To The West End?
Following its three week run, Salad Days transferred to the Vaudeville Theatre in London (via a week in Brighton), but this almost didn’t happen. Initially, managements insisted on casting known actors, but Slade insisted that the company remain the same. It looked like a London run would have to be abandoned but luckily two managements, Linnet & Dunfee and Jack Hylton agreed to share the risk and split the money.
When Salad Days opened at the Vaudeville on the 5th August, 1954, it was a smash hit, and the audience refused to leave. With Slade back at the piano once the show at finished, the audience descended on the orchestra pit to hear him play the tunes all over again. He stayed with the production for 18 months.
The rapturous reception it had received in Bristol and Brighton had been no guarantee of success and lyricist Dorothy Reynolds hardly expected it to last beyond another three weeks. But last it did: for five and a half years! It eventually ran for 2,283 performances, overtaking the previous West End record set by WW1 hit Chu Chin Chow.
The title refers to youthful inexperience and is taken from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra:
“My salad days, When I was green in judgment, cold in blood, To say as I said then!”
A New Novello...?
The Picture Post asked if London had found ‘A NEW NOVELLO?’, the heir to the celebrated composer who had died suddenly a few years earlier.
It praised the freshness of the production and its ‘amateurish charm’ derived from is cast of actors, not musical theatre singers (though Eleanor Drew had spend years in Oklahoma!)
“I think the actors must be people who can act first, and also sing and dance.”, Slade told their reporter.
Some critics found Slade’s musical style derivative (of Gilbert & Sullivan, Ivor Novello, Noel Coward), but the similarities did him no harm in the public mind. After all, Gilbert & Sullivan still enjoyed enormous popularity and there was yet to be an acknowledged successor to Ivor Novello’s smash-hit extravaganzas. Even Coward himself was a fan. Slade recalled Coward visiting him backstage after the performance: “the first thing he said was –‘well done, dear boy. Tunes! Tunes! Tunes!’ Coming from him I was very flattered.”
The Writing Process
Speaking of tunes, how did Slade come to have such a way with melody? With limited musical training, when Slade began songwriting, we was limited to the key of C (much like Noel Coward, similarly self-taught, often stuck to the key of Eb). He always began with the lyric and would “tinkle till the tunes come” (according to the Picture Post). His most admired composer at the time of Salad Days was Lionel Monckton, who wrote The Quaker Girl among other successful Edwardian Musical Comedies.
Speaking to Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs he described the writing process with Reynolds: “at the beginning stages , we talk and talk and talk… then parcel the work out by songs and scenes and decide which of us is more suited to write what”. When asked about their loose ‘revue’-style approach to the construction, he explained “it gives us a release to do whatever we like to do and I find that particularly with music I want to feel completely free to express myself without being tied too much to story.”
Enduring Legacy
Salad Days, alongside Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend, heralded a new generation of British musical theatre creators, and inspired the next. Sir Tim Rice recalled seeing the show, and Sir Cameron Mackintosh was famously inspired to become a theatre producer after seeing a performance. Slade gave the young Cameron a backstage tour and it made him realise that there was someone behind the scenes making it all happen. Slade took Sir Cameron under his wing and became his mentor.
The show continues to support performers to this day. Profits from the original run went towards the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s purchase of a building in Clifton and in 1995, their dance studio was named the Slade/Reynolds Studio in recognition of the ongoing legacy.
And whilst the Theatre itself does not include Salad Days in its pre-show sound-and-light display, the Theatre School recently celebrated the 70th anniversary with a bring-and-sing scratch concert performance, bringing together former students and Slade enthusiasts. Who knows, perhaps it will have inspired a future composer to get writing?
