1984–1989

Summary

‘An evening calculated to bore one to death and back’

Daily Mail on Girlfriends

1984: Blockheads Peg The Importance The Hired Man

None of the 1984 British musical flops roused the enthusiasm of audiences. Blockheads (Mermaid Theatre, 17 October 1984; season) had a decent provenance, and decent enough actors to play Laurel (Mark Hadfield) and Hardy (Kenneth H. Waller). Mounted for ￡300,000, and encouraged by the success of the London production of Snoopy!!! for both of which shows the American Hal Hackady wrote the lyrics, the show was intended for Broadway, but never made it. Hackady had a busy career as lyricist, without much commercial success, having contributed to Broadway revues and musicals including Minnie's Boys and Ambassador, panned on both sides of the Atlantic. For some reason, the music for Blockheads was by the Russian pianist and classical music and motion picture composer Alexander Peskanov. For the Financial Times ‘This patchy, likeable work has its moments, but lacks dramatic tension’, while the Sunday Times criticised ‘a plodding storyline […] a slow, myopic stage biopic earnestly indexed with dates’, and music that was ‘undistinguished’. The Standard agreed that ‘The tunes […] are jaunty but predictable’ and the lyrics ‘pedestrian enough to be accused of loitering’. Hadfield and Waller's impersonations of the famous duo were appreciated, but Blockheads failed to generate enough interest to take it beyond its Mermaid season.

In the West End, David Heneker's run of luck with splendidly mounted British musicals (Half a Sixpence, Charlie Girl, Jorrocks, Phil the Fluter) was running dry by the mid 1980s, by which time his idea of what a British musical might be seemed out of step. Peg (Phoenix Theatre, 12 April 1984; 146) aged itself by presenting as ‘A Romantic New Musical’. At least here was a show born of Anglo-American co-operation, courtesy of its American producer Louis Busch Hager, who travelled to England ‘because of my desire to work with David Heneker’. The hope was that after its London opening following a spell at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, the show would get to Broadway; a hope doomed to be forlorn.