Where did musical comedy begin? Geeks tend to cite The Black Crook (1866), although this is disputed by even geekier geeks. You should see the punch-ups at Marie’s Crisis on a Saturday night.
But let’s withdraw further into the mists of history. There was opera, of course, but for people who couldn’t manage opera there were masques. These were elaborate spectacles that could be knocked up by aristocrats on a wet weekend to amuse their friends, all the better if someone with actual talent was involved (such as, famously, John Milton for Comus).
In 1740, the Prince of Wales commissioned a masque about the most Christian king Alfred the Great, who saved us from the Danes. It was performed at Cliveden1 and some years later in London, having expanded from eight vocal sections to twenty-seven musical numbers. King Alfred would not be the last show to start small in previews and stagger, bloated, into the West End…
Anyway, the finale for Alfred was the assertion that “Britons never never never shall be slaves.” This was a tad anachronistic, but “Anglo-Saxons never never never shall be slaves” doesn’t scan and might have been awkward, given that the British throne had been occupied by Germans since 1714. Still, musical theatre thrives on anachronism and Frederick had commissioned it precisely as an act of overt patriotism, assuring his people that he was as British as… well, as Alfred.
As far as I know, there is no musical about St George, although there have certainly been dozens of pageants. Through the late-Victorian Era, a jubilee couldn’t go by without the villagers constructing a dragon. Musicals about England and patriotism more generally are fewer and further between than you might expect. Even Noel Coward, so patriotic that he was in the Nazi Black Book for execution in the event of a successful invasion2, didn’t write a successful patriotic musical. ‘London Pride’ was written during the Blitz, but it’s a stand-alone song.3 The biggest West End hit of the war was Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years; it was about a Jewish-Austrian composer between 1911 and 1938, but that was obliquely patriotic at best. In retrospect, it’s amazing nobody adapted Mrs Miniver as a musical or that Coward himself didn’t re-work Cavalcade into something more manageable than the original cast-of-hundreds play.
(He did, in The Girl Who Came to Supper, write a ten-minute song cycle in celebration of London with which Tessie O’Shea apparently stopped the show. This turned out to be a problem as the show apparently didn’t then re-start).
In America, of course, Irving Berlin wrote This is the Army and Cole Porter Something for the Boys (one suspects the title is a droll wink on Porter’s part). Berlin, a Jewish refugee from Russia, was possibly the last unabashed patriot to write a musical. The final song of Berlin’s Mr President begins “patriotism has gone out of fashion” but asserts that “this is a great country”. Nobody today would sing, with sincerity, “take a look in your history book / and you’ll see why we should be proud.”
British and/or English patriotism was kicked off stage by The Entertainer and Oh What a Lovely War. The best substitute was the Victorian Era, such as I and Albert, in which Lord Palmerston got to sing “if a country threatens Britain / I’ll first make sure they are smitten / Then apologise much later, if at all.”4 Half a Sixpence was, if not exactly flag-waving, at least set in upwardly-mobile Edwardian England. But Oliver! was hardly patriotic, Blitz! and Charlie Girl successful in London but too provincial for Broadway. Rex was English history done not very well. The Canterbury Tales ran forever in London and stumbled in New York.
All of which suggests that British and/or English patriotism and musical theatre are not natural bedfellows. This is strange, at least for the period before 1960. One explanation is that the numbing effect of the 1914-18 war (and, to an extent, the socio-economic environment of the interwar era) coloured the expressions of patriotism after 1939, in a war that otherwise allowed anybody fighting the Nazis to depict themselves amongst the angels.5
What the world really needs is a musical adaptation of Powell and Pressburger. Should anybody know a composer of great talent, I would be happy to volunteer book and lyrics for A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or A Canterbury Tale, to stick to only those with intimations of national identity. A hat-tip, therefore, to A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, the Broadway adaptation of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Ealing comedies are about as English as one could wish, even if a comedy about a mass murderer could hardly be described as flag-waving.
One lasting observation from my time in America was to confirm that Americans, bless them, never quite got indirection.6 A group of English people can talk for ages and say a great deal, yet a verbatim transcript would suggest that communication had been in the nature of ships at sea. In a mixed group of English and Americans, the former can be engaged in two entirely different conversations simultaneously.
The very English Flanders & Swann, who were successful on Broadway, understood the triple meaning of the English self-image in ‘A Song of Patriotic Prejudice’:
“The English are moral, the English are good
And clever and modest and misunderstood!
And all the world over, each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practise beforehand, which ruins the fun!”7
The quintessentially English character in musical theatre might be Anna Leonowens in The King and I: a very respectable lady, but one who could stand up to injustice even in a strange environment.8 It also, in the absence of paeans to Saint George, William Wilberforce or Dr Johnson, allows me to quote one of my favourite songs from the entire canon. As I’ve written before, Oscar Hammerstein9 had a God-given gift of simplicity, deployed to great effect in ‘Hello, Young Lovers’:
“When I think of Tom
I think about a night
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white
And the soft mist of England
Was sleeping on a hill
I remember this
And I always will
There are new lovers now on the same silent hill
Looking on the same blue sea
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all
And they're all a part of Tom and me
Hello young lovers, whoever you are
I hope your troubles are few
All my good wishes go with you tonight
I've been in love like you.”
Not patriotic, but the best kind of art in which the universal is expressed through the specific. Which is also, when you think about it, the essence of patriotism.
Where, many many years later, a swimming pool was the location for events that would eventually make it to the West End as Lloyd Webber’s flop Stephen Ward.
‘My dear,’ he telegraphed to a fellow potential victim, ‘the people we should have been seen dead with.’
‘There’ll Always Be An England’ was written in 1939, although not by Coward.
I think I and Albert might have been more successful if it had been given a less awkward title.
This was of course embarrassing as we had to laud the USSR. Still, it must be admitted that the Soviets could do patriotic work with the ‘best’ of them.
With some honourable exceptions (you know who you are).
I would lay a dime to a dollar that a person’s reaction to this song correlates exactly with his or her voting record.
This must be a nightmare for contemporary theorists to write about: the toxic male is also the oppressed colonial.
There is a memorial plaque to Oscar Hammerstein in Southwark Cathedral, of all places.
HMS Pinnafore?