By Jeeves – The Shows Must Go On YouTube channel

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s By Jeeves – The Shows Must Go On YouTube Channel.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

The chequered history of one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s less successful musicals turned out to be more entertaining than the show itself although, to be fair, it did pick up and there were one or two nice songs, ‘Half a Moment’ in particular.

Plucked from the vaults for the noble lord’s free The Shows Must Go On channel, By Jeeves at least did better at the box office than its predecessor, simply called Jeeves, 21 years earlier.

The original was so long that when it went into its fifth hour in its Bristol try-out, the orchestra downed tools and walked out. It had 19 songs and 21 Bertie Wooster-ish characters faithful to the rarefied between-the-wars upper-class-Twitter world of PG Wodehouse.

Full of frivolous English Hooray Henrys and Henrietta with silly names like Gussie Fink-Nottle, ‘Stinker’ Pinker, Honoria Glossop, Stiffy Byng and Wooster himself with his indispensable valet Jeeves, it needed to be funnier than it was.

With book and lyrics by the redoubtable Alan Ayckbourn, it should have worked – Ayckbourn was no great fan of musical theatre, finding it “boring” – but it didn’t take off and the critics gave Lloyd Webber, Ayckbourn and its star, David Hemmings, such a pasting that it lasted only a month in the West End.

Two decades later with mostly new songs (only three were retained), rewritten, renamed and condensed to 13 numbers and a cast of ten, it did better, its 12-week West End run being extended into 1997.

Later it toured the States, Americans loving its olde English quaintness, the show opening at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut before visiting Pittsburgh, Washington DC and Los Angeles and finally alighting on Broadway for two months in 2001, and might have stayed longer but for the horrors of 9/11 when theatre was far from uppermost in New Yorkers’ minds.

The film we saw at the weekend was a pre-Broadway made-for-Canadian TV performance staged in a Toronto studio, directed by Ayckbourn, with an all-North  American cast bar veteran Brit Martin Jarvis – but you would never have guessed: the accents were immaculate.

Heading the line-up as the dithering Wooster was John Scherer, a mammoth part in which he was barely off-stage. It was the same ten with one small change that went to Broadway seven months later.

The first half-hour, when Wooster’s banjo is apparently stolen from the dressing room as he tries to entertain a church charity audience and Jeeves hands him a frying pan instead, was pretty dire but if you stayed with it, there were a few chuckles if silly people with frightfully posh accents are your cup of tea.

‘When Love Arrives’ and the aforementioned ‘Half a Moment’, a segment of which was cut and re-employed in the Sunset Boulevard hit ‘As If You Said Goodbye’, were likeable Act II ballads, while ‘Travel Hopefully’, sung by Bertie, Jeeves and Bingo in Act I, has a fascinating back-story.

The melody was originally written by Lloyd Webber as ‘Love is Here’ for his first-ever collaboration with Tim Rice for The Likes Of Us, about the founder of Dr Barnardo’s, when he was only 17, a show not staged professionally until 40 years later.

But this wasn’t Lloyd Webber or Ayckbourn at their best and so we move on to this week’s offering, the filmed version of the original Cats with Elaine Paige and the late John Mills. Coming so soon after the first cinematic, greatly-rearranged, much-abused movie version with Judi Dench and a beguiling debut by ballet star Francesca Hayward, it will make for a fascinating comparison. It is up for 24 hours from 7pm on Friday 15 May.

Jeremy Chapman