tue 19/03/2024

Salad Days, Riverside Studios | reviews, news & interviews

Salad Days, Riverside Studios

Salad Days, Riverside Studios

Spry, classical look at the pretty gels and goofy cheps of the 1950s musical

'Pretty gels and goofy cheps': Katie Moore's Jane and Sam Harrison's Timothy are looking for a pianoBoth photographs by Roy Tan

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," trilled critic Harold Hobson in Wordsworthian mood about a musical which even in 1954 must have made Gilbert and Sullivan look like Ingmar Bergman. Over half a century on, can Salad Days's sweetly silly paradise be regained? The fact that my eyes pricked as the two lovers launched into the dance-song celebrating their magic piano may partly be ascribed to nostalgia for teenage am-dram - late Seventies, not early Fifties - but much more to the airy lack of irony in Tête à Tête's deliciously classical production.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," trilled critic Harold Hobson in Wordsworthian mood about a musical which even in 1954 must have made Gilbert and Sullivan look like Ingmar Bergman. Over half a century on, can Salad Days's sweetly silly paradise be regained? The fact that my eyes pricked as the two lovers launched into the dance-song celebrating their magic piano may partly be ascribed to nostalgia for teenage am-dram - late Seventies, not early Fifties - but much more to the airy lack of irony in Tête à Tête's deliciously classical production.

Bring on the tunes for which the plot of graduate shenanigans in a fantasy London is but the merest prop

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