The Stage

Darling of the Day

Published Monday 6 September 2010 at 14:22 by Mark Shenton

There are few weirder yet more remarkable acts of musical theatre performance archaeology than the annual summer excavations made by producer/director Ian Marshall Fisher, with his long-running Lost Musicals series.

While Broadway’s Encores series, inspired by Fisher’s own efforts, only does surface digs - quite how this year’s season opener there in November of Bells are Ringing qualifies when it was last revived on Broadway as recently as 2001 is beyond me - Lost Musicals genuinely unearths rarities, and Darling of the Day is no exception.

Its original Broadway run in 1968 played a total of 35 performances, including four previews. In Ken Mandelbaum’s book on flop musicals, Not Since Carrie, it is described as “one of the most ill-starred projects in Broadway history”.

And it’s true that this adaptation of an Arnold Bennett novel, about a celebrated artist who finds he can jump off the carousel of his own life when his valet unexpectedly dies and he passes that death off as his own, had a tortuous path to the stage, with writers and directors jumping off the carousel themselves at will (and sometimes against their will).

But as always with these delightful, if occasionally stodgy, Sunday afternoon black-tie concerts, there are plenty of gems along the way. While Fisher’s own stagings follow a rigid formula that seems to always insist (or maybe simply always gets) ham comic-acting in the bare-bones presentation that has no sets and has the actors performing from scripts in black binders, it is nevertheless refreshing to see and hear such unfamiliar material mostly unadorned by other directorial interventions.

In this case, it means that Nicholas Jones’s artist, and Louise Gold as the lonely heart who falls for him thinking that he’s the valet she’s been communicating with via a matrimonial agency, get to reveal a charming song, Let’s See What Happens.

But the show is virtually stolen by Vivienne Martin as an art collector and Michael Roberts as an unscrupulous art agent performing a song called Panache, with lashings of the same quality.