Concert stagings could revitalise forgotten musicals

Ten years after his mysterious disappearance, the anti-hero has lured an unsuspecting woman to his lavish theatre where she will once again sing his music. She’s accompanied by her 10-year-old son, but who is his father? Will she fall in love again? Will she sing the show’s title song? Those were the less than puzzling questions facing 2010 London audiences of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-feted, ill-fated sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies.

Notoriously renamed during previews by the West End Whingers bloggers as Paint Never Dries – a joke that flew around the industry in approximately four-and-a-half minutes – it foundered on the rocks of mainly wretched reviews. Notices weren’t massively better when the show was re-reviewed eight months later after a revamp with a new creative team. Less than 18 months after opening, it shut, never to be seen in London again. Until this week, when it resurfaced in a two-night concert at Lloyd Webber’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

Audiences were able to savour the score played by the 27-piece London Musical Theatre Orchestra and sung by a cast led by Norm Lewis, Celinde Schoenmaker (the splendid Sarah in Nicholas Hytner’s joy-filled Guys and Dolls) and Matthew Seadon-Young (quietly outstanding in Marianne Elliott’s Company and Death of a Salesman).

I didn’t see it, but dispensing with most of the book may have done the piece favours. Many musicals that people learn to love by listening to the score turn out to be underwhelming on stage, since few musical books are sufficiently gripping. This is why lavish concert stagings focusing on the music can be a boon.

The London Musical Theatre Orchestra is dedicated to this, but most of its concert stagings since its 2016 founding have been classics or new works. It is not alone in presenting lavish one-offs. Shrewd and scrupulous musical director Alex Parker has presented concerts of shows such as Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

But what about lesser-known titles? The economics behind producing one-off versions with full cast and orchestra are scary, but in the wake of Love Never Dies, there are umpteen titles from the past that deserve consideration. It happens with neglected or downright forgotten operas, so why not musicals?

Die-hard musical fans will all have lists of favourites waiting to be disinterred with glamorous casts, but here are my top three. Please note: like my Desert Island Discs list, this is subject to change on a near-daily basis, but here goes:

High Spirits. This is the 1964 musical of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, which starred Beatrice Lillie and Edward Woodward. The plot of a medium, Madame Arcati, creating comedy havoc when the ghost of the married hero’s home-wrecking first wife is accidentally conjured up, remains the same. But in the musical, she runs a school for young spiritualists, who hang out in a coffee bar beneath her house and sing blissfully dated, early 1960s numbers such as Go Into Your Trance. Highlight: Madame Arcati singing “My beads are all a-jangle / My heart is in a spasm / I’m finally going to entertain / A genuine ectoplasm.”

St Louis Woman. The great composer Harold Arlen, best known for songs including Sinatra’s One for My Baby, Blues in the Night and the scores for The Wizard of Oz and the matchless Judy Garland/James Mason A Star Is Born, had bad luck on Broadway. The score for this 1946 musical, based on a novel by Arna Bontemps and adapted by Countee Cullen, both African Americans, was lovingly reconstructed for New York City Center’s indispensable Encores series. It’s a blinder. Highlights: Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home, I Had Myself a True Love and the roof-raising Come Rain Or Come Shine.

The Crooked Mile. A 1959 British musical by Peter Wildeblood, the journalist whose 1955 autobiographical book Against the Law helped legalise homosexuality. Based on his novel West End People, about “the neon-lit jungle of Soho: a study of London layabouts and their girls”, it featured a highly attractive score by Peter Greenwell and starred legendary singer Elisabeth Welch and a young Millicent Martin. Highlight: Welch singing the haunting I’ll Wait.

Fascinating though this musical is, its book seems to have vanished without a trace. Anyone with a copy, do please make contact. Meanwhile, listen to the score online.