Patricia Routledge and Edward Seckerson. Photo by Matt Thomas.
Our gang went along to a very special occasion last night - an audience with one of our all-time fave entertainers, the supremely talented Patricia Routledge - Facing the Music.
More widely known nowadays for her role as Hyacinth Bucket, a worldwide smash hit - “I'm very big in Botswana”, she says - the evening instead focused on her largely forgotten career as a fine singer and musical actress. In the capable hands of interviewer Edward Seckerson, formerly the presenter of Radio 3's (late, lamented) programme Sight and Sound, Miss Routledge was every bit as charming and candid as we would have hoped of such a "national treasure". Interspersing anecdotes with many of her recordings, this was a sublime evening indeed...
Tracing her life right back to middle-brow Birkenhead (the opposite end of the Mersey Tunnel to Mr Seckerson's more humble Bootle roots), her enchantment with the theatre began at an early age thanks to her father (a 'high class tailor' - "Every shop called itself 'high class' in those days!") and his deals with the local theatre, which got the family free tickets every week. Yet her youthful ambition was to be “an avant-garde headmistress with a red sports car who had affairs all over Europe. What went wrong?”
She managed eventually to get into theatre school and onward to the hard slog of a real-life stage career - a career that was unfortunately dogged by a succession of well-respected but commercially disastrous productions.
She appeared in such flops as Sheridan's operetta The Duenna, the Victoriana musical Follow That Girl (from which we were treated to her duet with James Cairncross, Waiting For Our Daughter, which was hilarious), and the first musical for which she was leading lady, a pastiche of American operetta called Little Mary Sunshine - complete with its OTT chorus of singing Mounties (very Monty Python!).
America beckoned (in the form of Jule Styne, who asked her to audition after seeing her in pantomime!) and in 1968 she appeared on Broadway in the musical Darling Of The Day alongside a woefully miscast Vincent Price. It closed after only 32 showings, but she scooped a Tony award for a performance that was hailed in The New York Times as "the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country." Miss Routledge liked that bit.
From that show, here's Miss Routledge's "eleven o'clock song" (the show-stopper near the end of a musical) Not On Your Nellie:
However, the biggest and most spectacular flop was to come when she was hand-picked to star in the ill-fated collaboration between theatrical giants Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in which she portrayed every First Lady of America. As she said, however, "It was four hours long. Lenny was trying to write an opera. Alan was writing a musical. It didn't work." Speaking of the opening night she said, "The warmth and good will of the audience lasted until roughly the interval”. The show played for seven performances.
She managed a little more success in the tribute revue Cowardy Custard (for which The Master himself chose the name) - and her version of Mr Coward's A Marvellous Party was probably the highlight of the evening's music for me!
Among her other notable accolades was her part as "the old lady with one buttock" in Candide which won her a Laurence Olivier Award, and the famous production of The Pirates of Penzance co-starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt in New York's Central Park (in the middle of a heatwave, apparently). She also had a modicum of commercial success with a studio recording of The Sound of Music, on which she sang Mother Superior's classic Climb Ev'ry Mountain:
Concluding at the crossover period between her life as a theatrical performer, her collaboration with Alan Bennett and her whirlwind success on television, Mr Seckerson himself chose one of Miss Routledge's beautiful ballads from Darling of the Day to close - That Something Extra Special.
Visit the Sound of Vincent Price website to hear that song, and the rest of the Darling of the Day score.
An appropriate end to a fascinating evening!
I adore Patrica Routledge!!!
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