And we've been known to scream about that certain thing called "The Boy Friend"

[He] went to Elstree Preparatory School, a Spartan institution from which he nevertheless won a scholarship to Harrow. “You’ll see some fellows doing things which will shock and disgust you,” warned his prep school headmaster. “They will ask you to join in, too, and this you will on no account do.” History does not relate whether young Sandy needed or heeded this advice.

We bid a sad farewell today to Sandy Wilson, composer, playwright and author, and one of the last "greats" of British theatre.

Although his output was wide-ranging (including revues for the likes of Peter Cook and Hermione Gingold, and tributes to both Dorothy Parker - on stage - and Ivor Novello - in print), and various productions of his such as Valmouth do get an occasional airing (to largely critical, rather than popular, acclaim), it is inevitably for one worldwide "hit" that Mr Wilson will be remembered the most. From his obituary in The Telegraph:

In 1952 the Players Theatre commissioned Wilson, for a £50 fee, to write a “divertissement”. The result was The Boy Friend. After some lengthening of the original two-act show, and various efforts to get it to the West End, it opened to general acclaim at Wyndham’s Theatre in January 1954.

Though it remained a perennial favourite and earned Wilson so much money that he was advised he need never work again, his own relationship with the play was a difficult one. He hated the Broadway production and was banned from rehearsals. He hated Ken Russell’s film version, complaining that his offers of help had been rejected. In 1984 he fell out with Cameron Mackintosh over a West End revival which also, he felt, veered too far from the original.

The Boy Friend is a camp, cult classic, not merely because of the Art Deco extravaganza that was the movie version (we saw an excellent production at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in 2006). Despite Mr Wilson's reservations, it is not a bad legacy at all, methinks...

The Boy Friend trailer

Facts about Sandy Wilson:

• Apparently the character of "Sandy" in the Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick camp comedy routine Julian and Sandy was based on Wilson (and Julian on Julian Slade).
• The Boy Friend ran for more than five years at Wyndham's theatre in London, spent more than a year on Broadway, and made an international star of the young Julie Andrews.
• He applied his artistic talents to home-made Christmas cards, usually featuring flappers, pierrots or harlequins in a mimimal setting of crescent moons and floating balloons.
• He lived for many years with his partner Chak Yui, not "in a little flat in Bloomsbury" but in Kensington, and eventually retired to Wiltshire.
• His autobiography I Could be Happy was published in 1975.

RIP Alexander Galbraith "Sandy" Wilson (19th May 1924 - 27th August 2014)

"The concert, it is I"

It is the bicentenary of the birth of the flamboyant composer Franz Liszt. Renowned for his florid style of performance and deliberately complicated compositions, in many ways this dramatic Hungarian, with his silver-topped cane and cloak, was so popular in his day he was the latter-day equivalent of a Liberace or an Elton John.

Among his acolytes (as portrayed by Danhauser) were such luminaries as Victor Hugo, Niccolò Paganini, Gioachino Rossini, Alexander Dumas and George Sand. His work influenced Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg, Camille Saint-Saëns and Frédéric Chopin.

From the Lisztomania concert programme website:

"Lisztomania" is by no means a modern word creation. Heinrich Heine coined the term in connection with the famous concert series presented by Franz Liszt in 1841/1842 in Berlin. The piano virtuoso’s stage performances were legendary. "Le Concert c’est moi" – "The concert, it is I," wrote Franz Liszt on 4 June 1839 in a letter to Princess Christina Belgiojoso in Paris. His appearances on stage were highly expressive, almost eccentric, rousing his audiences to transports of enthusiasm, especially the ladies, whose adoration soared at times to hysterical heights. He tossed his long mane of hair and struck the piano keys aggressively, sometimes even breaking the hammers and strings. His audiences were so wildly enthralled that Franz Liszt stopped having seats placed in the concert halls where he performed. He even had fan articles distributed. These phenomena made him the first superstar in music history.

As Tom Service says in his Guardian blog:

His discarded cigar butts were worn as relics by adoring fans, the piano strings that would break under the strain of his transcendental pianism were transformed into high-society jewellery. By the early 1840s, around the time of his 30th year, his reputation was such that he was heralded as virtual royalty in the continent's capitals. He left Berlin after a two-week residency in 1842 in a carriage drawn by six white horses, the head of a procession of hundreds of other coaches. As the critic Ludwig Rellstab put it, "Not like a king but as a king did he march out, surrounded by a rejoicing crowd."

Liszt's love-life, too, was the stuff upon which the tabloids thrived. And it was on this aspect that Mr Ken Russell chose to focus much of his extravaganza movie Lisztomania, roughly based on the great man's life:

Ken Russell - Lisztomania

How to follow that?! Here is my favourite piece of Liszt - his Liebestraum, played beautifully by Evgeny Kissin:

Evgeny Kissin plays Liszt - Liebestraum no 3 O Lieb

Franz Liszt (22nd October 1811 - 31st July 1886)

"Reality is a dirty word for me"

Over at Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle, it's all about the Last Night of the Proms.

Ken Russell's take on the classics, however, is a little more extreme...

Ken Russell - Nessun Dorma (from "Aria")

Ken Russell - 1812 Overture (from "The Music Lovers")

"Reality is a dirty word for me, I know it isn't for most people, but I am not interested. There's too much of it about."
Ken Russell

Savage Messiah - a Ken Russell site