The Return of "Pickwick"
As readers of these pages well-know, I’m a huge fan of Harry Secombe (who I got to meet backstage as a kid when he was appearing in the musical The Four Musketeers). He came to fame in the BBC Radio program The Goon Show along with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan (a show which members of Monty Python point to as their inspiration), had his biggest stage hit in the long-running musical Pickwick, based on the Dickens novel, which he later played on Broadway, and is probably be best-known to U.S. audiences playing 'Mr. Bumble' in the Oscar-winning Best Picture, Oliver! (Another Dickens-based show, of course...)
Pickwick, which has a score by Cyril Ornadel and Leslie Bricusse (longtime partner of Anthony Newley) opened on London’s West End in 1963 where it was a big hit and ran for 694 performances. In fact, as I posted a few weeks back, Harry Secombe and the cast did two songs from the show on the 1963 Royal Variety Performance where The Beatles were on. Pickwick subsequently played on Broadway and toured the U.S. Then, 30 years later, in 1993, the show got revived at the famous Chichester Festival and once again starred Harry Secombe (who had been knighted in 1981) recreating his role. It later transferred to London's West End where it had another successful run. I bought the CD, which has about 20 more minutes of music than was on the original 1963 LP. And it was notable what great voice he was still in at the age of 72. Not as booming, but more textured and hitting all the very-high notes.
I found out about the 1993 revival while browsing through a music store of cast albums, where they had the new cast recording. Alas, I came across it too late, since it was a few years after the production was done. I was extremely happy to know about it, and how successful it was, but gnashed my teeth for not learning about it beforehand, because if I had, there’s a good chance I’d have made a trip to London.
As it happens, I recently was browsing an article and came across mention that that revival of Pickwick also made its way into a Royal Variety Performance -- this second time as part of the 1993 production, with Queen Elizabeth in attendance. And oh-so-happily, I tracked it down. (Others on the bill that night were The Bee Gees and the Muppets.) And so, although I missed the actual production itself, it was a joy to see the footage of the show. They performed an eight-minute medley of songs from the musical, ending with the show’s big hit that, from the original production, had become Harry Secombe’s signature number, “If I Ruled the World.” (You'll hear the audience break into big applause after he finishes the verse and gets into the main part of the song.)
One note: The song “The Trouble with Women” here is performed by the characters 'Sam Weller' (Mr. Pickwick’s fast-talking valet) and Sam's father, 'Tony'. As it happens, the role of 'Tony' in the revival was played by a popular British performer Roy Castle – who played the much bigger role of his son Sam thirty years earlier, in 1965 when Pickwick played on Broadway!
So, here’s the video which I edited out of the 2-1/2 hour Royal Variety Performance video. For whatever odd reason, the whole video of the broadcast was lit pretty darkly, so my strong suggestion is that you make the image full screen. You’ll see better and more. (And the darker your room, the better since light washes the screen out.) Note, too, that as very dark as it is at the beginning, it does improve after a few seconds.
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