Rodgers & Hammerstein, For One Half Only, With Bobbie Scully, Theatre Royal Hanley, 2 September 1984

Richard and Oscar, unaware of how their work might be abused 40 years later

Sunday 2 September 1984 – a memorable evening at the theatre for all the wrong reasons. And let me be honest about this; it was my own darned fault.

Got up late -did nothing much all day – then went to dreadful show in Hanley. Walked out & had an Indian meal.

This debacle of an evening was at the Theatre Royal Hanley.

It happened like this.

The Theatre Royal Hanley wanted to encourage Keele University students to attend their theatre. They offered me a pair of free tickets to see any show I fancied over the summer. I was a new Student Union sabbatical and it was a new (or I should say revived) venue. I suppose they thought people like me might have some influence over the “yoof” audience.

I spotted what looked like quite an interesting play – with Tom Conti in it if I’m not mistaken, which I thought Bobbie and I would both enjoy when she was up for a long weekend at the end of August/start of September.

Problem was, I chose the Sunday evening (probably because we were otherwise engaged on both the Friday and Saturday evenings) and failed to check whether the Sunday evening show was the same show as the Monday to Saturday show.

It wasn’t.

You cannot blame the box office – they had been instructed to issue me with comps for whatever evening I chose…and I chose the Sunday evening.

The Life And Music Of Rodgers And Hammerstein. I am 95% sure that the show we saw was Hella Toros and her ensemble. A grande dame by 1984, widow of John McLaren, who had been in the original cast productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein shows in the 1950s…

…here’s how she looked and sounded in 1940, before sadness and illness struck her life for some while:

Correction: it wasn’t Helen Toros’s ensemble, it was the Newcastle Amateur Operatic Chorus. The following clipping from the Evening Sentinel confirms why/how I got the “They’re Playing Our Song” offer (Peta Toppano and Barry Quinn, not Tom Conti) confused with Rodgers and Hammerstein, plus confirms exactly who performed:

Rodgers & Hammerstein Evening Sentinel 01 Sep 1984, Sat Evening Sentinel (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England) Newspapers.com

The Evening Sentinel doesn’t seem to have reviewed the show, but I found the following clip in the Lichfield Mercury – click here and see “Life Story In Song” article – which describes Toros’s half-a-dozen shows of similar type.

It was the most stilted show imaginable. Imagine a heavy European accent dramatically stating

Rodgers and Hammerstein, the most wonderful musicals in the whole world…

…I bet she said that about all the composers of such works in all of her shows…

…Ivor Novello – the most wonderful writer of musical shows in history…Sigmund Romberg, the most exquisite operettas ever written…

Between numbers, Hella gave us bits of her life story tentatively connected to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Her late husband’s involvement in the original stage productions of the musicals was bigged up to the extent that one might have imagined that John and Hella were round Oscar and Richard’s places all the time back in the 1950s.

In short, Bobbie and I had turned up at the theatre expecting to see “our sort of play” and found ourselves instead watching a static recital of songs from musicals, delivered in an exceptionally old-fashioned style.

The audience was almost as stilted as the performances. Not that everyone in the audience was about three times our age. Dear me no. Some of them were at least four times our age.

Bobbie and I didn’t know where to look. Actually we did…not at each other, lest the giggles get the better of us.

To be fair, we mostly won the struggle to keep straight faces for most of the first half of the recital…

…until the rather elderly and minimally mobile grande dame of the show, Hella Toros, attempted to sing Happy Talk with appropriate movements…lifted from the movie…

…our struggle with retaining our composure was lost. For good.

We felt we owed it to the audience, who were, after all, our elders and betters, to withdraw during the interval, ahead of the second half of the show, rather than inflict the inevitable giggly disturbances on the audience throughout the second half.

The exact nature of the Hanley-based Indian meal we devoured in place of the second half of the show is lost in the mists of time. It was probably quite good food and reasonably priced – there were some decent Indian restaurants in the Potteries by then.

This show was almost certainly not the only blot on the Theatre Royal Hanley’s choice of billing at that time. This link provides an excellent summary of the Theatre Royal Hanley’s less than special recent history. If anything ever happens to that history blog – and goodness knows the history it is recording is chequered enough – click here for a scrape thereof.

Is it possible that, but for my choice of night/wrong show error, I might have been able to influence the student body to frequent the Theatre Royal Hanley and helped turn around the disaster-prone institution? Unlikely.

On reflection, Bobbie & I probably shouldn’t go to any theatre with “Theatre Royal” in its name…I recall a peculiarly incident-rich visit to the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Bobbie to see Long Day’s Journey Into the Night. There’ll be a link here once I have written that one up.