By Steven Suskin
11 Jul 2010
FOLLOW THAT GIRL/HOORAY FOR DAISY [Must Close Saturday MCSR 3047]
Must Close Saturday Records — and you've got to admire anyone who calls themselves Must Close Saturday Records — has brought forth Julian Slade's 1960 musical Follow That Girl, which is at once charming but mild. Slade and his collaborator Dorothy Reynolds had taken London by storm, as they say, with the 1954 musical Salad Days. A piece of whimsy so successful that it overtook the 1916 musical Chu Chin Chow — ah, remember Chu Chin Chow? — to become the longest running musical in West End history, at least until superseded by Lionel Bart's Oliver! 2,283 performance it ran, an astounding number at the time; doubly astounding, as I find this trifle about a piano in the park that magically makes people dance so wispy as to be flavorlessly bland. I suppose you had to be there, in London in 1954, to understand the public's fascination with the show. At any rate, Slade and Reynolds followed Salad Days with Free As Air, which opened in 1957 midway through Salad Days's extended run. Free As Air was issued on CD several years back, and I find the thing as charming and melodically bright as Salad Days isn't. Free As Air does seem to fall apart midway through, but what care I?
At any rate, Salad Days finally closed at the Vaudeville in 1960, and the proprietor asked the authors for a replacement attraction. In came Follow That Girl, the score for which I would place somewhere above Salad Days but several paces below Free As Air. It turns out, as Adrian Wright of Must Close Saturday explains in his liner notes, that composer Slade and co-lyricist/co-librettist Reynolds did not come up with a new musical for the occasion; they went back to a 1952 effort, Christmas in King Street, written as a holiday attraction for the Bristol Old Vic.
Follow That Girl — a light-hearted musical comedy in which the heroine jumps off a London bridge, or some such nonsense — is blessed with a jolly good title tune that bounces along cheerily; a second enjoyable tune, "Song and Dance," sung by the policeman who falls in love with her; and a rather zany entry called "Waiting for Our Daughter" in which a 30-year-old actress playing the heroine's mother gives a performance so arresting that you want to find out just who this actress, who sings like a tipsy Swiss bell-ringer slipping on her Alp, might be. Turns out it's Patricia Routledge, and no wonder. The leading lady proper is Susan Hampshire, who in the early 1970s won three Emmy Awards for best actress (but not for musical comedy work).
So that's three reasons to investigate Follow That Girl. Must Close Saturday fills out the running time with the EP — extended play 45, that is, capable of carrying up to 15 minutes — of the 1959 Slade-Reynolds Bristol Old Vic Christmas offering, Hooray for Daisy! Always glad to hear a new, old musical, but this is not one that I expect to replay. The title character is a cow, by the way, of the dancing variety. "Daisy is the cow for me," they sing, but not for me; I'll take Caroline — that moo-sical moo cow who likes to moo in the moonlight — any day.
(Steven Suskin is author of the recently released updated and expanded Fourth Edition of "Show Tunes" as well as "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations," "Second Act Trouble" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com.)
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