West End

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