Australian TV Plays: Lola Montez (28 April 1962)

Lola Montez (28 April 1962)

Adaptation of the famous Australian musical. I understand there's no recording. That is a real loss.

Still, it was made. And that fact is one of the reasons why I love Aussie TV plays.

Alan Burke later told Graham Shirley "Lola is not a great work in any way. It’s a lovely songbook but the tele I was very proud of and as long as I was working in television, my persona was Alan Burke, Television Producer but it went hand in hand with Alan Burke who wrote Lola Montez."

The first light muscial done by the ABC.

Premise

It's Ballarat in 1855. The show opens with the song 'Southerly Bluster'.

Irishman Daniel has come to Ballarat to find Jane, the woman who nursed him in the Crimea and who he hopes to marry. They sing 'Saturday Girl'. Daniel gets obssessed with gold while there and goes prospecting and finds a nugget. Jane hates gold because she's seen it corrpt men.

Lola Montez arrives in Ballarat with her manager Sam to play at the Victoria Hotel.

Daniel forgets Jane and becomes infatuated with Lola when he sees her perform. He jumps on stage to present Lola with his nugget.

Dan imagines Lola at the Bavarian Court.

In the morning after, Dan feels appalled at what he has done. Dan visits her to claim back his nugget, making Lola feel better. They sing 'Lady Finds a Love'.

Lola reads a bad review of the Spider Dance by the local editor, Seekamp. She horsewhips him.

Seekamp tells Sam that Lola is not an aristocratic Spaniard but an Irish woman. Lola realises she must seduce Dan to keep her gold nugget.

Lola rejects Dan. Sam comes back and is reunited with Lola.

Cast

Brigid Lenihan as Lola Montez
Campbell Copelin as Seekamp
Mary Duchesne as Lola in Bavaria doing ballet
Alida Glasbecek as Gisela
Patsy Hemingway as Jane
Alan Hopgood as Smith
John Kendall as Jocko
Reginald Newson as Wilson
Anne Peterson as Nancy
Ron Pinnell as Crosbie
Rex Reid as King Ludwig I of Bavaria
Beverley Richards as Ilsa
Johnny Rohan as Daniel
Leslie Sinclair as Mac
Frank Wilson as Sam

1958 Musical

Peter Stannard, Benjamin and Alan Burke were all friends from university. Burke had been in England for several years then returned in 1956. He met his friends and they decided to write a musical together.

Alan Burke says he had never heard of Lola Montez until he heard her mentioned in a program on the ABC. He was attracted to the subject because it was Australian but had international appeal; he did not want to make something along the lines of On Our Selection. Also, since the lead was a performer, the songs would come naturally.

He described the plot:

There are a whole lot more of detailed stuff, talking of research and using too much, we just took the bare bones of what we wanted and I drafted the book. We worked out vaguely the sequence, we added the other leading characters. One would be this Irish boy who’d come out to marry the girl who had nursed him in the Crimea and that he, in Ballarat would be caught with the gold fever, find his nugget and then in this wild delirium, give it to Lola on stage as the miners through little nuggets at her. That gave us obviously a good idea for a plot and second act would be how he got it back and who did what.
A couple of things that didn’t work. Her manager was in fact, a very gentle person by the name of Noel Follind or Folland, we’ve never been able to determine it and we wrote him in fact as a very brash, New York entrepreneur down on his luck who’d taken on her tour as manager. And that he of course who finally, in our musical, wooed her and got her away and the bulk of the story was going to be about her sense of being at the end of her glamour and not wanting to cope with it and taking a young lover in the hope you know, pretending that she was still young and beautiful. And his, the managers, absolute determination to make her face reality and parallel to that, the boy with his nugget and the girl who meet as he had planned that they would, but she’s a realist and he’s a dreamer and he is dreaming of the future which will be all these riches which the nugget will get him and she’s saying ‘come on face reality’, so the pairs are comparable. And Sam is saying to Lola ‘come on forget the past, live now’ and she, Jane says to Daniel ‘forget the future, live now’ and there they are all together all working towards the same end in a funny sort of way. That was the rough plot we worked out and Benjamin and Stannard had some scrapbook, what do you call it, I can’t remember the phrase but we had a phrase ‘workfile’ or something like that and Stannard would have jotted down over the years little themes that he might use some day.

They worked on it through 1957.

“We modelled it without any sense of shame on a Rogers and Hammerstein,” said Burke. “We’d studied them, really studied them you know, how long can you go between songs before they get bored. When do you reprise something. When can you bring in a new song without it being disturbing. All that sort of thing.”

Hugh Hunt of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust heard several auditions of the work and agreed to fund a trial production at the Union Theatre Repertory Company in Melbourne in early 1958. It was directed by John Sumner. The production was very popular.

Burke called Hugh Hunt... Hugh was your English, pink cheeked gentleman who got the job to come out here but then really didn’t like Australia and we were all larrikins and ruffians and he missed desperately the velvet touch of the West End or not that he was mainly West End, he was mainly University theatres and Bristol and Old Vic I think he associated with. He got embarrassed at Australian energy almost. We offended him somehow and I’m sure his good lady wife whom I never met or perhaps just met, missed England like mad... “They wanted something to make a lot of money and Hugh’s funny, ambivalent attitude he didn’t like musicals. They were second rate theatre but they made money, so let’s find a musical. “

A 1958 article about Australian musicals is here. A review is here.

Trust Production

The Trust took up their option and launched a professional production. George Carden was brought in to direct.

Bruce Barry talks about his involvement here.

Alan Burke talked about the production in an excellent interview available here. He says his dream Lola was Vivien Leigh but that he wanted Moyra Fraser to star. Hugh Hunt wanted a star so they imported 25 year old Mary Preston from the United Kingdom to play the lead (she had been in Grab Me a Gondala for two years).Burke said Preston was hopelessly miscast playing a 37 year old aging beauty.

The show trialled in Brisbane for a short season.

Michael Cole, who was playing Daniel (and had been brought out to Sydney from Perth by Burke), was sacked in Brisbane because of his voice. He was replaced by Eric Thornton, who Burke said was too old - a 45-year-old man playing a 19-year-old.

The play moved to Sydney, where it opened on 22 October 1958. An AWW article is here. A SMH review is here.

Burke says it lost £30,000 and "was a show loved by very few people but it went into legend." The original program is here. A review of the show is here.

Clips from the show were done on Showtime on ATN 7 in October 1958.

However the show did run for more than three months.Michael Cole's single recording of "Saturday Girl" became a minor hit. Burke made money out of it, enough to buy a house. He told Graham Shirley the musical, "Got us a wonderful reputation, we became liked in show biz, but the money wasn’t ever what it was about. And the fact that it died, well tough."

Cole later appeared in the TV musical Pardon Miss Westcott which was commissioned from the writers of Lola Montez.

Other adaptations

The musical was performed on radio in December 1958 in Melbourne. This radio version was repeated on 9 June 1959. ABC Weekly said it debuted in Jan 1959.

In 1965 the ABC presented a TV special called Lola and the Highwayman. It consisted of selected songs from Lola Montez and another Australian musical The Highwayman. Melbourne producer Fred Axian said "some of the melodies from these musicals are among the best in the world." Songs selected from the musical were interwoven in a story to give it continuity. Eleven songs were used in all. An extract from the production is at the State Library of New South Wales. It went for 30 minutes. A clip is here.

The musical has been much revived since in amateur and school productions.

The musical was heavily revised in 1988 for a production in Canberra.

Alan Burke said in a 1988 interview there were plans to film it in colour for the ABC in the mid 70s. It was to be one of a series of musicals for the ABC. But only one was made The Sentimental Bloke then the ABC had its funding cut.

Production

Not sure why the ABC decided to make it then. They may have been prompted by the Armchair Theatre TV play "His Polyvinyl Girl" in 1961.

The show was filmed by the ABC in 1962. It was shortened from the stage show only running 90 mins. Burke wanted to get back to "what the book was about". Mainly the restoration of the Bavarian ballet. He also felt the casting was more age appropriate than it had been for the Elizabethan Trust version.

Burke thought "it sat comfortably on television" because it had a lot of intimate moments, like The Sentimental Bloke which he later did for the ABC.

Burke says because he directed, things were not misunderstood.

Johnny Rohan was cast as Daniel after Burke saw him singing on a pop show.

For the role of Lola, Burke wanted to cast an actress who could sing, and picked New Zealander Brigid Lenihan, who had appeared in shows such as Little Woman, Revue 61 and A Night Out.She died relatively young in the early 1970s. "From all accounts she was quite a lady," Lenihan said of Lola. "I think it will ne necessary to lower the pitch of a couple of songs but I'm not going to let that bother me." Lenihan felt Lola's "heart was in the right place... I think she was just a victim of circumstances who had one of those strong personalities that kept her involved in situations over which she had no control. I have a lot of sympathy for Lola."

It was filmed in the ABC's Southbank Studios in Melbourne.

Choreography was by Rex Reid, and Mary Duchesne danced the Lola in the Bavaria sequence. The dance ensemble included Kelvin Coe and Barry Moreland.

There were 33 actors, singers and dancers.

Frank Wilson joined In Melbourne Tonight shortly after the show.

Burke later told Graham Shirley about it in a 2004 interview:

I was working for the ABC of course and it was suggested, I forget by whom, that I go down to Melbourne and do a Lola and I of course jumped at the chance. It was absolutely marvellous. So I cut it myself down to 90 minutes which is all they would give us. We cast Brigid Lenihan, it was just the opposite of Mary Preston in that she was a very good actress indeed but not a singer and she was distressed herself. We prerecorded the numbers and she wasn’t happy but she gave a lovely performance and was very good.
GS What was she distressed about?
AB That she was singing less than operatic standard you know, she sang quite well, there was nothing wrong with it.
GS So you taped it to playback presumably. Was it videotaped or was this in the day of telerecording?
AB It was videotaped. We had two inserts for the two ballets one of which was on film and the other which was on tape. The difference being that the film one was the goldfield ballet which is part of the contemporary chronology of the plot and the Bavaria throwback that I’ve spoken of that Hugh hated and we reinstalled of course, thank you very much for the television, shot on video very faintly, or was it the other way round I can’t remember, we must have filmed that one ,yes that’s right. Very faintly soft focus which was the nature of the film. That’s right we videotaped the one that was the contemporary part of the plot. And that worked very nicely but to my knowledge, was never preserved. It was obviously taped and shown in Melbourne because it was shown Nationally but my next point is, as I mentioned earlier, that Barbara and Vernon [in around 1963-64] wanted to look up the boy who’d played Daniel and went to the library to find it and was informed that it had been wiped and no reference to me. I was furious. Not just my selfish conceit or anything like that but as a piece of history. I was very angry that it was not to be preserved... We had the Melbourne Symphony no less for Lola. God, looking back the luxury, we had the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra doing Lola... It was in fact, prerecorded music played back onto floor and recorded and then edited after it was shown...

GS How happy were you with the TV adaptation?
AB Oh I was very pleased. Well it meant that I had gone back to what I had wanted. They’d cut Bavaria for the big production. I put it back. I cast a Lola of approximately correct years. I was very happy with it and out of Johnny Rohan, the boy I speak of, got the most heartbreaking performance, a boy who had never acted in his life.

He cast Rohan after seeing him in on In Melbourne Tonight.

I got onto the ABC and they found his Agent and he got in touch with me and he came and read for me and the Irish accent was going to be the big thing, could he do it? And indeed he did quite a nice one off the top of his head but said ‘I’ll go back and see my Parish Priest and work on it’, so he was a good Catholic boy. Come the rehearsals I spent I suppose as much time on him as I did on the rest of the Principals put together. This is coming back to my theories on how you direct people. You really had to show him the way. He had never acted. And one notable scene in which he had a confrontation with Lola, Biddy, Brigid Lenerhan you know, going ‘what are you grrrr, grrrr, grrrr, brrrr, brrrr’ and Johnny giggling and turning away and coming over to me. I said ‘what’s the matter John’. ‘She’s angry with me’. I said ‘John, Lola is angry with you, Brigid is not’. Brigid came over and gave him a hug and said ‘of course not’. And so he went back to try it again. And on the final day, I, oh let’s not go into all this, but I wasn’t able to put it to air, I had myself a panic day and my assistant director put it to the final taping day but I was in the studio...

And there was a party afterwards, June Bronhill very sweetly in town with Sound of Music and we finished shooting at a lunch time on whatever the last day was and she asked us over for the afternoon to have some drinks. And I went and sometime into the afternoon or evening I looked round and said ‘where’s Johnny’, could see everyone else but where’s Johnny? And we found him standing out on a balcony just looking into the distance. I went out and said ‘hello what are you up to’ or something like that and without looking back he just said ‘any time I can do anything at all for you in the world let me know’. And I thought that was so touching and he didn’t look back and I didn’t pursue it but we remained very good friends obviously. And that was the niceness of an absolutely unknown casting.

The end of the thing I’d written was that he buries his head in the lady’s bosom having renounced Lola and she sings his song back to him, You’re the Man who’ll Own the World One Day when his song is I’ll be the Man Who’ll Own the World One Day. And I directed it and said ‘it’s not an embrace, it’s not a loving embrace, you go round the body, it’s back to your Mum, it’s all sorts of safety’ and he got that. And on the day of the take and there I was in the Control Room watching and we came to the end and we rolled the graphics and I kept looking for him and Johnny hadn’t budged. And he sat there for many minutes just sad and I think crying, I’m not sure, and that led up to the afternoon when he told me that it was like a whole new experience for him and was very grateful for it...

GS You referred in passing to ‘I had a panic day that day’. What happened there?

AB Well I spoke earlier I think of my first day of the panic attach I had at university and the world just fell away all around me. This day in ’62 we’d taken all the rehearsals, we’d done the pre taping, I’d taped Bavaria myself which I was very proud of. And come the day of the final shoot or the first of two days of final shoot. I got in nice and early and I went to the director’s position in the gallery and Gordon Petrie was my assistant director and I’d asked to have one just for safety and I could offload some rehearsals to him. Anyway it rolled around to be sort of towards 8 o’clock which was when we were starting and I just said ‘I’m sorry Gordon, I cannot do this’. I couldn’t. I looked at those monitors and said ‘no can’t do this, can’t, too much responsibility, too much obligation’ and Gordon sat in the control room and did it for me. I went down to the dressing room and smoked endless cigarettes and had a doctor in and was given some tranquillisers and all sorts of things. But that was the second of my breakdown in life. It would happen the day of Lola but it was working up to it. I could see the sense of what tremendous responsibility I was taking on to make it work when it hadn’t worked at the Trust. And here was I, its Mum, trying to put it to air and make a success of it. Luckily it was.

Songs

"Southerly Buster" - sung by miners
"Til Summer's Been and Gone"
"I Can See a Town"
"Saturday Girl" - sung to by Daniel to Jane
"A Dame Like This"
"I'm the Man"
"Let Me Sing! Let Me Dance!"- sung by Daniel to Lola
"He's Mine"
"All About Lola"
"Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna"" - sung by Sam and Lola
"I Alone"
"Lady Lady Please Don't Cry"
"The Wages of Sin"
"A Lady Finds a Love" - sung by Lola and Dan
"There's Gold in Them There Hills"
"He's Mine"
"Beware"
"I Alone"
"Partner Name Your Poison"

Reception

The Age praised the "superb acting" of Lenihan but felt apart from Frank Wilson that "others in the show... gave stereotyped performances."

The Sydney Morning Herald thought the character of Lola remained "the most intractable fact" of the production thinking she was better used to "material for a sensitive play which hardly in with the lusty, simplicity of a musical that sounds like a marriage of Oklahoma and Paint Your Wagon... All the same, it was interesting to have the chance of seeing again a. musical that promised so much for the talents that combined to devise it; and also a little saddening to think how little has been heard of these talents since."

The Sunday Herald said "it was a brilliant piece of work, sizzling in pace from start to finish, with a cast and chorus as perfectly rehearsed and drilled as an Army platoon. "Lola Montez" was good on stage; it emerges on television even better; almost as though it had been originally written with the small screen in mind. The only flaw in the entire 90 minutes so far as I was concerned, and it was a minor one, was [the]... dream sequence flashback to Lola's days as a court beauty. It was competently done, but it dragged a little toward the end."

Frank Roberts of The Bulletin admitted to missing the first half of the broadcast but still ran his review saying "the part I did see was so lacking in entertainment values that the use of 90 minutes of prime viewing time for a show of that standard would not prove courage, but sheer foolhardiness... On “Lola Montez’s” showing, very little of the talent on view deserved encouraging. It is difficult to criticise the production piecemeal because nearly all of its ingredients were uniformly dreadful."

Was this the first Frank Roberts review of an Australian TV play? What a lazy, lazy review. He would go on to become a major enemy of Australian drama.

TV Times disliked it.

Soundtrack - you can listen to it here. It's quite a fun score, Rogers and Hammerstein-y.

This was of the stage production. According to this article it was pressed by EMI in September 1958 at a cost of over 2000 pounds. It was launched in October 1958 and played on radio in Melbourne the night it premiered in Sydney

The album was recorded before the Brisbane try out so people appear on the album who were fired such as Michael Cole. It featured 'A Lady finds a Love' which was dropped by Sydney. 'There's Gold in Them Thar Hills' and 'Ballad of the Tree' were dropped from the LP. A review is here.

1 Overture - Orchestra - 03:59
2 Southerly Buster - Alan Hopgood - 02:56
3 ’Til Summer’s Been And Gone - Alan Hopgood - 02:11
4 I Can See A Town - Jane Martin/Bernard Shine - 02:46
5 Saturday Girl - Michael Cole, Jane Martin - 02:42
6 A Dame Like This - Frank Wilson - 02:37
7 I’m The Man - Michael Cole - 03:30
8 Let Me Sing! Let Me Dance! - Mary Preston - 04:04
9 He’s Mine - Jane Martin - 02:19
10 All About Lola - Chorus - 02:41
11 Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna - Frank Wilson, Mary Preston - 01:25
12 I Alone - Michael Cole - 02:22
13 Lady Lady Please Don’t Cry - Frank Wilson/Jane Martin - 03:03
14 The Wages Of Sin - The Ladies - 04:37
15 A Lady Finds Love - Mary Preston - 01:39
16 Partner Name Your Poison - Mary Preston, Frank Wilson - 02:18
17 Saturday Girl/ Let Me Sing! Let Me Dance! [Reprise] - Jane Martin/Michael Cole/Mary Preston - 02:13