Joy Nichols

Dear Editor

At the age of fifteen, I became a dancer at the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney and danced in many of the shows. The article about Joy Nichols was one of them I still have the program with my name Wendy Burr as Showgirl.

I had lied about my age, as I was pursuing a career as a ballerina, studying during the day, then wearing spangles and high heels at night.

At 17 years of age left for London joining London’s Festival Ballet, followed by, many musical movies and West End shows. An amazing career.

Now at age 85 living in the USA, I shall always call Australia home... a beautiful country.

After receiving your email, wanting to know about my career in dance and theatre, here is a short bio from my Professional life in dance.

It all started at my Mother’s Dancing School in Wentworthville, NSW. I was born on a farm in Pendle Hill, and couldn't wait to leave as soon as I turned 15 years old.
That’s when I joined the Tivoli Theatre. Ronnie Hay the Choreographer was artistic and invented so many wonderful shows. Eight shows a week, but I loved it.

Studying Ballet during the days towards the RAD Scholarship to go to London. In a theatrical boarding house, at Kings Cross I rented a room, not the safest place for a young girl, but it was cheap. Lucette Aldous won the RAD Scholarship and was sent to the Royal Ballet School. She was an amazing Ballerina. Sadly, she passed in 2021.

After saving enough money for a passage on an Italian ship to Europe, and eating too much pasta, did not look a ballerina when I arrived. Cut my hair to look like Audrey Hepburn, but looked more like Gina Lollabrigida. Lucky for me the day I went to audition for London's Festival Ballet a girl in the Company had an accident, and I was her height. The following night I was in “Gizelle”. This is August 1955, and I am 17 years old.

Some highlights of six years in the Company were Performing at Grace Kelly’s Wedding in Monte Carlo, in the beautiful Opera House. It was magic! From Pendle Hill to Monte Carlo.

We travelled extensively though out Europe, South America and Isreal. An education in itself. Eventually, I took a leap of faith and left the Company, to dance in the Cliff Richards Movie's ...“The Young Ones” and “Summer Holiday” where I had a wonderful role as the Yugoslavian Sheperdess... many films followed: “Oliver”, “The Boyfriend”, “Demoiselle de Rochefort” with Gene Kelly... how exciting is that.

My career continued in London’s West end Musicals, “Billy” with Micheal Crawford, and principal dancer at London’s Palladium “Aladdin” panto, TV specials and much more. Never famous, now married with three children, kept dancing till we relocated to USA. My last performance with the Palm Springs Follies in California at age 69-71 years of age. Now live in Newport R.I . Famous for the Australians winning Americas cup in 1983! Well done Aussies.

Thank you Elisabeth, it’s been a wonderful fulfilling life.

Why I changed my name to Barry? I did not want to be known as Marilyn Burr’s sister. She was a famous ballerina, who passed sadly a year ago.

I think I am the last living member from that period in London’s Festival Ballet 1955-1961.

Wendy Barry

(My Stage Name)

_{AND ROBERTA HAMOND}

1950s cigarette card. Frank Van Straten collection.

In october 1952 Britain’s Royal Family—the new young monarch, Elizabeth II, on the throne but not yet crowned, accompanied by her husband Philip Duke of Edinburgh and sister Princess Margaret—went to the Palladium, one of London’s largest theatres. For her first time as Queen, she had commanded her nation’s greatest entertainers to appear gratisat the sold-out annual Royal Variety Charity Performance. Almost all the then stars of British stage, radio and TV popular entertainment appeared, including Vera Lynn, Gracie Fields, Tony Hancock, Arthur Askey, Jimmy Edwards, Terry-Thomas, Max Bygraves, Maurice Chevalier, Bud Flanagan with his ‘Crazy Gang’, and a young singer-comedian, claimed to be one of the Queen’s ‘favourites’, Joy Nichols.

The Weekly Dispatchrepresentative was watching the Royal box and reported on 26 October that the Duke and Princess Margaret joined in singing ‘Let’s All Go Down the Strand’ and that, when Joy Nichols took to the stage and started into Marie Lloyd’s old music hall number: ‘My old man said follow the van/And don’t dilly dally on the way …’, ‘the Queen sang as well’. The entertainers’ own newspaper, The Stage,also loved the show but, in its 6th November issue, grumbled that women had been under-represented and only two ‘out-and-out comediennes’ appeared: Gracie Fields, for many years the highest-paid and most admired of English popular singers—and Joy Nichols.

Four years later, the United Kingdom’s Actors’ Equity held its own annual charity performance, the Green Room Club ‘Midnight Matinée’ for the benefit of the Entertainers’ Benevolent Fund. Most of the Knights and Dames of British high performance art took part, including ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn and actors Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir John Gielgud, Dame Edith Evans, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Lady Olivier (Vivien Leigh). The Stage(8 March 1956) thought they were all great, but when Joy Nichols walked out and sang in her deep, warm, clear voice the sexy, exuberant Broadway number ‘I Wanna Get Married’, she ‘brought the house down’.

Every one of those named above were legends in their field then, and many are still remembered today. Joy Nichols has been almost entirely forgotten.

Joy Nichols. Photographer unknown.

State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

Joy and George, 1942. Photo by Grimes.

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy ACP Magazines Ltd.

She was an Australian, born in Sydney in 1925, who grew up in extreme poverty, particularly after first an outbreak of swine flu and then the Great Depression bankrupted the family piggery. Her desperate father became occasionally violent and Joy, the only daughter, retreated to total dependency on her mother Freda, a former amateur actor who taught her and one of her brothers, George, elocution and singing and arranged tap dancing lessons in exchange for other students she taught.

Both George and Joy became clever impersonators of famous adult entertainers, particularly the Scots comic singer Sir Harry Lauder; Joy also sang in imitation of Gracie Fields. Freda sent George off at the age of seven to tour with the Young Australia League. At age 4, Joy lost her beloved brother and became the centre of her mother’s attention. And her mother’s only interest was the stage. Confusing to a child to say the least but, as Joy later wrote, ‘mum lived through my performances as if it were she. She was happy. I became even more important to her. I liked the feeling.’

Joy Nichols (sixth from right) with contestants of the 2GB Youth Show, 1941. Photo by Sam Hood.

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Freda wrote incessantly to radio stations and theatre managers and, by age seven, Joy was acting and singing to earn money to help the struggling Nichols family. By the late 1930s both George and Joy had become leading young variety artists. However, Joy had also won a scholarship to Fort Street Girls High School, was a high academic achiever, and wanted to become a teacher. But, in mid-1940, Freda secured for her a contract to sing between feature films in cinemas and, without first telling her daughter, withdrew her from the school. Joy’s career path was set, and she would struggle mentally all her life with the consequences, delighted by the astonishing success she enjoyed both in Australia and England but so nervous she threw up before almost every performance, became emotionally unstable, and bitterly attacked those close to her who tried to help. Another Joy Nichols, one the public never saw.

Success on stage and radio came immediately. On 28 May 1940, even before she stopped being a student, Joy Nichols appeared in front of a packed Sydney Town Hall audience at the first of many Commonwealth ‘Win-the-War’ rallies. Prime Minister Robert Menzies and federal Treasurer Percy Spender were present, and the famous Australian baritone Peter Dawson also on the bill. The fifteen-year-old Nichols sang patriotic songs including Harley Cohan’s ‘Swingin’ Along the Road to Victory’. One report claimed the applause held up the show for five minutes.

Sheet music cover for ‘A Brown Slouch Hat’, 1942

Courtesy of Roberta Hamond

Sheet music cover for ‘The Finger of Suspicion’, 1952

The Sheet Music Warehouse

Soon after, she became the leading singer and comedian on the weekly 2GB Sydney Youth Showand later its compere as well. She was also the star of many later live concerts raising funds and entertaining Australian troops during World War Two. In 1942, at the age of 17, she recorded ‘When a Boy from Alabama meets a Girl from Gundagai’, written by Jack O’Hagan as American troops poured into Australia. Her voice on that disc is still heard occasionally today in radio and TV documentaries about Australia’s role in the Second World War. Later the same year, Joy was one of the first to sing George Wallace’s patriotic song and march, ‘A Brown Slouch Hat’, composed in the darkest days of the War as the Meiji Emperor’s troops attempted to capture Port Moresby prior to a possible invasion of Australia. By 1944, after she had joined the Australian Tivoli Circuit, she was being acclaimed as ‘our best young variety performer’.

Joy Nichols in her dressing room at the Sydney Tivoli, 1943. Photographer unknown.

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy ACP Magazines Ltd.

George and Joy in their home recording studio. Photographer unknown.

Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy ACP Magazines Ltd.

At the end of that World War, as the sea lanes reopened, the Tivoli management reverted to its long-successful policy of importing from England and the USA the headline acts for all its shows, ignoring the protests of local professional performers. Many Australian entertainers, starved of work and the limelight in their own country, went to London to further their careers. Joy Nichols was one of them—and one of only a very small number who succeeded. George went with her and, after a first difficult six months, their double act had modest success.

George later returned to Australia; Joy stayed and, for the next six years, her meteoric rise and glittering career generated countless enthusiastic news stories in British and Australian newspapers. She inspired many other young female stars of the Australian stage to try their luck in London to see if they could become ‘another Joy Nichols’, including Lorrae Desmond, Maggie Fitzgibbon, and Toni Lamond.

Joy Nichols, 1948. Photo by John Lee.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Program cover for Take It From Us,Adelphi, Theatre, London, 1950

Elisabeth Kumm collection

Before she left Sydney, 2GB had engaged her to record over 50 fifteen-minute episodes of Presenting Joy Nichols. These were still being replayed on Australian radio stations ten years later, reminding listeners of the warm contralto voice and cheerful personality of the Aussie girl who had gone to London and made good. What they didn’t know was that, in addition to her private turmoil, her public joi de vivrewas being sustained by ‘uppers’, given to her from her Youth Showdays. Like Judy Garland, to whom she was often compared, she became addicted.

Joy Nichols starred in many seasons on stage in London’s biggest West End theatres, but it was her success on BBC radio with Jimmy Edwards and fellow-Australian Dick Bentley in the weekly comedy, singing, and satire broadcast Take It From Herethat made her a household name in both countries. By 1949 TIFH, as it became known (pronounced ‘TIFE’), had the largest audience of any radio program in the UK with over ten million listeners, and was equally popular in Australia. According to a London correspondent for Sydney Truth, in 1949 ‘Joy’s face beams at you from posters in all the underground stations’.

Wally Peterson and Joy Nichols running in Regent’s Park, London, 1950

Courtesy of Roberta Hamond

Joy Nichols with her daughter Roberta, 1952

Frank Van Straten collection

Nichols maintained this hectic pace for over six years, interrupted only briefly by marriage in 1949 to Wally Peterson, an American singer/actor/songwriter, and the birth of their daughter Roberta in 1952. She reportedly was earning £200 per week on the live stage and £160 on radio—what she herself later described as ‘a preposterous amount of money’. Then, in the middle of 1953, Joy Nichols took a break to return to Australia to see her family, show them her one-year-old daughter, and to star on the Tivoli Circuit in a show built around her: Take It From Me.

There were Lord Mayors’ Dinners, newspaper and radio interviews, publicity gigs and charity appearances. She was everybody’s Joy, sometimes page 1 news. With the incessant attention, requests and commitments, her reliance on amphetamines to keep going, the demands of motherhood, and her unresolved childhood demons which re-intensified as family and old friends gathered around, she broke. Barely a week into the opening season in Sydney she had a serious breakdown which incapacitated her for nearly a year. Interest in her in Australia slowly faded away; some even assumed her career had ended then.

Program cover for Take It From Me, 1953

Frank Van Straten collection

Cover of the original London cast recording of the musical The Pajama Game, 1955

 

It didn’t, although Joy Nichols did pull back, trying to find a better balance. She made a successful return to the London stage, notably as the female lead in the long-running (1955-57) London premiere season of the musical The Pajama Game. In England, she became a legend—young English comediennes also aspired to be ‘another Joy Nichols’— and was sometimes claimed as an English ‘local’, standing high amidst the American invasion of the popular musical stage.

However, in these later decades, Joy Nichols was both unlucky and unable to conquer her nightmares. The 1953 trip to Australia meant she lost her place in the cast of Take It From Here, which ran till 1960 and made stars of her successors. In 1957, Joy and her husband lost almost all their money when defrauded by their financial adviser. They sought a new start in New York where at first both struggled to survive and where she was unable to capitalise on the prominence The Pajama Gamehad given her in the UK. Wally eventually broke through as a successful entertainer though never a star, and as a stage and production manager. Joy performed less frequently and less prominently but in major shows and in radio and television on both sides of the Atlantic, taking time out after she gave birth to twins, Richard and Victoria, in New York in 1962.

In 1965, the tug between Joy Nichols’ career and her Australian family of origin delivered one final unfortunate twist. Her mother had died, but she wanted to reconnect with her father and siblings and for her three children to meet them. She was asked by the Australian Tivoli to star in a British musical farce, Instant Marriage. Before she left New York, Joy was approached by the later legendary Bob Fosse. She first met ‘Bobby’, as she called him, when he came to London to choreograph The Pajama Game. Fosse was organising, for potential financial investors, a concert performance of a new musical he wanted to direct, Sweet Charity. Fosse asked her to assist at this ‘backers’ audition’. Joy did and so was the first to sing in public its biggest hit, ‘Hey Big Spender’. The financiers were enthused and the premiere Broadway season ran for 608 performances, but she couldn’t accept his offer to perform in the show as she had contracted to go back to Australia, for the last time, to star in a musical that didn’t take.

Joy Nichols gradually lost her struggle with mental illness, left show business and died in a care home in Brooklyn in 1992. There were brief obituaries in the trade magazines and a few newspapers, none of which revealed (or probably knew) the price she had paid for fame. There are listings of some of her achievements on entertainment history databases in the UK and USA, while a few books on stage, film and radio history include some brief details, often inaccurate, of the career in the 1940s and 1950s of one of Australia’s and England’s greatest stars of popular entertainment who, as she was often titled, had been ‘Our Joy’, but never her own.

This summary of Joy Nichols’ career is sourced from Australian and English newspapers, published memoirs, and Nichols’ own press cuttings, letters, etc, which Roberta, her daughter, holds. We would welcome hearing from anyone with memories or material related to Joy Nichols’ career.

We would also particularly like to hear from anyone who knows if any of the radio recordings of her singing ‘A Brown Slouch Hat’ have survived. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Listen to Joy Nichols

‘I’m Not at All in Love’ from The Pajama Game

‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’

‘Be a Clown’

Roberta Hamond, née Peterson  England

Roberta Hamond studied political history at Boston University and also holds a MA in Theatre Arts (Distinction) from Goldsmith’s College, London. She has over 40 years’ experience as a professional actor, writer, theatre arts teacher and producer/director, particularly for theatre education projects. She currently works as a carer representative for the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists.

The full cast dressed in pyjamas for the finale. Photo by Rimis. From Theatre World, no. 372, January 1956.

The Pajama Game

Musical in two acts by George Abbott and Richard Bissell, based on Bissell’s 1953 novel 7½ Cents. Lyrics and music by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. Opened at the London Coliseum, 13 October 1955. Presented by Williamson Music Ltd. and Prince Littler by arrangement with Frederick Brisson, Robert E. Griffith and Harold S. Prince. American production directed by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins. Reproduced by Robert E. Griffith. Production supervised by Jerome Whyte. Settings and costumes designed by Lemuel Ayers. Choreography by Bob Fosse. Reproduced by Zoya Leporska. Musical direction by Robert Lowe. Orchestrations by Don Walker. Dance music arrangements by Roger Adams. Pyjamas are made by Bonsoir from fabric containing Ardil, ICI’s protein fibre. Designs printed by The Calico Printers’ Association.

Workers in the pyjama factory—singing “Racing the Clock”. Photo by Rimis. From Theatre World, no. 372, January 1956.

In July 1955, Richard Adler, the co-composer of The Pajama Game arrived in the UK. His task was to select the cast for the British premiere, which was set to open in October 1955 at the Coliseum, directly following the close of Can-Can. Though there were some murmurings about the lack of suitability of British performers, Adler soon selected his three leads: Joy Nichols, Max Wall and Edmund Hockridge.

Joy Nichols (1925-1992) was considered a real find and someone with star potential. Sadly, this was to be her only West End musical.

Max Wall (1908-1990) heralded from the music hall and this was his first appearance in a musical. His songs “I’ll Never be Jealous Again” and “Think of the Time I Save” were applauded, but unfortunately, his reception was marred by scuttlebutt in the popular press who had exposed the breakdown of his marriage and liaison with a younger woman (Jennifer Chimes, ‘Miss Great Britain 1955’, whom he married in 1956). On opening night, members of the audience tossed vegetables at him as he took his curtain call.

Edmund Hockridge (1919-2009) was a Canadian, and had performed leading roles in operas and musicals throughout America and the UK. During the war years, he performed with the BBC Forces Network, singing and producing some 400 shows. He never became a big name, but he possessed a fulsome singing voice (capable of filling the Coliseum) and handsome appearance. Prior to The Pajama Game, he had played the role of Judge Forestier in Can-Can.

Joy Nichols (Babe Williams) singing “I’m Not at All in Love”. Photo by Rimis. From Theatre World, no. 372, January 1956.

Of the supporting cast, Elizabeth Seal (b.1933), who played the soubrette role of Gladys, scored a huge hit in the number “Steam Heat”. She had played small parts in Gay’s the Word (1951), The Glorious Days (1953) and Cockles and Champagne (1954), but this was her first significant role. As a dancer and singer she proved an ‘overnight sensation’ (as they say in show biz). She received an award from the Variety Club of Great Britain for Most Promising Newcomer.

In the minor role of a Salesman is the name of Arthur Lowe (1915-1982), who would go on to become inseparable from his TV persona of Captain Mainwaring in the sitcom Dad’s Army.

When The Pajama Game opened in the West End, the other ‘rivals in the same class’ were The King and I (Drury Lane) and Kismet (Stoll), along with the ‘home-grown’ musical The Water Gipsies which was making ‘quite a success with the unsophisticated’ at the Winter Garden.

The Pajama Game would go on to achive a run of 588 performances at the Coliseum, closing on 9 March 1957.

Sid (Edmund Hockridge) confronts Babe (Joy Nichols) after she deliberately jams the machines. Photo by Rimis. From Theatre World, no. 372, January 1956.

The Cast

Elizabeth Seal as Gladys entertains the factory workers at the staff picnic. Photo by Roger Wood. New York Public Library, New York.

The Scenes

The action takes place in a small town in the Middle West.

Time—The present.

Elizabeth Seal performing the Steam Heat number, with Johnny Greenwood & Ivor Meggido. Photo by Rimis. From Theatre World, no. 372, January 1956.

The Songs

Prez (Frank Lawless), with pencil and pad, annouces that everyone will get their pay increase—and they sing the number “7½ Cents”. Photo by Remis. From London Casino souvenir.

The Reviews

The Pajama Game at the Coliseum

Tuneful, racy, and funny, and having some ideas above the usual boy-meets-girl situation (although this is included, of course), “The Pajama Game” is among the most satisfying American musicals seen in London. The music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross do not remain in your mind for long after you have left the theatre; on the other hand, the book by George Abbott and Richard Bissell, based on Bissell’s novel “7½ Cents”, retains an odd fascination. This, no doubt, is because it provides a very well integrated and convincingly characterised story in which merely glamorous things are largely replaced by situations and people that have the tang of real life.

Pay Dispute

The pajama factory, in which there is a long dispute over a rise in pay, while being as colourful as possible, seems like the real thing, and the people working in it manage to make us believe they belong there. There are interpolations that could be fitted into almost any musical play, but the remarkable thing is that reality and fantasy are so well blended. It is light entertainment, but never silly or crude, and the American determination to inject social propaganda into musical shows could hardly have been accomplished with more smoothness and care.

It is indeed refreshing, along with the gay, inconsequential side of it all, to find the hero and heroine and their friends involved in a capital-v.-labour situation, with the delights of love fulfilled only in their proper time and place. Babe Williams, red-headed operative with a social conscience, and Sid Sorokin, the worker who has decided to get to the top at any price, interest us as personalities with ideas of their own. Their clash over the factory dispute, neatly sustained until the happy ending, has the excitement of real drama. The workers’ enemies are symbolised in the factory boss, Hasler, fat, white, hard, sentimental and quick-tempered, who is drawn with suitable restraint, yet not without sharp conviction. The worker who is as much a time-server as time-keeper, little Hines, is redeemed from being a traitor to his fellows because he is natural, simple and ready to enjoy life outside his dubious job.

But it is fun, not all serious thoughts. One stresses the basic elements of seriousness because they are what makes the show so striking. Without the aid of big brass and wild yells, they give it stamina and vitality.

It is very well staged, moves swiftly and clearly. and is aptly decorated. Joy Nichols, returning to the West End after a long absence, invests Babe Williams with humanity and real character. She is somewhat lacking in charm, and her singing retains traces of its old brash heartiness, but she has matured considerably as an artist, and in “Hey There”, one of the most appealing songs in the show, reveals a touching sensitivity and new command of expression.

Edmund Hockridge looks the part of the tall, wide, and handsome Sorokin, and both his singing and acting have developed more suppleness and variety of colouring. Max Wall as the time-keeper who glories in his game of knife-throwing, has excellent opportunities for quiet comedy, which he takes every time. With Joan Emney, the large-size secretary, he makes a big success of “I’ll Never Be Jealous Again”. Elizabeth Seal, a newcomer with a delightfully cute personality, is at her best in the effective dance interludes in which she gives vent to her high spirits. She is outstanding in “Steam Heat”. and may well be a star of the future.

R.B.M.

The Stage, 20 October 1955, p.9

Cover of The Pajama Game souvenir

ebay

Sheet music cover for The Pajama Game, published by Frank Music Company, Ltd.

Her Majesty’s Theatre Archive, Melbourne

Charm at a Discount

by Anthony Cookman

“Oklahoma!”, it is time to recall, swept us off our feet not by telling a story taken from a novel, but by evoking a mood. “O, what a beautiful morning... everything’s going my way”—the mood was caught in the very first lines and held lightly and securely to the end of a wonderful evening. The successors to Oklahoma! all take their stories from novels, but now for a quite different reason. The stories are not shaped to produce a mood exhilarating enough to sweep a light musical audience off their feet. They are supposed to be interesting in themselves.

If it is in their nature to be ugly or drab or confusing, that is of no moment: the clumping energy with which they are put across can be trusted to disguise their fundamental unsuitability for a song-and-dance show. If we ask in our simple, traditional way for charm we are sternly reproved by the earnest realists of Broadway and told that for charm (or grace or inspired gaiety or gilded nonsense, or whatever sort of escapism we have come to expect of musicals) we must make do with a rendering of life as it really is.

And we make do. The story of Pajama Game at the Coliseum is supposed to be interesting in itself. It takes us into a pyjama factory and shows us the work-girls madly stitching away, so many stitches a minute by the stop-watch, as though they were part of a scene in an Expressionist drama of the ’thirties. They are hardly less slaves of the machine when they come to recreate themselves for the next day's work at an outing in the woods organised by the management, though there are the usual amorous diversions.

However, Romance eventually brings up, not the 9.15 of Kipling, but the Grievance Committee with the heroine at its head. What interrupts the course of true love between them is a disputed wage increase of 7½ cents. He is for the bosses, she for the workers, what an agonising conflict of loyalties! Quite a good conflict for the prosaic playwright to treat seriously. The objection to it on the light musical stage is that it has to be treated there with a realism which, while almost too insistent, is thoroughly bogus. The result is not a rendering of industrial life, but a crude mockery of it, charmless and not very funny.

Yet The Pajama Game, with all the crudity and repetitiveness of its book, will get by. The music and lyrics, by Mr. Richard Adler and Mr. Jerry Ross, have staying power, and the dancing by an English company has a near-American vitality and a good command of various taking rhythms. Mr. Edmund Hockridge, a forceful baritone, is well cast as the Works Superintendent. His voice, without the help of amplifiers, fills the vast spaces of the Coliseum, and it is a novel idea which works out successfully that the song “Hey there”, which warns him that he is falling in love, should be sung as a duet with his own voice recorded on a tape machine and playing back at him.

The heroine (the Grievance Committee) has a rather more human personality that the hero (the Works Superintendent), and Miss Joy Nichols fill it out most attractively. Before the run ends Miss Nichols is likely to number her friends by the ten thousand. Miss Elizabeth Seal, a lithe brunette whose eccentric dances are one of the show's undoubted success, has as much gusto as any of the company, and she manages to throw in a little charm as well. The humour is only of the more obvious sort, and Mr. Max Wall, a a jealous knife-thrower, gets his best chance (such as it is) in his dream of a flighty wife’s behaviour in his absence, and even here he is only the miming intervener in Miss Seal’s comic dance.

The Tatler and Bystander, 26 October 1955, p.235

Bibliography

Frances Stephens, Theatre World Annual (London), no. 7, 1st June 1955-31 May 1956, Rockliff, 1956

Adrian Wright, West End Broadway: The Golden Age of the American Musicals in London, The Boydell Press, 2012