1961: The Three Caskets Belle Wildest Dreams

With its eye on a West End transfer, the Players’ Theatre mounted a revival of Gordon Snell and Peter Greenwell's operetta The Three Caskets (Players’ Theatre, 1 March 1961; season), originally produced in a shorter version at that theatre in 1956. Now extended to provide a full evening, with new songs, and orchestrations by Gordon Langford played by the Eugene Pini Orchestra, the updating of scenes from The Merchant of Venice moved the action to Miss Portia Browne's residence in Belmont Square, Mayfair. It was a pretty conceit for the educated sensibilities of the typical Players’ audience, but whether it would have rung a bell with the average London theatregoer is doubtful. Portia, played by Margaret Burton, was wooed in turn by Denis Martin as an Irish tenor, Robin Hunter as a black-face Morocco Joe arriving complete with ‘nigger minstrel’ songs, and heroic Laurie Payne (formerly a romantic presence in A. P. Herbert and Vivian Ellis's The Water Gipsies and the Louisa M. Alcott musical A Girl Called Jo) as the soldierly Honourable Percy Bassanio. It seemed an odd project in a climate already suffused with the rhythms and street-wisdom of West Side Story, and more so because Greenwell was one of the few British composers who had seemed to be pushing the boundaries towards modernity with The Crooked Mile. Coming so soon in the wake of the catastrophic Johnny the Priest, with its curious cocktail of teddy boys and semi-operatic religioso, it showed the Players’ management as out of kilter with the world beyond Villiers Street. Greenwell's next collaboration with Peter Wildeblood, House of Cards, suffered from an identity crisis, too, unsure of what idiom it assumed. It was generally agreed that this economy-sized edition of The Three Caskets, despite its bright lightness, was not as diverting as it had more briefly been in 1956, when the joke had worked better because it wasn't so stretched.