Music Review: The Boys From Syracuse – Original London Cast

THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE – Original London Cast (Jay Records CDTER 1078).

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

All praise to John Yap and DigiMIX Master for continuing to release original recordings of musical shows that may have been overlooked in recent years. The current list includes Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend and Valmouth, Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures and A Little Night Music, Julian Slade’s Salad Days and Free As Air, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Rodgers and Hart’s The Girl Friend, and Mitch Leigh’s Man of La Mancha among many others. Now we have The Boys from Syracuse, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s musical rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.

George Abbott wrote the book for the musical and also directed it with choreography by George Balanchine for the original Broadway production. It opened in 1938 at the Alvin Theatre in New York, following out of town tryouts in New Haven and Boston. It ran for over 200 performances which may not seem that many but such was the tradition of the times that there was always a new show on the theatrical horizon, long before musicals started to clock up runs of decades of performances.

The first revival in 1963 ran for 500 performances in an Off-Broadway production. In the same year the London production based on the Off-Broadway show opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Judi Dench later directed the 1991 revival at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park and it then toured the UK. Further productions were staged in the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, with another Broadway revival in 2002 and then in Washington in 2011 and the following year the show had its Asian premiere in Singapore. Many decades earlier there had been a film version in 1940 with Allan Jones, Irene Hervey, Martha Raye, Joe Penner and Alan Mowbray

It is the original 1963 London production that has now been released on CD by Jay Records. Set in Ancient Greece, the plot concerns identical twins, Antipholus of Ephesus (Denis Quilley) and Antipholus of Syracuse (Bob Monkhouse) who were separated as children during a shipwreck. They both have servants called Dromio (Sonny Farrar and Ronnie Corbett). On a visit to Ephesus by the pair from Syracuse, the wives of the Ephesians, Adriana (Lynn Kennington) and her servant Luce (Maggie Fitzgibbon) think that they are their husbands and so starts what is in Shakespeare’s original title, ‘the comedy of errors’ in which Adriana’s sister Luciana (Paula Hendrix) and Antipholus of Syracuse fall in love.

One wonders what Shakespeare himself would have thought of his comedy of mistaken identity being turned into a Broadway musical. It was, however, not the only time one of his plays was transformed into a musical show. Just think of Kiss Me, Kate which Cole Porter refashioned from The Taming of the Shrew, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona by Galt MacDermot of Hair fame, West Side Story out of Romeo and Juliet, Something Rotten and Rockabye Hamlet, both about the Prince of Denmark, All Shook Up and Play On!, both from Twelfth Night, Lone Star Love (The Merry Wives of Windsor), The Donkey Show (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Return to the Forbidden Planet, a version of The Tempest… and there are others!

Of course the main attraction now with The Boys from Syracuse are the songs and on this recording they come up bright and shiny new, even though they are well-seasoned classics that have survived and gained eternal popularity across the 85 years since they were first performed. Rodgers and Hart knew what they were doing, so it is great to be reminded once more of their amazing songs from 1938. It is easy to forget or fail to remember which classic songs come from this show – ergo ‘Falling in Love With Love’, ‘This Can’t Be Love’, ‘You Took Advantage of Me’ and ‘Sing For Your Supper’ to name but four. The whole score is a total delight and deserves to be better known.

The overture comprises a medley of the four most celebrated songs before going into an introduction to the story of mistaken identity which the cast declare that if it’s good enough for Shakespeare, then it’s good enough for us. The Sergeant (John Adams) explains to the First Citizen (John Moore) about the dilemma of losing his family in a shipwreck in the song ‘I Had Twins’. Enter Antipholus and Dromio (Monkhouse and Corbett) who don’t seem to approve of Ephesus at all as they yearn to be back in ‘Dear Old Syracuse’. This is a great point number, a bouncy tune with some typically clever lyrics by Lorenz Hart.

‘What Can You Do With a Man?’ finds Maggie Fitzgibbon and Sonny Farrar bemoaning the faults of the masculine gender in a typically pert way. Kennington as Adriana has the beautiful ballad of  ‘Falling in Love With Love’ while Quilley moons over ‘The Shortest Day of the Year’. Monkhouse with Hendrix as Luciana question romantic passion in ‘This Can’t Be Love’, while later they have a lovely duet with ‘You Have Cast Your Shadow On the Sea’.

Among some of the other songs that are worth getting acquainted with again are ‘Ladies of the Evening’ sung by John Adams, while Corbett and Fitzgibbon are splendidly droll in ‘He and She’, a delightful patter song comparing genders. ‘Sing For Your Supper’ has Kennington, Hendrix and Fitzgibbon performing a charming number comparing humans to avians because when birds sing they usually get attention, romantic or otherwise. Witness: “I heard from a wise canary/ Trilling makes a fellow willing/So, little swallow, swallow now/Now is time to sing for your supper.”

Perhaps The Boys from Syracuse might seem a little old fashioned now in its innocent plot but that was the order of the day in 1938, before the Broadway musical really got serious. I know we cannot go back to the good old days of musical comedy but it is enlightening to be reminded of just how great the songs were in the 1930s. The likes of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart knew how to write a popular show. In these straitened times it is good to be reminded of just how good they were. Could the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company have a new hit with a show like The Boys from Syracuse? They did it with Guys and Dolls and Kiss Me, Kate, so they could do it again, couldn’t they? Just asking…

Michael Darvell