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
Tuesday, 28 December 2010
'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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