After The Ball (musical) - Background

Background

Coward decided, in August 1953, to base a musical on Oscar Wilde's play, Lady Windermere's Fan; he worked on it until January 1954. He delegated the first draft of the script to his assistant Cole Lesley. Lesley "cut out the more glaringly melodramatic of Wilde's lines and divided the remainder into sections ending with a suitable 'cue for a song'" "I know that it is very good indeed," wrote Coward of the finished piece, "I have... turned out some of the best lyrics I have ever written" Coward worked on the piece during his customary winter holiday in Jamaica in December 1953. His music director, Norman Hackforth, flew to Jamaica to help him finish the score after Christmas. The scenery and costume design was by Doris Zinkeisen.

Coward cast Mary Ellis in the leading role of Mrs Erlynne, unwisely accepting without audition her assurance that, in her late fifties, she was singing as well as ever. Hackforth soon realised that she could not adequately sing Coward's difficult music for the role. In Coward's absence, Hackforth reluctantly cut the most challenging music for the twelve-week tour opening in Liverpool on 1 March 1954, but he was still dismayed by Ellis's delivery of the music. Coward returned to England at the end of March and saw the production at Bristol on 1 April. He was distressed by what he saw and heard: "the absence of style in the direction... a great deal of the performance was inaudible.... Vanessa sang divinely but acted poorly. Mary Ellis acted well but sang so badly I could hardly bear it. The orchestra was appalling, the orchestrations beneath contempt, and poor Norman conducted like a stick of wet asparagus.".

Coward immediately began major rewriting, reorganization, reorchestration and cutting of the show. He fired his old friend Hackforth as musical director. Hackforth remembered, "If had struck me across the face and told me I was no bloody good it would have been less painful!" Coward engaged Phil Green to reorchestrate the score and revised much of Helpmann's production, but he was still "terribly disappointed about After the Ball. The whole project has been sabotaged by Mary not being able to sing it. Unfortunately she is a strong personality and plays it well, otherwise I would of course have had her out of the cast weeks ago." He was still more forthright to his friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: "I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis's singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat. I know that your sense of the urbane, sophisticated Coward wit will appreciate this simile." In London, reviews were mixed: "The daily Press was idiotic as usual but well-disposed and good box-office. are, on the whole, very good, particularly Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times." The show ran from 10 June until 20 November 1954.

In retrospect, the director, Robert Helpmann, wondered whether the attempt to combine Wilde and Coward was ever likely to have worked:

You would have thought that a play of Wilde's with music by Noël Coward should be marvellous, but I suddenly realised at the first rehearsal it was like having two funny people at a dinner party. Everything that Noel sent up, Wilde was sentimental about, and everything that Wilde sent up Noel was sentimental about. It was two different points of view and it didn't work."