By Jeeves
| By Jeeves | |
|---|---|
| Jeeves (formerly) | |
Cast recording
|
|
| Music | Andrew Lloyd Webber |
| Lyrics | Alan Ayckbourn |
| Book | Alan Ayckbourn |
| Basis |
Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse |
| Productions | 1975 West End 1996 West End revival 1996 Goodspeed Opera House 2001 Broadway 2007 UK tour |
By Jeeves, originally Jeeves, is a 1975 musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn, based on the novels of P. G. Wodehouse.
Jeeves is the original 1975 version, which opened on 22 April 1975 and closed on 24 May after 38 performances at Her Majesty's Theatre, London. It is regarded as Andrew Lloyd Webber's only real flop. By Jeeves is the rewritten 1996 version, which opened 1 May 1996 in London and due to success was extended to February 1997, through three theatres. It premiered in the U.S. in 1996 and on Broadway in 2001.
Tim Rice conceived the idea of turning P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories into a musical. Originally, he was to work with his then-partner, Andrew Lloyd Webber, but Rice backed out of the project. Eventually Lloyd Webber teamed up with famed British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, and the two of them began work with the personal blessing of Wodehouse. Ayckbourn utilized characters and plot lines from several Jeeves and Wooster stories, notably The Code of the Woosters. The action takes place at the East London Club for Unmanageable Boys, where Bertie Wooster is playing a banjo concert; his banjo keeps breaking down, so he is forced to tell stories to pass the time while Jeeves is sent off to fetch new strings. Bertie recounts how he managed to become engaged to three ladies simultaneously and how his valet Jeeves (through ingenious intervention) unravelled the complications.
Unfortunately, the loyalty to the Wodehouse material made for an epic length (four and three-quarter hours at the Bristol tryouts), and reducing the duration made for creative tensions. Rows broke out about the presence of an all-male singing sextet accompanying Bertie Wooster and the realisation that the first woman did not appear on stage until thirty-five minutes had passed. Regardless of book-trouble, Lloyd Webber had provided a strong period score that eschewed all traces of the pop-inflections of his Jesus Christ Superstar. The sound of trumpets, banjos and saxophones for this score were written by a group of arrangers: Keith Amos, Don Walker, Lloyd Webber himself and his future orchestrator, David Cullen.
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