It’s opening night of London Calling!, the musical revue named after the BBC’s call sign for its 10-month-old radio station, 2LO.
This is the first musical production for the show’s writer and composer, Noel Coward, 23.
Coward had great success with a play earlier this year, which gained him a lot of young fans who would shout out,
“That’s a Noelism!”
when they heard his best lines.
But this is his first West End musical. And it’s also a new experience for his co-star, Gertrude Lawrence, 25, whom he’s known since they appeared on stage in Liverpool together, when they were just teenagers.
Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in London Calling!
Gertrude has been a big success on the London stage, but she’s never had to sing before.
Coward has written all the music and lyrics, except for their last duet, “You Were Meant for Me,” by two African-American musicians, Noble Sissle, 34, and Eubie Blake, 36.
Noel has been taking dancing lessons from another American, Fred Astaire, 24, who is appearing up the street at the Shaftesbury Theatre, with his sister Adele, about to turn 27.
There are 25 skits and song and dance numbers in London Calling!. Coward has written one sketch called “The Swiss Family Whittlebot,” making fun of a ridiculous musical performance he saw the poet Edith Sitwell, 35, give in the spring. Her whole family are a bunch of pretentious toffs.
The audience is getting ready by donning the tinted glasses they need to wear to see the opening act which employs a new 3-D stereoscopic shadowgraph process. It’s been used at the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, but this is its European debut.
Stereoscope glasses with test images
Coward is a bit nervous about the competition. Up the street at the Winter Garden tomorrow night is the premiere of The Beauty Prize, co-written by popular English author P. G. Wodehouse, 41, with music by American Jerome Kern, 38. Those two had a big hit in the West End last year.
The Beauty Prize program
Coward is hoping his “Noelisms” will bring in the crowds.
Curtain going up!
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, , at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
This fall I will be talking about the women of Bloomsbury and the Left Bank at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, and about art collector John Quinn at the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library, co-sponsored by the Heidelberg University English Department, in Quinn’s hometown of Tiffin, OH.
If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 