Grab Me a Gondola – Guildford School of Acting, 2025 cast recording (Stage Door Records).
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Drama schools are uniquely positioned to resurrect neglected musicals, but Guildford School of Acting (GSA) has gone one better with its commercial release of the cast recording of Grab Me a Gondola, James Gilbert and Julian More’s 1956 show lampooning the Venice Film Festival, satirising fame-hungry celebrities in the making and newspaper columnists in search of a scoop.
In an ambitious revival that stands as an exemplar of collaboration between conservatoire and university, the Grab Me a Gondola album sees final-year BA (Hons) Musical Theatre undergraduates from GSA teaming up with students from the University of Surrey’s internationally-famous BSc/BMus Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) degree.
The show’s tongue-in-cheek title barely does justice to the absorbing tale of a sexy film star’s headline-grabbing incursion into the Venice Film Festival, inspired by the infamous photos of blonde bombshell Diana Dors (who was also slated to star in the musical’s aborted film adaptation), Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe, posing in a mink bikini while reclining in a gondola at the previous year’s festival for much the same reason.
Unlike Dors, the protagonist of Grab Me a Gondola, Virginia Jones, finds true love in Italy while chasing her dream acting job and attracting the interest of the international press, including Fleet Street reporter Tom Wilson. Ever on the search for a juicy story, Tom becomes the unwitting target of the young starlet’s affection, neglecting his fiancée Margaret, who seeks solace in the company of a local prince, Luigi Bourbon Corielli. The stage is set for farce of epic proportions, particularly when Margaret manipulates the media by weaving her own fabricated stories into Tom’s newspaper article prior to publication.
Wildly successful during its day, Grab Me a Gondola started out at the Theatre Royal, Windsor before transferring to London’s West End for some 700 performances (an impressive, though not record-breaking, run at the time) followed by a UK tour and international productions in Europe, South Africa and even as far afield as Australia – but it soon fell into obscurity. Its rediscovery was brought about by the 2025 recording’s visionary producer Stewart Nicholls (who also served as director for the corresponding GSA stage show), an advocate of old British musicals, following research in Gilbert’s and More’s archives.
The original orchestrations having mostly not survived (they were not even used for the 1956 cast album, released on His Master’s Voice), Grab Me a Gondola is presented on this disc, by permission of the respective estates, in a skilful musical arrangement by Rowland Lee featuring two pianos, double bass, drums/percussion and a colourful array of new vocal harmonies.
Recorded with minimal dialogue since Grab Me a Gondola’s indebtedness to the revue form yielded songs that rarely advance the plot, GSA’s cast album delivers over an hour’s captivating musical entertainment. Many of its tracks last less than two and a half minutes so the songs quickly fly by, engaging the listener through the stylistic variety and richness of the score – it really is the gift that keeps on giving.
Musical director Brady Mould allows Gilbert’s rollicking, oom-pah accompaniments to romp along delightfully from the very first note of the titular opener, which received national airtime shortly after release on BBC Radio 2’s Elaine Paige on Sunday.
The 16-strong GSA cast seem to revel in the catchy, earworm-inducing melodies, with many show-stopping songs – ‘Man Not a Mouse’, ‘Star Quality’, ‘Bid Her a Fond Goodbye’, ‘The Worst Thing That Happened to Me’ and more – sung with consistent gusto, riding on the momentum of Richard Burden’s drums. These tracks are set in relief by more innocent numbers such as the operetta-style ‘Plain in Love’, endearingly performed by Olly Adams as Tom and Beth O’Donnell as Margaret, and Bibi Simpson’s ‘That’s My Biography’ as Virginia shrewdly courts media attention.
Picture: Steve Gregson
The show’s comic value arises from its lyrics and music in equal measure. ‘Cravin’ for the Avon’, in which Virginia shares her desires for a ‘serious’ acting role (that of Portia in an upcoming film version, predictably, of The Merchant of Venice), will enthral fans of the Bard for its cerebral sprinkling of Shakespearean allusions, Simpson’s spectacular execution concluding with an effortless vocal flourish.
The breakdown of Tom and Margaret’s car prompts some ingenious opera pastiche in ‘The Motor Car is Treacherous’, in which Rigoletto’s ‘La donna è mobile’ becomes ‘motore non è mobile’, and Samuel Levene, Cicely Dunster and Charlie Varlet deliver a performance suitably laced with irony as italophone passers-by.
Of the many other gems on this album, listen out in particular for ‘Chianti’, in which the Venetians market their wine to the British visitors, its Italianate lyricism relished almost too much by Ewan Rutherford as ex-gondolier Tino. ‘Lonely in a Crowd’ and ‘New to Me’ see Paulo Infante perfectly project the beguiling charm of the flirtatious Prince Luigi.
And, in a nod to Grab Me a Gondola’s photojournalistic origins, ‘Rig o’ the Day’ offers the obligatory homage to mink bikinis, the ensemble’s deliciously sultry vocals proving the ideal complement to James Armstrong’s walking bass.
As the first ever musical to feature a rock ‘n’ roll song, Grab Me a Gondola not only capitalised on the latest craze but also successfully anticipated the direction of travel for Anglo-American popular culture with ‘Rockin’ At the Cannon Ball’, whose 12-bar blues acquires great energy and drive on this recording courtesy of lead singers Geo Bailey and Lewis Stevenson. The album therefore provokes a fundamental rethinking of the history of musical theatre, debunking the myth that the rock musical started only a decade later, and on the other side of the Atlantic, with Hair and its successors.
This landmark release makes the complete music of Grab Me a Gondola available on disc for the first time, including all reprises and instrumentals (the only exceptions being one short passage excised for reasons of sensitivity, plus the ill-fated song ‘Giuseppina’, to the best of our knowledge now lost to history). Although the 1956 original cast album remains findable on standard streaming platforms, the restrictions of its vinyl format meant that several of the show’s most entertaining songs were substantially cut while others were omitted altogether.
Picture: Steve Gregson
Funded by Ambassador Theatre Group Productions (ATG) and the University of Surrey’s Arts and Humanities Impact Acceleration Account and Learning & Teaching Fund, GSA’s cast recording is beautifully presented in CD format, with extensive and informative liner notes as well as production photos by Steve Gregson, set against a bold colour scheme.
Released on Stage Door Records, it was launched earlier in the month at the Apollo Theatre (adjacent to the Lyric, where Grab Me a Gondola was staged 69 years ago) with an exclusive VIP guest list including Valerie Walsh, who performed in the 1956 production.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this is ‘merely’ a drama school recording: almost all of the GSA alumni whose excellent vocals feature on the album are now working professionally. The quality of the recording itself – engineered, edited, mixed and mastered by final-year Tonmeister Mark Hennessy, heading a team of students – is likewise impressively high. The result is a must-have item on the shelf of any aficionado of British musical theatre.
While some of its more esoteric topical allusions have not aged well (even despite a lyrical updating of two songs by Gilbert and More in the 1990s), Grab Me a Gondola’s overriding themes of the fickleness of celebrity and the tenacity of the press remain just as relevant today as in 1956. This outstanding new album will surely lead to future high-profile productions of such a remarkable ‘forgotten’ show.
Reaching No.2 in Amazon UK’s Best Sellers chart for Musicals and Cabaret on its day of release and narrowly missing out on a Top 100 spot in the UK Official Charts for compilation albums, GSA’s 2025 cast recording of Grab Me a Gondola looks set to continue making waves.
Christopher Wiley
- The 2025 cast recording of Grab Me a Gondola was released in CD format on 12 September 2025 and is available to purchase from Amazon or via Stage Door Records
Comments are closed.