To celebrate Salad Days’ 70th birthday, we look at how Julian Slade came to write the longest-running show in West End musical theatre history and how it almost didn’t happen!
Early Life
After the Slade family moved to Gloucestershire when Julian was ten, he developed his love of theatre with the ‘Painswick Players’ dramatic society in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Importance of Being Earnest alongside his two brothers, Christopher and Adrian. His time at Eton also gave him the chance to play what he considered his first ‘grown up part’: Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 1.
Student Productions
From Eton he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he continued to perform in student theatre, including as Lady Macbeth opposite John Barton’s Macbeth and with Angus McKay in St Joan. It was also during this time that his skill as a composer flourished.
He wrote two shows: Bang Goes The Meringue (in which Angus McKay later recalled singing ‘I shall Never Me So Successful Again As I Was When I was At School’, which caused a stir with critics) and Lady May, written for the traditional May Week.
Also at Cambridge with Slade was another Julian: Julian More, who would go on to have a very successful career as the lyricist of Expresso Bongo, Irma La Douce among others. The letter seen here is from More hailing the success of Slade:
Bristol Old Vic
After Cambridge, Slade studied for a year at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, taking roles with the professional rep company. Director Denis Carey suggested he become the Musical Director and this gave the young composer a chance to flex his muscles in a range of styles. First came Two Gentlemen of Verona, which transferred to London.
Then Carey asked for volunteers to write a Christmas musical and so followed Christmas in King Street, a pantomime-revue devised by Slade, James Cairncross and (in the first of many collaborations with Slade) Dorothy Reynolds. Christmas in King Street would later be adapted into Follow That Girl. More on that in a future post.
Slade followed this with new music for The Merchant of Venice in Stratford, Sheridan’s The Duenna in Bristol and London, and another Christmas show with Reynolds, The Merry Gentleman.
Salad Days
In his 3rd year with the company, Slade and Dorothy Reynolds were tasked with creating an end-of-season show to follow a run of Murder In The Cathedral, featuring the same actors.
And so was born Salad Days. The somewhat ‘fantastical’ tale of a magical piano called Minnie which makes people dance whenever it is played and brings together Timothy and Jane, who have recently graduated from university.
There’s no doubt the piano is the hero of the Salad Days and Slade led the musical accompaniment on one of two pianos in the orchestra pit.
The audiences loved the freshness of the style and story full of charming innocence and a far cry from the darker, harder musicals that were coming over from America and beginning to dominate the West End. Here was a show that sounded ‘British’ and new but also harked back to a previous generation of Novello, Vivian Ellis and the song-and-dance revues of Noel Coward. It’s ‘end-of-term entertainment’ the perfect tonic to the ongoing post-war malaise. Don’t forget that food rationing had only just come to an end.
70 years on...
I think there’s a parallel to be drawn here with the theatre of 70 years later. In Operation Mincemeat, we have had an incredible success story: a show written by young actors and developed in Fringe Theatre (which has replaced regional rep as the ‘training ground’ for many actors) blossoming in the post-pandemic West End. Their youth and freshness channelled through multi-role performances and storytelling with humour and heart have captured the public imagination in a way that echoes the reaction to Salad Days. Who knows, perhaps Operation Mincemeat will soon match Salad Days’ record breaking run?
Next Time
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In the next post, find out about how Salad Days almost didn’t make it to the West End and we’ll delve into his creative process with Dorothy Reynolds…