The Holiday Music Fest 2020
For today's Holiday Music Fest, we dive into perhaps the quintessential core of celebrating Christmas, and that's Charles Dickens. This is a charming and little-known song from a little-known British musical (except to visitors of these pages), Pickwick, based on Dickens' first novel that brought him to fame, The Pickwick Papers
The show starred Harry Secombe, with a score by Cyril Ornadel and Leslie Bricusse. And the song here, which comes near the beginning and sets up the flashback telling of the story is "That's What I'd Like for Christmas."
I was going to post the recording from the original London production, whose version I slightly prefer, but I found a video that uses the cast recording from the 1993 Chichester Festival revival of the show (which later returned to the West End) that once again -- 30 years later -- also starred Harry Secombe. This includes the dance music for the scene. What I most like here, though, is that the person who posted this edited the song to period etchings from the book and photos of the George & Vulture tavern that Dickens writer about in the novel,
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