1973: Kingdom Coming The Card The Water Babies

Clocking in for its two-week season, Kingdom Coming (Roundhouse, 21 May 1973; 14) was little liked. Another car-crash that would never have withstood the West End, here was what everyone had been waiting for: the cryogenic musical about putting dead people in the freezer. A tiny audience witnessed its first night, some probably deafened by the appalling amplification system. The list of its creators, music Bill Snyder, lyrics Stanley Baum, with book and lyrics by David Climie and Ronnie (Ronald) Cass, represented an Anglo-American collaboration that was going nowhere. The evening involved characters being stuffed into refrigerators and (if they were lucky) being successfully defrosted. Richard Macdonald's sets claimed to be the first to be made entirely of fibreglass and polystyrene, but Charles Lewsen for The Times noted that Kingdom Coming was ‘the first show in which both plot and dialogue are biodegradable’. Climie and Cass's book was ‘a cross-eyed wreck’ in ‘a show with something for everyone to dislike’, for it was ‘not every day you see a musical that ends with the refrigerated being carried out, like the rest of us, board-stiff’.

What possible excuse was there for using Arnold Bennett's 1911 novel as the prop on which to hang The Card (Queen's Theatre, 24 July 1973; 130), with a score by popsters Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent? Hugely successful as they were in providing hit songs for popular singers or the theme music for the television soap Crossroads, could they extend their talents to writing a theatre score? Bennett had little regard for his story of Denry Machin, a lovable social climber, thinking his novel ‘Stodgy, with no real distinction, but well invented and done to the knocker, technically, right through.’3 Eric Ambler wrote the 1952 film screenplay for which William Alwyn wrote the score. Now, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, whose work in musicals included Joey Joey, Lost Empires, Budgie, Andy Capp and Billy, adapted the book for the musical.