Robert Tanitch reviews Salad Days at Union Theatre, London SW1
In 1954 two long-running British musicals premiered in the West End.
Firstly, there was Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend, which had transferred from The Players’ Club, and then there was Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds’s Salad Days, which had transferred from the Bristol Old Vic.
Jacob Seickell and Laurie Denman in Salad Days
Wilson and Slade were bracketed together from then on, much to their disapproval.
Nobody in the profession was any doubt that Wilson’s witty pastiche of a 1920’s musical was infinitely superior to Slade and Reynolds’s mixture of musical and old-fashioned revue sketches.
Slade and Reynolds wrote the show in 1954 for the Bristol Old Vic Company as an end of season entertainment and it always did have a slightly amateurish feel about it, as if the actors were letting their hair down and doing something they did not normally do.
The company had just appeared in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. Hence the title, a quote from Cleo, referring to her youth.
Nobody then could have imagined when Salad Days transferred to London that it would run for 2,288 performances at the Vaudeville Theatre.
The story-line is about a magic piano which can make people dance.
Slade’s music is tuneful: “O, look at me, I’m dancing’, reprised endlessly, is just the sort of thing an audience can take away as it leaves the theatre and hum for days.
The show is a mere frolic in the park – so silly, so twee, so very naive, so whimsical and so frightfully English, it’s perfect for maiden aunts and very young children..
Having watched a number of revivals since, I have always felt that Salad Days should be left to the amateurs. Watching this well-meaning revival by Bryan Hodgson I haven’t changed my mind.
In 1954 Julian Slade also wrote the music for Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s long-forgotten comic operetta, The Duenna. Now could this, perhaps, be something more worthy of revival?
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