. 9 Between 1958 and 1978 (and 1992) there were no less than thirty-one Carry On films. The franchise also generated four Christmas specials, a thirteen-part TV series and three stage plays. 10 ‘Six review, Arts Theatre: glorious musical meeting with all Henry VIII’s wives’, The Telegraph, 28 August 2018. Dominic Cavendish.

Chapter 3 1 Todd, Selina (2021), Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth, London: Chatto & Windus. 2 The General Election of 2019, however, saw many traditionally ‘safe’ Labour seats in the North, and North East fall to the Conservatives as a fallout from the Brexit delays.

Notes to pp. 116–28

229

Chapter 4 1 Thorpe, Vanessa, ‘From fringe to Broadway, how Tudor musical became global hit’, The Observer, 23 June 2019. 2 Mountford, Fiona (2018), ‘Six the Musical review: Kick-ass musical about Henry VIII’s wives channels its inner Beyoncé’, The Evening Standard, 5 September 2018. 3 Book by Dennis Kelly. Music and Lyrics by Tim Minchin. Developed and directed by Matthew Warchus. Choreography by Peter Darling. Set and Costumes by Rob Howell. Orchestrations and additional music by Christopher Nightingale. Lighting by Hugh Vanstone. Sound by Simon Baker. 4 Bakare, Lanre, “Jewface” row: West End musical accused of cultural appropriation’, The Guardian, 23 August 2019. 5 Book and Lyrics Christopher Hampton and Don Black, Director Richard Eyre, Choreographer Stephen Mear, Set and Costume Design Rob Howell, Lighting Design Peter Mumford, Sound Design Paul Groothuis, Video and Projections Jon Driscoll. 6 Questions were raised concerning Ward’s conviction and in 2014, the trial verdict was put under review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The case was not referred to the Court of Appeal due to the disappearance of the original transcript of the judge’s summing up of the case in 1963. 7 Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2017) Music by Dan Gillespie Sells, book and lyrics by Tom MacRae, directed by Jonathan Butterell. Becoming Nancy (2019) Music by George Stiles, lyrics by Anthony Drewe, book by Elliot Davis, directed by Jerry Mitchell (premiered at the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, USA). The Boy in the Dress (2019) Music and lyrics by Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers, book by Mark Ravenhill, directed by Gregory Doran. 8 Billington, Michael, ‘The Boy in the Dress Review - Robbie Williams has a ball with David Walliams’, The Guardian, 28 November 2019. 9 ‘UN special rapporteur criticises Britain’s “in-yer-face” sexist culture’, The Guardian, 15 April 2014. 10 Sasha Regan, director of the Union Theatre in Southwark, has directed all male productions of The Pirates of Penzance (2009), Iolanthe (2010) and The Mikado (2017). The 2020 tour of HMS Pinafore was cancelled due to Covid.

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Notes to pp. 132–76

11 Brown, Mark, ‘ “It’s about celebrating difference”: The Boy in the Dress arrives at the RSC’, The Guardian, 28 November 2019. 12 Despite lukewarm reviews, Mamma Mia! The Movie took $615 million at the box office worldwide, making it the fifth highest grossing movie of 2008. 13 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/12/six-review-henry-viiiwives-bring-empty-pop-spectacle-to-broadway

Chapter 5 1 Adapted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall from the 1959 novel by Mary Hayley Bell. Bell’s teenage daughter, Hayley Mills, played the central role of Kathy in the screen adaptation of Whistle Down the Wind, earning a BAFTA nomination for Best British Actress, but losing out to Dora Bryan for A Taste of Honey. 2 The 2021 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Lloyd Webber’s wealth at £525 million, a fall of £275 million from 2020, due to the Covid pandemic. 3 Billington, Michael (2007), State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, London: Faber and Faber Ltd, p. 293. 4 Sarah Brightman in The Phantom of the Opera and Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon. 5 ‘Six review, Arts Theatre: glorious musical meeting with all Henry VIII’s wives’, The Telegraph, 28 August, 2018. Dominic Cavendish. 6 ‘Stage: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express” ’, New York Times, 16 March 1987. 7 ‘Musical portrayal of the Profumo scandal with nifty songs in 1960s style sits oddly with social and political critique’, The Guardian, 19 December 2013. 8 An annual list recognising the 100 most influential people working in the industry, the 2021 list honoured inspiring theatre practitioners who had utilised their creativity and influence during the pandemic shutdown. 9 https://variety.com/2021/film/columns/andrew-lloyd-webber-emeraldfennell-cinderella-just-for-variety-1234936884/ 10 ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new act: Activism’, New York Times, 12 July 2021. 11 ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber cancels opening night of Cinderella due to covid case’, The Guardian, 19 July 2021.

Notes to pp. 178–203

231

12 ‘Cinderella review – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical opens in West End’, WhatsOnStage, 18 August 2021. https://www.whatsonstage.com/londontheatre/reviews/cinderella-andrew-lloyd-webbers-musical_54726.html (accessed 20 August 2021). 13 ‘Cinderella review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new take is a hilarious triumph’, The Evening Standard, 19 August 2021. 14 ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella” is the revisionist fairytale we all need’, LondonTheatre.co.uk. 19 August 2021. https://www.londontheatre.co.uk /reviews/andrew-lloyd-webbers-cinderella-the-musical-carrie-hopefletcher (accessed 20 August 2021). 15 ‘The Arts have had it tough, but critics need to take off the kid gloves’, The Observer, 5 September 2021. 16 ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber at 70: how a ruthless perfectionist became Mr Musical’, The Guardian, 21 March 2018.

Chapter 6 1 Bradley, Ian (2005), You’ve Got to Have a Dream: The Message of the Musical, Westminster: John Knox Press, p. 32. 2 Sierz, Aleks (2011), Rewriting The Nation: British Theatre Today, London: Methuen Drama, p. 64. 3 The original Crazy Gang members were Bud Flanagan, Chesney Allen, Jimmy Nervo, Teddy Knox, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold. 4 Hudd won the 1983 Society of West End Theatre Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of Bud Flanagan. 5 Leslie Bricusse won a Golden Globe for best original score for Goodbye Mr Chips, and was nominated (with John Williams) for an Academy Award. Peter O’Toole was also nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Mr Chipping. 6 Goodbye Mr Chips (1934) by James Hilton, p. 58. 7 Leslie Bricusse was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song for ‘Thank You Very Much’. 8 The novel of Bridget Jones’s Diary evolved from newspaper columns written by Helen Fielding for The Independent and The Telegraph broadsheets.

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Notes to pp. 206–20

9 Bohemian Rhapsody won four Academy Awards in 2019 for Best Actor (Rami Malek), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. It was also nominated for Best Picture.

Chapter 7 1 The concert version of Les Misérables was forced to close after two weeks when London and the South East of England returned to tier 4 Covid restrictions on the 21 December. 2 Billington, Michael (2007), State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, London: Faber and Faber Ltd., p. 285. 3 https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/andrew-lloyd-webber-puts-the-otherpalace-up-for-sale 4 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/half-budget-musicalyear-national-theatre-faces-future/ 5 https://www.whatsonstage.com/west-end-theatre/news/stephensondheim-and-the-art-of-lyric-writing_11007.html

Selected Bibliography Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Aston, Elaine and G. Harris (2013), A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Billington, Michael (2007), State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, London: Faber and Faber Ltd. Bernstein, Leonard (2004), The Joy of Music, Amadeus Press. Black, Don (2020), The Sanest Guy in the Room, London: Constable. Bradley, Ian C. (2005), You’ve Got to Have a Dream: The Message of the Musical, Westminster: John Knox Press. Bricusse, Leslie (2006), The Music Man: The Key Changes in my Life, London: Metro. Bulman, James C. (2008), Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross-gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Butler, Judith (2011), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Taylor & Francis. Chambers, Colin (2004), Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution, London: Routledge. Coveney, Michael (2000), The Andrew Lloyd Webber Story, London: Arrow. Edensor, Tim (2002), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. Gillis, John R. (1994), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gounaridou, Kiki (2005), Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre and National Identity, Jefferson: McFarland. Harvie, Jen (2005), Staging the UK, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hilton, James (1934), Goodbye Mr Chips, Hodder & Stoughton. Hoare, Phillip (1995), Noel Coward A Biography, London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Hoffman, Warren (2014), The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Holdsworth, Nadine (2010), Theatre and Nation, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Selected Bibliography

Jones, John Bush (2003), Our Musicals, Ourselves. A Social History of the American Musical Theatre, Waltham: Brandeis University Press, USA. Kerbel, Lucy (2017), All Change Please: A Practical Guide to Achieving Gender Equality in Theatre, London: Nick Hern Books. Knapp, Raymond (2009), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Knapp, Raymond (2005), The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kumar, Krishan (2003), The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maitland, Sara (1986), Vesta Tilley, London: Virago. McCrum, Robert (2004), Wodehouse: A Life, London: Viking. McGrath, John (1981), A Good Night Out, Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, London: Nick Hern Books. Moon, Krystyn R. (2005), Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Morley, Sheridan and R. Leon (1998), Hey, Mr. Producer!: The Musical World of Cameron Mackintosh, London: Back Stage Books. Morley, Sheridan (1987), Spread a Little Happiness: The First Hundred Years of the British Musical, London: Thames and Hudson. Mundy, John (2007), The British Musical Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Neame, Ronald, et al. (2003), Straight from the Horse’s Mouth: Ronald Neame, an Autobiography, Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Rankin, Peter (2014), Joan Littlewood: Dreams and Realities, London: Oberon Books. Ritzer, George (2000), The McDonaldization of Society, Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Rodger, Gillian M. (2018), Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sierz, Aleks (2021), Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre Since the Second World War, London: Methuen Drama. Sierz, Aleks (2011), Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today, London: Methuen Drama. Stafford, David and Caroline (2011), Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be: The Life of Lionel Bart, London: Omnibus Press.

Selected Bibliography

235

Sternfeld, Jessica (2006), The Megamusical, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Todd, Selina (2021), Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth, London: Chatto & Windus. Vermette, Margaret (2006), The Musical World of Boublil and Schonberg, New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books. Webb, Paul (2005), Ivor Novello: Portrait of a Star, London: Haus Publishing. Whitfield, Sarah (2019), Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity, London: Red Globe Press. Wolf, Naomi (1991), The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, Charlottesville: W. Morrow. Wolf, Stacy (2010), Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Stacy (2002), A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wollman, Elizabeth. L. (2006), The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Index ABBA 202–3, 204–5, 206 accessibility vs excellence debate 44, 47–9 albums 157–8 All Creatures Great and Small (BBC television programme) 186 All the Fun of the Fair (Various Artists) 207 All-Time Greatest Song from a Musical vote 147, 155 Allen, Chesney 188 see also Flanagan and Allen Ambassador Theatre Group 119 America 4, 21, 220 see also Broadway American Dream 25, 67, 85, 151 Americanization 6 anti-Americanism 24–5 Billington, Michael 216–17 British Invasion 159 British musicals on Broadway 21, 29 culture 23–4 diversity 24 identity 151 immigrant influence 24 musical films 23 musical theatre 4, 21, 24–5 musical theatre education 215–16 national identity 25–6 race 59–60, 61 social class 24 social history 56 technology 28–9 Women’s Liberation 26 American Psycho (Sheik, Duncan) 118 Americanization 6 & Juliet (Martin, Max) 9, 174, 226 anti-Americanism 24–5 anti-intellectualism 47

anti-Semitism 121–2 Any Dream Will Do (BBC television show) 164 ‘Any Dream Will Do’ (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim) 148 Anything Goes (Porter, Cole) 43 archives 11 Asian characters 61 Aspects of Love (Black, Don; Hart, Charles; Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 43, 49, 148, 160, 167, 171 Assisted Passage Migration Scheme 81 audiences 22, 35, 52, 68, 162–3 age 130–1, 192, 226 class 90, 105 Covid-19 pandemic 223 developing 164–5 diversity 71–2, 79, 131 emotion 154 local 192–3 misogyny 130–1, 132–3 nostalgia 192 shared experiences 210 teenage 130–1 women 117, 132–3 Australia 81 Ayckbourn, Alan 216 By Jeeves 152 153 Jeeves 152, 153 Baez, Joan 33 Baiju Bawra (Chag, Niraj) 69, 71 Baker’s Wife, The (Schwartz, Stephen) 43 Ball, Michael 147, 213 Band, The (Take That) 118 Bart, Lionel 6, 21, 26, 28, 68, 148, 155 Blitz! 28, 68

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238

Index

Fings Aint Wot They Used T’Be 68 ‘Food Glorious Food’ 148 Oliver! 26, 27, 28, 96, 148, 164, 194, 221 ‘Why’ 197 Bay City Rollers 209 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 59 BBC Radio 2 147–8 All-Time Greatest Song from a Musical vote 147, 155 Beale, Simon Russell 216 Beatles 158 Beautiful Game, The (Elton, Ben and Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 55, 65, 101, 118, 153, 163, 169–70 Beauty and the Beast (Ashman, Howard; Menken, Alan; Rice, Tim) 199 Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Bartram, Neil; Sherman, Richard M.; Sherman, Robert B.) 9, 199 Beggar’s Opera (Gay, John and Pepusch, Johann Christoph) 34 Bell, Jamie 92 belonging, sense of 210 Bend it Like Beckham (Chadha, Gurinder) 64–5 Bend it Like Beckham (Goodall, Howard and Hart, Charles) class 101 football 101 race 58, 62, 64–6, 77, 133 touring 222 Bennett, Alan History Boys, The 47, 191, 201 Benny Hill Show, The (BBC/ITV television show) 73 Berlin, Irving 24 Bernstein, Leonard 24 West Side Story 25 Betty Blue Eyes (Drewe, Anthony and Stiles, George) 49, 53, 58 all-male creative team 118 class 97, 108–10, 112

English identity 184 nostalgia 182, 183, 184 women 97 Bhamra, Kuljit 65 Big Life, The (Joseph, Paul and Sirett, Paul) 221 all-male creative team 118 audience 193 race 58, 67, 69–70, 96, 122 touring 222 Billington, Michael anti-intellectualism 47 Boy in the Dress, The 124 gender 124 Girl from the North Country, criticism of 39 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 180 megamusicals 165, 216–17 Misérables, Les, criticism of 46 populism 46 State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 2 Stephen Ward 172 women 172 Billy Elliot (Daldry, Stephen) 92 Billy Elliot (Hall, Lee and John, Elton) 21, 47, 70, 148, 221 all-male creative team 118 class 56, 83, 90, 91–3, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100–1, 104, 109, 111, 112–13 community 94 ‘Deep into the Ground’ 39 drag 102, 103 failure, portrayal of 112–13 homosexuality 102 masculinity 100–1, 104 nostalgia 182, 205 pit brass band tradition 38–9 politics 39–40, 91–2, 98 setting 94 women 97, 98, 118, 144 Bitter Sweet (Coward, Noël) 154, 173, 181 Björnson, Maria 117

Index Black, Don 171 Aspects of Love 43, 49, 148, 160, 167, 171 Bombay Dreams 62–4, 66, 67, 135, 163, 170 ‘Love Changes Everything’ 148 Mrs Henderson Presents. See Mrs Henderson Presents ‘Perfect Year, The’ 148 Starlight Express. See Starlight Express Stephen Ward. See Stephen Ward Sunset Boulevard 21, 28, 43, 148, 153, 161, 167 Tell Me On A Sunday 151, 171 women 171 Black and White Minstrel Show, The (BBC television show) 59, 135 Black Lives Matter 19 blackface 59, 133, 134, 135 Blitz! (Bart, Lionel) 28, 68 Blitz spirit 183–4, 187, 188 Blood Brothers (Russell, Willy) 11, 31–2, 33–5, 36, 37–9, 48, 56–8, 148, 209 class 35, 57, 83, 90, 104 women 145 failure, portrayal of 112 politics 7, 8, 33–5, 36, 57–8, 90, 179, 191 Blythe, Alecky 75, 77 London Road 10, 43, 75–8 Bohemian Rhapsody (Singer, Bryan) 206 Bollywood musicals 62–3 Bombay Dreams (Black, Don and Rahman, A. R.) 62–4, 66, 67, 135, 163, 170 Bowie, David Ziggy Stardust 157–8 boxing 101 Boy Friend, The (Wilson, Sandy) 83 Boy in the Dress, The (Chambers, Guy and Williams, Robbie) 9, 44–5, 46, 49, 65, 78

239

all-male creative team 118, 119 audience, relationship with 133 Billington, Michael 124 class 48, 49, 85, 98, 101–2, 104–5 conventions 222 drag 72–3, 101–2, 104, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 135, 201 football 101–2 gender 45, 101–2, 104, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 135, 199–200 gender appropriation 124, 132 homosexuality 102 national characteristics 72–3 nostalgia 199–201 race 50 stereotypes 98, 121 women 45, 46, 58, 98, 118, 119, 121, 129–30, 131–3, 134, 135 Boyle, Susan 207 Boys From Syracuse, The (Hart, Lorenz and Rodgers, Richard) 69 Boyz, Da (Excalibah, DJ and Skolla, MC) 69 Bradley, Ian 181, 224 You’ve Got to Have a Dream: The Message of the Musical 56 Bragg, Melvyn 35 Hired Man, The. See Hired Man, The Brannagh, Kenneth 159 Brecht, Bertolt 32, 33 Threepenny Opera, The 34 Brexit 54, 185 Bricusse, Leslie 21, 148, 155 Goodbye Mr Chips 174, 188–94 Pickwick 194 Scrooge 194, 196–8 Stop the World I Want to Get Off 26, 31 Brigadoon (Lerner, Alan Jay and Loewe, Frederick) 55 Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding, Helen) 203

240

Index

Briggs, Raymond Snowman, The 195 Brightman, Sarah 153 ‘Bring Him Home’ (Boublil, Alain; Kretzmer, Herbert; Natel, Jean-Marc; Schönberg, Claude-Michel) 147 Bristol 19 Brit Pop 23 Britain’s Got Talent (ITV television show) 78, 213, 214, 215, 223 British Bhangra 65 British Empire 62, 95 British identity 52–3 see also national identity British Indians 62–7, 70, 133 Britishness 27, 28, 29, 37, 48–9, 52–4, 55–6 Blitz/Dunkirk spirit 183–4, 187, 188 confidence 166 Coward, Noël 173 emotion 154 folk music 30, 31, 33, 36, 38 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 37, 151–4, 159, 161–2, 167, 173, 179 1960s counter-culture 158 nostalgia 154, 181–2, 193–4, 212 pit brass bands 38 rural England 36 stoicism 188 Broadway 8, 9, 13, 26, 56, 68, 165 British Invasion 1, 25, 159 British musicals on 21, 29 Cats 166 Jesus Christ Superstar 156 Last Ship, The 93 Miss Saigon 121 Phantom of the Opera 149 race 59–60, 61, 121 religion 156–7 technology 28–9 Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (Bettinson, Rob and Janes, Alan) 182, 187, 202

By Jeeves (Ayckbourn, Alan and Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 152, 153 Cabin in the Sky (Duke, Vernon and Latouche, John) 59 Caird, John 42 Calendar Girls (Barlow, Gary) 74, 77, 118, 137–9, 140 Calendar Girls (Cole, Nigel) 137 Camelot (Lerner, Alan Jay and Loewe, Frederick) 166 Cameron Mackintosh Resident Composer Scheme 220 Campaign against Racial Discrimination 59 Candide (Bernstein, Leonard and Sondheim, Stephen) 43 capitalism 20, 37, 38, 110, 157, 159–60 Card, The (Hatch, Tony and Trent, Jackie) 86 Carousel (Hammerstein II, Oscar and Rodgers, Richard) 43 Carrie (Gore, Michael and Pitchford, Dean) 40, 42, 44, 216 Carry On films 73, 77, 106–7 Cartwright, Jim Road 8 Cats (Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 7, 30, 47, 153, 167 Britishness 151 Broadway 21, 166 class 111 commodifying 159 creativity 48 influence 149 Jellicle Ball theme 180 longevity 179 Lynne, Gillian 117 marketing 92 Nunn, Trevor 42, 43 as revolutionary 191 ‘Radio 2 Celebrates Musicals’ weekend 147 set designs 28

Index success 36, 160 tours 179 Cavalcade (Coward, Noël) 6, 95, 173, 191 Chadha, Gurinder 64, 65 Bend it Like Beckham 64–5 Chag, Niraj 69 Chair of Contemporary Theatre, St Catherine’s College, the University of Oxford 216 challenges 217–26 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Shaiman, Marc and Wittman, Scott) 118 Chess (Andersson, Benny; Rice, Tim; Ulvaeus, Björn) 43, 148 Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, The (McGrath, John) 31 Chichester 88, 191, 193 Chichester Festival Theatre 9, 79, 87–8, 185–6, 189, 223 Child Ballads (Mitchell, Anais) 33 Childs, Francis 33 Child’s Ballads 33 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Hughes, Ken) 198–9 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Sherman, Richard M. and Sherman, Robert B.) 182, 198–9 Chorus Line, A (Kleban, Edward and Hamlisch, Marvin) 25 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens, Charles) 194–8 Christmas Carol, A (Hurst, Brian Desmond) 195 Churchill Theatre 11 Cilla The Musical (Various Artists) 118, 137 Cinderella (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Zippel, David) 48, 150, 167, 173–4, 222, 223 audience 177 Covid-19 pandemic 9, 11, 175–6 race 170, 177, 178 relevance 180

241

reviews 178–9 women 14–15, 125–7, 139, 142, 145, 163–4, 171, 172 ‘Circle of Life, The’ (John, Elton and Rice, Tim) 148 Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 30 Clark, Petula 189, 190 class 3, 4, 6, 7, 20–1, 22, 47, 81–4, 111–12 America 24 authenticity 90 barriers 162 Beautiful Game, The 101 Bend it Like Beckham 101 Betty Blue Eyes 97, 108–10, 112 Big Life, The 96 Billy Elliot 56, 83, 90, 91–3, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100–1, 104, 109, 111, 112–13 binaries 92 Blood Brothers 35, 57, 83, 90, 104, 112–13 Boy Friend, The 83 Boy in the Dress, The 48, 49, 85, 98, 101–2, 104–5 Chichester Festival Theatre 88 drag 102–3 education 189–90 Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 103–4, 105 Flowers for Mrs Harris 49, 87–90, 111–12, 113 football 101–2 Goodbye Mr Chips 190–1, 192, 193 Half A Sixpence 86, 89, 93 Hired Man, The 90–1, 92, 94, 97, 101, 112 homophobia 102 immigration 96 industrial unrest 91–4 Jesus Christ Superstar 7 Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat 84 Last Ship, The 90, 93–4, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 111, 112

242

Index

Lloyd Webber, Andrew 152, 162 Made in Dagenham 85, 98–100 masculinity 100–2, 104, 105 Me and My Girl 86, 89, 93, 108 megamusicals 92, 111 Mrs Henderson Presents 107–8 mythologies 87 Old School Tie Network 120 Our House 110, 112 race 96 royalty 109 RSC 41 Salad Days 83 sex 106–8 SIX 84, 85, 108 soap operas 102 social mobility 85–6, 89, 94–5, 96–7, 107–11 social realism 90 Spend Spend Spend 89–90, 97, 106 sport 101–2 Stephen Ward 123 stereotypes 7, 86, 87, 89, 93, 97, 152–3 theatre 20–1 transphobia 102 wealth 110 women 96–100, 102, 106–8 Cleo, Camping, Emmanuel and Dick (Johnson, Terry) 107 Close the Coalhouse Door (Plater, Alan) 31 Codron, Michael 216 Cohan, George M. 24 collective memory 185 colonialism 24, 26, 51, 60, 61–2, 63, 66, 95 Color Purple, The (Bray, Stephen; Russell, Brenda; Willis, Allee) 59 Colston, Edward 19 comedy 102, 109–10, 187, 188 Comedy of Errors, The (Nunn, Trevor and Woolfenden, Guy) 42 commercial success 3, 4, 5, 8, 40, 48

commissioning 43, 54–5 community 52, 94, 95, 98, 99 belonging, sense of 210 memory 184 Company (Sondheim, Stephen) 151 concept albums 157 ‘Concert for Diana’ (memorial tribute)148 Cool Britannia 22 Cooney, Ray Run For Your Wife 73 Cork, Adam 75 London Road 10, 43, 75–8 Corruna! (Dewhurst, Keith) 31 counter-culture (1960s) 158 Covid-19 pandemic 9, 11, 175–7, 213, 222, 223–4 Coward, Noël 5–6, 21, 27, 172–3, 174 Bitter Sweet 154, 173, 181 Britishness 173 Cavalcade 6, 95, 173, 191 class 84 control 173 Cowardy Custard 117, 202 criticism 173 In Which We Serve 174 London’s Calling 173 Operette 154 Pacific 1860 173 wartime entertainment 174 Cowardy Custard (Coward, Noël) 117, 202 Cradle Will Rock, The (Blitzstein, Marc) 25 Craymer, Judy 118 Crazy Gang 186–8 creative teams, all-male 118–22, 124 Calendar Girls 137, 138–9 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 171 critical analysis 4–5, 8–9, 12, 172 diversity 71 Crompton, Sarah 178 Crown The (Netflix television show) 123 cultural artefacts 19–20, 26–7, 40, 78

Index cultural icons 208 culture 19–20, 49, 158 America 23–4 production of 51–2 regional 192–3 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The (Stephens, Simon) 3 Curtis, Nick 178 Curtis, Richard 142, 152 Curve Theatre, Leicester 219 Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd) 157–8 David Copperfield (Dickens, Charles) 194 Dawson, Les 102 Deacon, John 205 Dead Funny (Johnson, Terry) 107 ‘Deep into the Ground’ (Hall, Lee and John, Elton) 39 devolution 184 Dickens, Charles 26, 194–8 Christmas Carol, A 194–8 David Copperfield 194 Great Expectations 194 Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The 42, 194 Little Dorrit 194 Old Curiosity Shop, The 194 Oliver Twist 194 Pickwick Papers 194 Tale of Two Cities, A 194 Dickson, Barbara 33 ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ 34 Dirty Dancing (Bergstein, Eleanor) 117 Disney stage musicals 165, 199 diva figures 130–1 diversity 4, 5, 7, 9–10, 12, 47, 58, 79–80, 140, 222 see also class and race and women America 24 audiences 71–2 Boy in the Dress, The 45, 46, 201

243

Britain’s Got Talent 78 colonialism 24, 51, 60, 61–2, 66 drag 128, 201 Fings Aint Wot They Used T’Be 68 Hamilton 72 immigration 24, 58 intersectionality 224 lack of representation 58 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 62–4, 78, 170–2 London Road 75–8 Miss Littlewood 44 Musical Theatre Project 68–70, 72 regional theatres 70, 71, 222 religion 169–70 RSC 41, 44–6 stereotypes 72–5 stifling of 214 West End, the 70–1 Doctor Doolittle (Fleischer, Richard) 196 Doggett, Alan 84 Donnelly, Declan 213 ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ (Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 147–8 Doran, Gregory 45, 49, 132, 200–1 Dossor, Alan 32 Downton Abbey (ITV television programme) 193 drag 72–3, 101–4, 127–36, 201 Boy in the Dress, The 101–2, 104, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 135, 201 homosexuality 102 drama 1, 2 see also theatre critical analysis 8–9, 35, 36 diversity 120–1 nostalgia 181 women 120–1 Dreamboats and Petticoats (Various Artists) 118, 207 Drewe, Anthony 27, 218, 220 Betty Blue Eyes. See Betty Blue Eyes Honk! 43, 119, 218

244

Index

Mary Poppins 21, 118, 182, 199, 214, 218 dumbing down 46–7, 49 Dyer, Clint 67 Ealing comedies 183 East is East (Khan-Din, Ayub) 70 Ebb, Fred and Kander, John Scottsboro Boys, The 25, 221 economy, the 82, 162 Educating Rita (Russell, Willy) 32 education class 83 musical theatre 215–16, 219–20 Edward (Prince of the UK) 109 Edward VII (King of the UK) 20 elitism 22, 57, 71, 85 see also class Elliot, Marianne 117 Ellis, Vivian 85 Elton, Ben 169 Beautiful Game, The 55, 65, 101, 118, 153, 163, 169–70 women 171 ‘Embraceable You’ (Gershwin, George and Ira) 24 emotion 154, 185 English identity 52, 53, 54, 58, 183–5 Boy in the Dress, The 200–1 drag 201 Goodbye Mr Chips 190–1, 193 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 177 rural England 36 entertainment 39–40, 47, 111–12, 215 Equity 61, 164 escapism 90 Essex, David 207 Evans, Daniel 87 Evans, Suzy 178 Evershed-Martin, Leslie 88 Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (MacRae, Tom and Sells, Dan Gillespie) 54, 103–4, 105, 117 all-male creative team 118 audience, age of 192, 226 audience, relationship with 133

drag 72–3, 128–9, 130, 134, 135 misogyny 129, 130–1 stereotypes 121, 124 women 58, 121, 124, 128, 130–1, 132–3, 134, 135 young female fan base 130–1, 202–3 Everyman Theatre, Liverpool 30, 32 Evita (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim) 8, 21, 26, 47, 155–6, 167, 177, 221 ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ 147–8 longevity 179 Eyre, Richard 216 Fairport Convention 33 failure, portrayal of 112–13 family unit 102 farce 72–4 Fellowes, Julian 86, 96 feminism 116, 138, 203 see also women post-feminism 203 Fennell, Emerald 172, 178 Fields, Gracie 21 film industry 23, 73, 182, 183, 199 Fings Aint Wot They Used T’Be (Bart, Lionel) 68 Five Guys Named Moe (Jordan, Louis) 68, 202, 218 Flanagan, Bud 188 see also Flanagan and Allen Flanagan and Allen 186–7, 188 Flatt, Kate 117 ‘Flower of Scotland’ (Williamson, Roy) 209–10 Flowers for Mrs Harris (Gallico, Paul) 88 Flowers for Mrs Harris (Taylor, Richard) 9, 54, 192 conventions 222 class 49, 87–90, 111–12, 113 folk music 30, 31, 33, 36, 38–9

Index ‘Food Glorious Food’ (Bart, Lionel) 148 football 101–2, 180, 209 42nd Street (Dubin, Al; Mercer, Johnny; Warren, Harry) 90 Foster, Nikolai 219 Frozen (Anderson-Lopez, Kristen and Lopez, Robert) 199 Fry, Stephen 86, 96, 216 Full Monty, The (Yazbek, David) 101 Fun Home (Kron, Lisa and Tesori, Jeanine) 145, 221 funding 41, 42, 69, 159, 170, 192–3, 219 see also subsidized theatre Garland, Patrick 174, 186, 188, 191, 192 Gay, Noel 85 Me and My Girl 21, 86 gender 45, 46, 66, 135 see also women appropriation 121, 124, 127–30, 132, 134–5 Boy in the Dress, The 45, 101–2, 104, 129–30, 131–2, 134, 135, 199–200 class 101–2 disruption 121, 124, 127–8, 132 drag 72–3, 101–4, 127–35 equality 115–16 Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 128–9, 130–1 masculinity 100–4, 105 roles 102 stereotypes 102, 121 George, Boy 206–7 Taboo 118, 206 Gershwin, George and Ira 24 ‘Embraceable You’ 24 ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’ 24 Porgy and Bess 24 Get Up Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical (Hall, Lee) 9, 122 ‘Gethsemane’ (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim)148

245

Girl from the North Country (Dylan, Bob and McPherson, Conor) 39, 155 Girlfriends (Goodall, Howard) 117, 142–3, 145 Glaze, Peter 186 Girlfriends 117, 142–3, 145 Goodall, Howard 8, 35, 37, 65 Hired Man, The. See Hired Man, The Two Cities 194 Goodbye Mr Chips (Bricusse, Leslie) 174, 188–94 Goodbye Mr Chips (Hilton, James) 188–9, 191 Goodbye Mr Chips (Ross, Herbert) 182, 189, 190 Goodbye Mr Chips (Wood, Sam) 189, 190 Goold, Rupert 10, 100 ‘Government and the Value of Culture’ (Jowell, Tessa) 19, 49 Grant, Hugh 72 Grease (Kleiser, Randal) 207 Great Expectations (Dickens, Charles) 194 Great Expectations (Lean, David) 189, 194 Great Expectations (Ornadel, Cyril and Shaper, Hal) 194 Greenhorn, Stephen 55 Grey Gardens (Frankel, Scott and Korie, Michael) 221 Guys and Dolls (Loesser, Frank) 42–3, 173 Gypsy (Sondheim, Stephen and Styne, Julie) 26 Half A Sixpence (Heneker, David) 27, 59, 72, 79, 192, 193 class 86, 89, 93 Hall, Lee 96 Get Up Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical 9 Billy Elliot. See Billy Elliot

246

Index

Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour 30–1 Hall, Peter 40 Halliwell, Gerri 22–3, 27 Hamilton (Miranda, Lin-Manuel) 9, 17, 25, 49, 174, 214 creation 220–1 diversity 72 race 60, 70, 79 set design 29 technology 29 Hampton, Christopher 171 ‘Perfect Year, The’ 148 Stephen Ward. See Stephen Ward Sunset Boulevard 21, 28, 43, 148, 153, 161, 167 Hands, Terry 42, 45 Hart, Charles 65 Hedley, Phillip 68 heritage industry 182–3 Hex (Fortune, Jim and Norris, Rufus) 220 Hill, Benny 73, 107 Hired Man, The (Goodall, Howard and Bragg, Melvyn) 8, 35–7, 179, 221 class 90–1, 92, 94, 95, 112 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 218 masculinity 101 politics 98 women 97 Young, Kate 117 history 182 see also nostalgia History Boys (Bennett, Alan) 47, 181, 201 Holdsworth, Nadine Theatre and Nation 2 Holt, Thelma 216 homophobia 102 homosexuality 102 Honk! (Drewe, Anthony and Stiles, George) 43, 119, 218 How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria (BBC television show) 164

‘How the English Establishment Framed Stephen Ward’ (Kennedy, Caroline and Knightley, Phillip) 122 How to Succeed in Business (Loesser, Frank) 26 Hudd, Roy 186–7, 188 Hugo, Victor 42 humour 73–4 Hytner, Nicholas 43 ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim) 148 I Dreamed A Dream (Various Artists) 207 ‘I Know Him So Well’ (Andersson, Benny; Rice, Tim; Ulvaeus, Björn) 148 Idol on Parade (Gilling, John) 19 ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)’ (Proclaimers, The) 209–10 immigration 24, 58, 62 Big Life, The 58, 67 class 96 employment 96, 97 sport 66 Windrush Generation 67 In the Heights (Miranda, Lin-Manuel) 59 In Which We Serve (Coward, Noël and Lean, David) 174 India 62 see also British Indians Bollywood musicals 62–4 sport 66 industrial unrest 91–4 industrialization 95, 103 intellectualism 2, 3, 20 see also literary gaze anti-intellectualism 47 megamusicals 39 International Brigade 82 intersectionality 224 investment 10

Index ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’ (Gershwin, George and Ira) 24 Jack in the Beanstalk (Massiah, Hope and Murray, Delroy) 69 Jamie: Drag Queen at 16 (BBC television programme) 103 Jeeves (Ayckbourn, Alan and Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 152, 153 Jelly’s Last Jam (Birkenhead, Susan; Henderson, Luther; Morton, Jelly Roll) 59 Jerry Springer (Lee, Stewart and Thomas, Richard) 4 Jersey Boys (Crewe, Bob and Gaudio, Bob) 49 Jesus Christ Superstar (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim) 7–8, 29, 35, 47, 163, 167 audience 177 Broadway production 156–7 concept album 157, 158 controversy 156–7 ‘Gethsemane’ 148 ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ 148 impact 158–9 longevity 179 profit 156 success 156–7 unauthorised productions 156 John, Elton 111 Billy Elliot. See Billy Elliot ‘Circle of Life, The’ 148 Lion King, The 199 John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert (Russell, Willy) 32, 202 Johnson, Boris 175, 176 Johnson, Catherine 136, 202 Johnson, Terry 107 Cleo, Camping, Emmanuel and Dick 107 Dead Funny 107 Jolson (Various Artists) 182, 187, 202 Jordan, Louis 68

247

Joseph, Paul 67 Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim) 84, 148, 164, 179 Jowell, Tessa ‘Government and the Value of Culture’ 19, 49 jukebox musicals 16, 136, 154, 182, 187, 205–11 nostalgia 202, 205–7, 211–12 problems 206 Kander, John and Ebb, Fred Scottsboro Boys, The 25, 221 Keeler, Christine 74, 122, 123 Kenny, Sean 28, 29 Kenwright, Bill 34 Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer, Robert) 183 King, Stephen 42 Kinky Boots (Lauper, Cindy) 101, 128 Koltai, Ralph 42 Kumar, Krishan 52–3 Ladykillers, The (Mackendrick, Alexander) 183 Last Night of the Proms 27 Last Picnic, The (Bryden, Bill) 55 Last Ship, The (Sting) 54, 58, 111, 155 all-male creative team 118 class 90, 93–4, 95, 96, 98, 101, 112 failure, portrayal of 112 masculinity 101 nostalgia 182, 205 politics 98 women 97, 98, 118 Leicestershire 91 Leith 208–9 ‘Letter from America’ (Proclaimers, The) 208 Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The (Dickens, Charles) 194

248

Index

Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The (Dickens, Charles and Edgar, David) 42 Lion King, The (John, Elton and Rice, Tim) 199 literary gaze 1, 2, 6, 21–2 Little Dorrit (Dickens, Charles) 194 Littlewood, Joan 6–7, 8, 21, 32, 44, 117, 155, 227 n. 3 Theatre Workshop 68 Fings Aint Wot They Used T’Be 68 Oh What A Lovely War! 7, 26, 27, 56, 221 Liverpool 33, 57 Liverpool Everyman Theatre 30, 32 Lloyd, Phyllida 136 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 3, 8, 49, 147–50, 211 see also Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim All-Time Greatest Song from a Musical vote 147–8, 155 alternative narratives 167 appreciation of 180 Aspects of Love 43, 49, 148, 160, 167, 171 Beautiful Game, The 55, 65, 101, 118, 153, 163, 169–70 Bollywood musicals 62–3 Bombay Dreams 62–4, 163, 170 as brand 180 Britishness 37, 151–4, 159, 161–2, 167, 173, 179 Broadway 166 By Jeeves 152, 153 Cats. See Cats charity projects 167, 170, 176 Cinderella. See Cinderella class 152, 153, 169, 170, 177 collaborators 171 commodification of shows 159–65, 177 ‘Concert for Diana’ 148 control 150, 173 Covid-19 pandemic 175–7

Coward, Noël, parallels with 172–3, 174 criticism 149, 150–1, 158–9, 162, 164, 172, 177–8 diversity 62–4, 78, 170–2 domination 214, 215, 217–18 emotion 154 Englishness 177 football 180 Hired Man, The 218 influence 155, 157–8 Jeeves 152, 153 Johnson, Boris 175, 176 as life peer 153 ‘Love Changes Everything’ 148 Love Never Dies 154 marketing/publicity 157, 160–1, 163, 164, 175–7 megamusicals 28, 29, 30 ‘Memory’ 148 misogyny 171 as national icon 167, 174–6 new talent, fostering 217–18 ‘No Matter What’ 148 nostalgia 154 ‘Perfect Year, The’ 148 Phantom of the Opera, The. See Phantom of the Opera, The profile 174–6, 179–80 profit 154–5, 156, 160, 174 race 170, 177 reality television 150, 164–6 Really Useful Group 78, 150, 153 Requiem 151, 153, 164 Songs of Praise 148 Sound of Music, The 164 source material 163 South Bank Show, The 155 Starlight Express. See Starlight Express Stephen Ward. See Stephen Ward sung through musicals 30, 156 Sunset Boulevard 21, 28, 43, 148, 153, 161, 167, 219

Index technology 28, 159 Tell Me On A Sunday 151 Thatcher, Margaret 169, 177 The Other Palace 218 tours 161–2, 179 trends 163–4, 173–4, 177 wealth 149, 153, 158–9, 160, 170 Whistle Down the Wind 148, 151–2, 167, 171, 179 women 119, 124, 164, 171–2 Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim 8, 27, 156 ‘Any Dream Will Do’ 148 counter-culture 158 ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’147–8 Evita. See Evita ‘Gethsemane’ 148 ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ 148 Jesus Christ Superstar. See Jesus Christ Superstar Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat 84, 148, 164, 179 profit 156 sung through style 156 Wizard of Oz, The 164 ‘You Must Love Me’ 148 Lloyd Webber, Julian 84 Local Hero (Forsyth, Bill) 124, 182 Local Hero (Knopfler, Mark) 44, 49, 55, 118, 124 London Road (Cork, Adam and Blythe, Alecky) 10, 43, 75–8, 221, 224 London’s Calling (Coward, Noël) 173 ‘Love Changes Everything’ (Black, Don; Hart, Charles; Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 148 Love Never Dies (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Slater, Gwen) 154 Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare, William) 67

249

Lynn, Vera 207, 212 Lynne, Gillian 117 McCartney, Paul 159 McColl, Ewan 33 McGrath, John 32 Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, The 31 Soft or a Girl 31 McKellen, Ian 216 Mackenzie, Julia 119 Mackintosh, Cameron 8, 10, 29, 41, 49, 160, 210–11 all-male creative teams 118 Betty Blue Eyes 108–9 Britain’s Got Talent 213, 223 Britishness 37 Broadway 166 commodification of shows 159, 160, 163, 165 Covid-19 pandemic 213 diversity 59, 61, 72, 78, 118 domination 214, 215, 217–18 megamusicals 28, 30 national identity, use of 161 new talent, fostering 217–18 ‘One Show More’ 213–14 Oxford University, endowment 216 revisions 221 technology 159 tours 161–2 women 118 McNally, Terence 220 McPartlin, Ant 213 Mad Men (Lionsgate television programme) 207 Made in Dagenham (Arnold, David; Thomas, Richard) 10 all-male creative team 118 class 85, 98–100 nostalgia 183 outdated attitudes 212 women 98–100, 118, 124, 142

250

Index

Made in Dagenham (Cole, Nigel) 98–9 Madness 38, 206 Our House 38, 110, 112, 118, 136, 206–7 male domination 139, 140–1, 145, 214, 215, 217–18 see also creative-teams, all male Mamma Mia! (Andersson, Benny and Ulvaeus, Björn) 21, 30, 47, 205 Cramer, Judy 118 nostalgia 185, 202–5 politics 56, 136, 205 women 10, 116, 117, 118, 136, 142, 145, 202–5 Manjoo, Rashida 125 Martin Guerre (Boublil, Alain; Clark, Stephen; Hardy, Edward; Schönberg, Claude-Michel) 221 Mary Poppins (Drewe, Anthony; Sherman, Richard M.; Sherman, Robert B.; Stiles, George) 21, 118, 182, 199, 214, 218 masculinity 100–4, 105, 129 Massiah, Hope 69 Matchgirls, The (Owen, Bill and Russell, Tony) 27 Matilda (Minchin, Tim) 5, 21, 40, 41, 44 all-male creative team 118, 119 conventions 222 drag 72, 128 nostalgia 182 Matilda (Warchus, Matthew) 128 May, Brian 205 Me and My Girl (Gay, Noel; Furber, Douglas; Rose L. Arthur) 21, 86, 89, 93, 108 megamusicals 7, 8, 20, 25, 30 audience 92 Billington, Michael 165, 216–17 Britishness 37, 48

class 92, 111 commodifying 157, 159–65, 177 competing with 211 criticism 46 as entertainment 39–40 as inferior 39, 46–8 national identity 25, 40 politics 37 profit 40, 48, 154–5, 156, 160, 174 publicity 160–1, 164 regional theatres 105–6, 161–2 set design 28–9 success 160 sung-through style 156 technology 28–9, 159 tours 161–2, 222 trends 163 women 117–18 memory 185 ‘Memory’ (Lloyd Webber, Andrew)148 Mercury, Freddie 205, 206 Mercury Musical Developments 10, 119, 218, 219–20 Merrily We Roll Along (Sondheim, Stephen) 151 middle class, the 84–5, 88, 108 see also class Betty Blue Eyes 108–9 Boy in the Dress, The 104 drag 101–2 Mrs Henderson Presents 107 race 96 sport 101–2 Mikado (Gilbert, W. S. and Sullivan, Arthur) 60–1 Miles-Kingston, Paul 153 Mills, John 189, 192 miners 83, 90, 91–3, 94–5 Miranda, Lin-Manuel 221 Hamilton. See Hamilton Misérables, Les (Boublil, Alain; Natel, Jean-Marc; Schönberg, Claude-Michel) 21, 36, 40, 42, 47, 160

Index All-Time Greatest Song from a Musical vote 147–8 audience 92 awards 166 Billington, Michael 46 as British Musical 214, 215 class 92, 96, 111 concert version 213, 215, 223 creativity 48 Flatt, Kate 117 national identity, use of 161 Nunn, Trevor 41–2, 43 popularity 90 reworking 221 set design 28, 29 technology 29 misogyny 124–5, 127, 133–5, 142 see also sexism Boy in the Dress, The 131–3, 134–5 Cinderella 127 Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 129, 130–1, 132–3, 134–5 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 171 Made in Dagenham 99–100 SIX 141–2 Starlight Express 170–1 Stephen Ward 168, 172 Miss Littlewood (Kenyon, Sam) 44 Miss Saigon (Boublil, Alain; Maltby, Jr., Richard; Schönberg, Claude-Michel) 28, 160 Hytner, Nicholas 43 national identity, use of 161 race 61, 121, 135 reworking 221 set design 29 technology 29, 118, 159 women 118, 124 Mitchell, Anais Child Ballads 33 Moss, Lucy 116 SIX. See SIX Mountford, Fiona 116 Mousetrap, The (Christie, Agatha) 1

251

Mr Cinders (Ellis, Vivian; Grey, Clifford; Myers, Richard; Newman, Greatrex) 86, 191 Mrs Henderson Presents (Black, Don; Chamberlain, Simon; Fenton, George) 53, 58, 74, 77 all-male creative team 118 English identity 184–5 nostalgia 182, 183, 184 women 107–8, 142, 212 Mrs Henderson Presents (Frears, Stephen) 107 multiculturalism. See diversity Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan, P. J.) 203 Murray, Delroy 69 music 31 see also popular music British Bhangra 65 diversity 68–70 folk music 30, 31, 33, 36, 38–9 pit brass bands 38 popular music 22–3, 29–30, 38 music hall 3, 6, 20–1, 24, 27 blackface 59 politics 32 stereotypes 73 musical theatre 24–5, 162, 210–11 see also megamusicals America 4, 21, 24–6 artistic standards 49 Britishness. See Britishness challenges 217–26 class appeal 7 see also class commercial success 3, 4, 5, 8, 40 commodifying 157, 159–65, 177 critical analysis 4–5, 8–9, 12 current trends 9–11 dumbing down 46–7, 49 education 215–16, 219–20 engagement with 225 as entertainment 39–40 as escapism 26 exclusion from cultural discourse 1–4, 12 function of 16–17 future of 217–26

252

Index

history 2, 6, 9 investment 10 see also funding lack of originality 9–11 literary adaptations 20 new talent, fostering 217–19, 221–2 political. See politics popularity 5, 20 preservation 11 profit 40, 48, 154–5, 156, 160, 174, 211 resources, lack of 219 revisions 220–1 socialist 31–2, 34 status 1–4, 11 sung through musicals 30, 40, 156 tours 161–2, 179, 222 war musicals 183–4 Musical Commissioning Hub 54–5 musical films 23 Musical Theatre Project 68–70, 72, 218–19, 222, 224 My Fair Lady (Lerner, Alan Jay and Loewe, Frederick) 43 Napier, John 28–9, 30, 166 national characteristics 72–5, 79–80 national identity 4, 5, 12, 48–9, 51–3 see also Britishness America 25–6 analysis 8 anti-Americanism 24–5 belonging, sense of 210 Blood Brothers 33, 48 Boy in the Dress, The 48, 49 British vs English 52–6 constructed 77–8 cultural production 51–2 culture 19 England. See English identity exclusion 58 Hired Man, The 36 idealism 77 Kumar, Krishan 52–3 localised 161

Mackintosh, Cameron 161 megamusicals 25, 40 Northern Ireland 52, 53, 54, 55, 58 Scotland. See Scotland sport 65–6, 101–2 Wales 52–3, 54, 58 national signifiers 52 National Theatre of Great Britain 10, 41, 42–3, 217, 219 national traits 51 nationalism 51 nationhood 3–4, 5–6 collective experience 52 theatre 2, 41 performance of 4, 51 Coward, Noël 5–6 Littlewood, Joan 6–7 Neame, Ronald 185 Scrooge 182, 195 new talent, fostering 217–19, 221–2 Newley, Anthony 21, 148, 155, 196–7 Scrooge 196, 197 Stop the World I Want to Get Off 26, 31 Nicholson, Viv 38, 89–90, 106 Spend Spend Spend 106 NitroBeat 70 ‘No Matter What’ (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Steinman, Jim) 148 No Sex Please, We’re British (Foot, Alistair and Marriot, Anthony) 73–4 Norman, Marsha 220 Norris, Rufus 49, 219 Hex 220 North-South divide 53, 82, 94 Northern Ireland 52, 53, 54, 55, 58 Beautiful Game, The 169–70 class 82 politics 82 nostalgia 154, 181–6, 211–12, 222 Billy Elliot 182, 205 Boy in the Dress, The 199–202 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 198–9

Index Covid-19 pandemic 222 Goodbye Mr Chips 174, 188–94 jukebox musicals 202, 205–7, 211–12 Last Ship, The 182, 205 limits to 205 Lynn, Vera 207, 212 Mamma Mia! 185, 202–5 Mary Poppins 199 Scrooge 196, 197, 198, 199 Sierz, Aleks 181, 191 Underneath the Arches 182, 183, 186–8, 193–4 Novello, Ivor 21, 85 Nunn, Trevor 41–2, 43, 216 O’Grady, Paul 102 Oh! Calcutta (Tynan, Kenneth) 74 Oh What A Lovely War! (Littlewood, Joan) 7, 26, 27, 56, 221 Oklahoma (Hammerstein II, Oscar and Rodgers, Richard) 43, 60, 173, 217 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens, Charles) 194 Old School Tie Network 120 Oliver! (Bart, Lionel) 26, 27, 28, 96, 148, 164, 194, 221 Oliver (Reed, Carol) 195 Oliver Twist (Dickens, Charles) 194 Oliver Twist (Lean, David) 195, 196 On Your Toes (Hart, Lorenz and Rodgers, Richard) 90 ‘Once We Were Kings’ (from Billy Elliot) 39 ‘One Day More’ (Boublil, Alain; Kretzmer, Herbert; Natel, Jean-Marc; Schönberg, Claude-Michel) 147 101 Dalmatians (Harris, Zinnie; Hodge, Douglas) 9 ‘One Show More’ (Mackintosh, Cameron) 213–14 online theatre 225 Operette (Coward, Noël) 154

253

O’Toole, Peter 189, 190 Our House (Firth, Tim and Madness) 38, 110, 112, 118, 136, 206–7 Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (Hall, Lee) 30–1 Our Man Crichton (Kretzner, Herbert and Lee, David) 86 outdoor performances 225 Over the Rainbow (BBC television show) 164 Pacific 1860 (Coward, Noël) 173 Paige, Elaine 147 Passport to Pimlico (Cornelius, Harry) 183 paternalism 55, 85, 89 patriarchy, the 98, 100–1, 102, 203 patriotism 6, 16, 51, 72, 107, 166, 183 ‘Perfect Year, The’ (Black, Don; Hampton, Christopher; Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 148 Phantom of the Opera, The (Hart, Charles; Lloyd Webber, Andrew; Stilgoe, Richard) 8, 20, 29, 47, 160, 167 audience 92 Björnson, Maria 117 as British Musical 214 Broadway 21 class 92, 111 Covid-19 pandemic 176 longevity 179 mask 23 nostalgia 154 relevance 180 South Bank Show, The 155 success 149, 160–1, 174 technology 118, 159 women 118 Pickwick (Bricusse, Leslie and Ornadel, Cyril) 194 Pickwick Papers (Dickens, Charles) 194 Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon 157–8

254

Index

plays with music 30–3 politics 6, 8, 20, 26, 30–2, 37, 56 see also Thatcher, Margaret Billy Elliot 39–40, 91–2 Blood Brothers 7, 8, 33–5, 36, 57–8, 90, 179, 191 Boy in the Dress, The 200, 201 class 82 Hired Man, The 35–6, 90–1 industrial unrest 91–3 Mamma Mia! 136, 205 Musical Theatre Project 68–9 North-South divide 82 Our House 38 socialism 95–6, 99 socialist theatre 6, 31–2, 34, 35, 36, 37, 55 Spend Spend Spend 38 Stephen Ward. See Stephen Ward popular culture 158 popular music 22–3, 29–30, 38 concept albums 157–8 popular theatre 32 populism 5, 20, 21, 22, 46–8 Billington, Michael 46 film 23 Porgy and Bess (Gershwin, George and Ira) 24, 33 post-feminism 203 power relations 134, 214 Prior, Maddy 31 Private Function, A (Mowbray, Malcolm) 109, 110 Proclaimers, The 55, 208–9 ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)’ 209–10 ‘Letter from America’ 208 Sunshine on Leith 55, 118, 137, 185, 208–10, 211 profit 40, 48, 154–5, 156, 160, 174, 211 Profumo, John 74, 122 Prom, The (Beguelin, Chad and Sklar, Matthew) 25, 145 Pryce, Jonathan 61, 121 publicity 160–1, 164

Queen 205–6 We Will Rock You 49, 117, 124, 136, 185, 205, 207 race/racism 58–68, 78–80, 96–7, 135 see also diversity anti-Semitism 121–2 Bend it Like Beckham 58, 62, 64–6, 77, 133 Big Life, The 58, 67, 69–70, 96, 122 Black and White Minstrel Show, The 59, 135 Black Lives Matter 19 blackface 59, 133, 134, 135 Bombay Dreams 62–4, 66, 67, 135 Cinderella 170, 177, 178 class 96 colonialism 24, 26, 51, 60, 61–2, 63, 66, 95 Five Guys Named Moe 68 Half A Sixpence 59, 72 Hamilton 60, 70, 79 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 170, 177 Mikado 60–1 Miss Saigon 61, 121, 135 music 68–9 Musical Theatre Project 68–70 power relations 134 sensitivity 121–2 Stephen Ward 178 Unforgettable 68 West End, the 70–1 Windrush Generation 67 yellowface 61, 133, 134, 135 ‘Radio 2 Celebrates Musicals’ (BBC radio programme) 147–8 Rahman, A. H. 64 reality television 150, 164–6 Really Useful Group 78, 150, 153 recorded music 157–8 regional theatres 44, 54, 70, 71, 105–6, 161–2, 192, 222 see also Chichester Festival Theatre Reid, Charlie 208–9

Index Reid, Craig 208–9 religion 169–70 Rent (Larson, Jonathan) 25, 29, 49 Requiem (Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 151, 153, 164 resources, lack of 219 revisions 220–1 Rice, Tim 216 see also Rice, Tim and Lloyd Webber, Andrew Beauty and the Beast 199 Chess 43, 148 ‘Circle of Life, The’ 148 Lion King, The 199 Rice, Tim and Lloyd Webber, Andrew 8, 27, 156 ‘Any Dream Will Do’ 148 Evita. See Evita ‘Gethsemane’ 148 ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ 148 Jesus Christ Superstar. See Jesus Christ Superstar Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat 84, 148, 164, 179 profit 156 sung through style 156 Wizard of Oz, The 164 Rice-Davies, Mandy 122, 123 Rich, Frank 155, 170–1 Road (Cartwright, Jim) 8 Robert and Elizabeth (Grainer, Ron and Millar, Ronald) 117 Rocky Horror Show, The (O’Brien, Richard) 47, 74 Rolling Stones 158 Ronder, Tanya 220 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). See RSC royalty 109, 177 RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) 9, 10, 40–2, 44–6, 119, 201, 217, 218 Run For Your Wife (Cooney, Ray) 73 Russell, Willy 8, 32–3, 37

255

Blood Brothers. See Blood Brothers Educating Rita 32 John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert 32, 202 Ryan’s Daughter (Lean, David) 189 Sagan, Leontine 116–17 Salad Days (Slade, Julian and Reynolds, Dorothy) 47, 83 Scargill, Arthur 91 Schönberg, Claude-Michel Misérables, Les. See Misérables, Les Scotland 31, 52, 53, 54–5, 58, 208–10 class 82–3 ‘Flower of Scotland’ 209–10 politics 82 Proclaimers, The 208–10 Sunshine on Leith 208–10 Scottish National Theatre 30–1 Scottsboro Boys, The (Ebb, Fred and Kander, John) 25, 221 Scrooge (Bricusse, Leslie) 194, 196–8, 199 Scrooge (Neame, Ronald) 182, 195, 196 Secret Garden, The (Norman, Marsha and Simon, Lucy) 42, 216 set designs 28–9, 42 setting 94 7:84 Theatre Company 30, 32, 55 sex 73–6, 106–8, 137–8, 140–1, 168–9 sex work 76 sexism 124–5, 127, 135, 141, 145 see also misogyny ‘Shakalaka Baby’ (Kalidas, Preeya) 64 Sheffield 103 Ship, The (Bryden, Bill) 55 Showboat (Hammerstein II, Oscar and Kern, Jerome)) 25 Shuffle Along (Blake, Eubie and Sissle, Noble) 59 Sierz, Aleks 181, 191 Simon, Neil 220 Sirett, Paul 67 Big Life, The. See Big Life, The

256

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SIX (Marlow, Toby and Moss, Lucy) 9, 17, 22, 49, 53, 115–16, 169 class 84, 85, 108 stereotypes 73, 116, 140 women 14, 52, 108, 115–16, 139–42, 145 younger audiences 226 Sleeping Beauty (Massiah, Hope and Murray, Delroy) 69 ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ (Andersson, Benny and Ulvaeus, Björn) 205 Smike (Holman, Roger and May, Simon) 194 Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth (Todd, Selina) 81 snobbery 162 Snowman, The (Briggs, Raymond) 195 soap operas 102 social class. See class social climbing 108–9 social media 225, 226 social mobility 85–6, 89, 94–5, 96–7, 107–11 social movements 12 social realism 90 socialism 95–6, 99 see also politics socialist theatre 6, 31–2, 34, 35, 36, 37, 55 society 1, 83, 160 analysis through musicals 56 changes in 200–1 issues of 76 Soft or a Girl (McGrath, John) 31 Soloski, Alexis 141 Sondheim, Stephen 27, 151, 220 Company 151 Gypsy 26 Merrily We Roll Along 151 West Side Story 25 Songs of Praise (BBC television programme) 148

Sound of Music, The (Hammerstein II, Oscar and Rodgers, Richard) 117, 164 ‘Sounds of the Seventies’ (BBC radio programme) 147 South Bank Show, The (ITV television programme) 155 South Pacific (Hammerstein II, Oscar and Rodgers, Richard) 43 Spanish Civil War 82 Sparrows Can’t Sing (Lewis, Stephen) 86 Spend Spend Spend (Brown, Steve and Greene, Justin) 38, 89–90, 97, 106, 183 Spend Spend Spend (Nicholson, Viv and Smith, Stephen) 106 Spend Spend Spend (Rosenthal, Jack) 106 Spice Girls 22–3 sport 65–6, 101–2 Starlight Express (Aquilina, Lauren; Black, Don; Coler, Nick; Lloyd Webber, Andrew; Stilgoe, Richard; Yazbek, David) 28, 153, 160, 166, 207 Billington, Michael 165 as escapism 36 longevity 179 misogyny 170–1 Nunn, Trevor 43 popularity 8, 36 set designs 28 trends 163 State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (Billington, Michael) 2 Steeleye Span 33 Stephen Ward (Black, Don; Hampton, Christopher) 74–5, 122–4, 151, 163 all-male creative team 118, 122 audience knowledge 167–8 criticism 178 failure 150, 153

Index misogyny 168 nostalgia 183 outdated attitudes 212 race 178 script 168 sex 74–5, 168–9 society, portrayal of 167–9, 170 stereotypes 172 women 122–4, 142, 168 stereotypes 72–5, 79–80 class 7, 86, 87, 89, 93, 97, 152–3 female 73, 98, 102, 116, 121, 123, 124, 125–6, 140 gender 102 Stephen Ward 172 Wodehouse, P. G. 152–3 Stigwood, Robert 156 Stiles, George 27, 218, 220 Betty Blue Eyes. See Betty Blue Eyes Honk! 43, 119, 218 Mary Poppins 21, 118, 182, 199, 214, 218 Sting (Gordon Sumner) 96, 111 Last Ship, The. See Last Ship, The Stop the World I Want to Get Off (Bricusse, Leslie and Newley, Anthony) 26, 31 Stoppard, Tom 216 Stormzy (Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo, Jr.) 60 street, music of the 24 Street Scene (Hughes, Langston and Weill, Kurt) 33 subsidized theatre 3, 9, 78–9, 119, 159 see also Chichester Festival Theatre and RSC Goold, Rupert 10 sung through musicals 30, 40, 156 Sunset Boulevard (Black, Don; Hampton, Christopher; Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 21, 153, 161, 167, 219 Nunn, Trevor 43

257

‘Perfect Year, The’ 148 set design 28 Sunshine on Leith (Fletcher, Dexter) 210 Sunshine on Leith (Proclaimers, The) 55, 118, 137, 185, 208–10, 211 Swash, Bob 34 Sweet Charity (Coleman, Cy and Fields, Dorothy) 26 Sweet Charity (Fosse, Bob) 195 Sweet November (Miller, Robert Ellis) 196 Swinging Sixties, the 158, 183 Taboo (Frost, Kevan; George, Boy; Stevens, Ritchis; Themis, John) 118, 206–7 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens, Charles) 194 talent shows 78, 150, 164–6, 207 see also Britain’s Got Talent Tamasha Theatre 70 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare, William) 41 taste 48 Taylor, Roger 205 technology 28–9, 35, 159 women 117–18 television, reality talent shows 78, 150, 164–6, 207 see also Britain’s Got Talent ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’ (Dickson, Barbara) 34 Tell Me On A Sunday (Black, Don and Lloyd Webber, Andrew) 151, 171 Thatcher, Margaret 110, 159, 160 arts, cuts to 41, 181 Blood Brothers 33, 57, 90 capitalist values 20, 35, 37, 38, 110, 159, 160 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 169, 177 popularity 190 regeneration 166

258

Index

society 160 value system 191 The Other Palace 218 The Who 158 Tommy 157 theatre 1, 162–3 see also drama and musical theatre British 1 Covid-19 pandemic 175–7 Edwardian 20 as elite experience 22 functions of 12 nationhood 2, 41 plays with music 30–3 political. See politics popular theatre 32 regional 44, 54, 70, 71, 105–6, 161–2, 192, 222 social class 20–1 socialist 31–2, 34, 35, 36, 55 status 11 Theatre and Nation (Holdsworth, Nadine) 2 Theatre Royal Stratford East 30, 32, 170 Musical Theatre Project 68–70, 72, 218–19, 222, 224 Theatre Workshop 68 Thompson, Emma 72 Thorpe, Vanessa 178–9 Threepenny Opera, The (Brecht, Bertolt and Weill, Kurt) 34 Timothy, Christopher 186–7, 188 Tisch School of the Arts 69 Todd, Selina Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth 81 Tommy (The Who) 157 Tomson, Bob 196 tourism 1 tours 161–2, 179, 222 Toye, Wendy 117 trade unions 91, 94, 99 see also Equity transphobia 102

Two Cities (Goodall, Howard) 194 Tynan, Kenneth 28 Uhry, Alfre 220 Underneath the Arches (Various Artists) 182, 183, 186–8, 192, 193–4, 198 Unforgettable (Peters, Clark; Walker, Larrington) 68 United Kingdom 184 USA. See America verbatim theatre 75–6 Victoria (Queen of the UK) 3 Wales 52–3, 54, 58 class 82 politics 82 Walk This Way revue (Pitt, Archie) 21 Walker, Johnny ‘Sounds of the Seventies’ 147 Walliams, David 44, 45, 200 Boy in the Dress, The. See Boy in the Dress, The Wallsend 93 War Horse (Stafford, Nick) 3, 30 war musicals 183–4 War of the Roses, The (Barton, John) 41 War of the Worlds (Wayne, Jeff ) 157–8 Ward, Stephen 75, 122, 123 Wayne, Jeff War of the Worlds 157–8 We Will Rock You (Queen) 49, 117, 124, 136, 185, 205, 207 wealth 110 West Side Story (Bernstein, Leonard and Sondheim, Stephen) 25 West Yorkshire Playhouse 105–6 Whistle Down the Wind (Forbes, Bryan) 182 Whistle Down the Wind (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Steinman, Jim) 151–2, 167, 171, 179 ‘No Matter What’ 148

Index Who, The 158 Tommy 157 ‘Why’ (Bart, Lionel) 197 Wicked (Schwartz, Stephen) 29, 117, 130, 131, 139, 202 Williams, Robbie 45, 60 Boy in the Dress, The 44, 45 Windrush Generation 67 Wiz, The (Faison, George; Graphenreed, Timothy; Smalls, Charlie; Vandross, Luther; Walzer, Zachary; Wheeler, Harold) 59 Wizard of Oz, The (Arlen, Harold; Harburg, E. Y.; Lloyd Webber, Andrew; Rice, Tim; Stothart, Herbert) 164 Wodehouse, P. G. 152–3 Wogan, Terry 34 women 9, 14–15, 115–21, 142, 144–5 see also feminism Aspects of Love 171 Bend it Like Beckham 67 Betty Blue Eyes 97 Billy Elliot 97, 98, 118, 144 Blood Brothers 145 Boy in the Dress, The 45, 46, 58, 98, 118, 119, 121, 129–30, 131–3, 134, 135 Calendar Girls 137–9, 140, 142 Cinderella 14–15, 125–7, 139, 142, 145, 163–4, 171, 172 class 96–100, 102, 106–8 drag, effect of 127–36 Elton, Ben 171 employment 96–7, 98–9 Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 121, 124, 128–9, 130–1, 132–3, 134, 135 Girlfriends 142–3, 145 Hampton, Christopher 171 Hired Man, The 97 judging 106 Last Ship, The 97, 98

259

Lloyd Webber, Andrew 119, 124, 164, 171–2 Made in Dagenham 98–100, 118, 124, 142 male roles 127 Mamma Mia! 10, 116, 117, 118, 136, 142, 145, 202–5 Matilda 128 megamusicals 117–18 misogyny. See misogyny Miss Saigon 118, 124 Mrs Henderson Presents 107–8, 142, 212 objectifying 137–8, 212 opportunity, lack of 118–22, 124, 127–9, 142, 145, 171 paternalism 89 post-feminism 203 power relations 134 RSC 44 sex 74, 106–8, 137–8, 140–1 sexism 124–5, 127, 135, 141, 145 SIX 14, 52, 108, 115–16, 139–42, 145 soap operas 102 social mobility 96–7 Spend Spend Spend 97, 106 Stephen Ward 122–4, 142, 168 stereotypes 73, 98, 102, 116, 121, 123, 124, 125–6, 140 technology 117–18 Tell Me On A Sunday 171 We Will Rock You 124 Women’s Liberation 26 Women’s Rights movements 203, 204 working class, the 82, 84, 85, 86–7, 90–3, 112 see also class Beautiful Game, The 101 Bend it Like Beckham 101 Billy Elliot 90, 91–3, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100–1, 104, 109, 111, 112 Blood Brothers 35, 57, 83, 90, 104 Boy in the Dress, The 98, 101–2, 104–5

260

Index

drag 101–4 Everybody’s Talking About Jamie 103–4, 105 Flowers for Mrs Harris 87–90, 111–12 football 101 Full Monty, The 101 gender 101–2 Hired Man, The 90–1, 94, 97, 112 Kinky Boots 101 Last Ship, The 90, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 111, 112 Made in Dagenham 98–9, 100 masculinity 100–2, 104, 105 Mrs Henderson Presents 107–8 North-South divide 94 Our House 110 regional theatres 105–6 setting 94

sex 106–8 SIX 108 soap operas 102 socialism 90, 91 Spend Spend Spend 89–90, 97, 106 sport 101 stereotypes 86, 87, 89, 93, 97 women 96–100, 102, 106–8 Wright, Steve 75 yellowface 61, 133, 134, 135 ‘You Must Love Me’ (Lloyd Webber, Andrew and Rice, Tim) 148 Young, Kate 117, 142 You’ve Got to Have a Dream: The Message of the Musical (Bradley, Ian) 56 Ziggy Stardust (Bowie, David) 157–8

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