The 1987 revival of Robert and Elizabeth starring Mark Wynter and Gaynor Miles played at the Chichester Festival Theatre commencing with 4 preview performances from Friday, 24 to Tuesday, 28 April, followed by a limited season of 38 performances between Wednesday, 29 April to Saturday, 27 June (which played in repetoire with a revival of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband starring Joanna Lumley).
The revival curtailed the extended dance and ballet sequences of the original production and eliminated the entire Cremorne Gardens scene, together with the Act 1 duet “Want to be Well” for Browning and Elizabeth, Bella Hedley’s song “What’s Natural” and Browning’s “Under a Spell” in Act 2 and relocated Henrietta and Capt. Cook’s “Hate Me Please” to a new setting; resituated an extended “Escape Me Never” to the beginning of the second Act and restored the Act 2 solo for Browning “Long Ago I Loved You”, cut from the score during its original pre-London run in 1964.
A proposed London transfer of the revival did not eventuate when Miss Miles decided that she could not sustain the vocally demanding role of Elizabeth for eight performances a week during an open-ended West End run.
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Mark Wynter as Robert and Gaynor Miles as Elizabeth
The cast and Production personnel
The reviews:
CHICHESTER
Mick Martin
Robert and Elizabeth
FIRST seen in Wendy Toye's 1964 production, Robert and Elizabeth offers an old-fashioned sentimental account of the power of love to overcome all obstacles as it traces the romance between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett from initial correspondence to eventual elopement.
Stewart Trotter's uneven revival, which launches the new season at Chichester's Festival Theatre suggests that Ron Grainer's fluent tuneful score has worn well. But by hinting at, rather than exploiting, the dramatic potential of the underlying tensions between energy, authority and repressed desire, Ronald Millars book seems too firmly rooted in a world of golden daffodils and lollipop trees where the course of true love runs, if not exactly smoothly, at least with sugar-coated predictability.
Mark Wynter as Browning is a considerable revelation, powerfully combining a fine singing voice and a commanding stage presence in the persuasive creation of a tenacious and debonair romantic hero of irresistible appeal.
Gaynor Miles has no less fine a singing voice (though its operatic quality does not always sit easily with the overall tone of the show). But her acting rarely penetrates the frail, wan and statuesque exterior of Elizabeth to reveal the passion and sensitivity that burn within.
John Savident provides a laudibly convincing study of pre-Freudian patriarchal tyranny, and he and Wynter make the most of such opportunities as the book allows to give substance to the central clash of wills.
The proceedings are lent a pleasing vitality by the slick ensemble work of the supporting cast, among whom Jacinta Mulcahy, as Elizabeth's spirited sister Henrietta, particularly catches the eye.
Stewart Trotter’s spritely direction gains in shape and definition as it proceeds, but fails to strike the necessary balance between the sombre and the bright. Especially in the early stages it also seems unnecessarily cluttered, threatening to engulf rather than inhabit the open stage.
And what Tim Goodchild's overbearing rustic hayloft of a set is intended to convey is anybody's guess.
The Guardian (London), 1 May 1987, p.21
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Theatre
By CLIVE HIRSCHHORN
A sumptuous treat
THIS year’s Chichester festival opens in fine style with a sumptuous revival of the musical ROBERT AND ELIZABETH, one of the better British efforts of the Sixties.
And if much of Ron Grainer and Ronald Millar's music and lyrics owe an unashamed debt to Rodgers and Hammerstein, not to mention Lerner and Loewe, at least they are borrowing from two impeccable sources.
For a generation unfamillar with the original, or for those who may have forgotten it, Robert and Elizabeth, based on a famous stage play by Rudolf Besler, is the story of the Barretts of Wimpole Street and the tyrannical hold Mr Edward Moulton-Barrett exercised over his nine grownup children, including the sickly Ellzabeth (Gaynor Miles), the oldest and most favoured of the Barrett brood.
TUNEFUL
The claustrophobia of Ellzabeth’s confined, airless existence is penetrated by “versifier” Robert Browning (Mark Wynter), whose love for the ailing poetess helps restore her health long enough for her to defy her father by marrying Browning and travelling to Italy with him.
Structured by Ronald Millar with a professionalism rare in British musicals, this relentlessly tuneful show, niftily directed by Stewart Trotter, benefits from a lively, full-throated cast (John Savident is particularly imposing), some simple but effective choreography by Mike Fields, and from Tim Goodchild's evocative sets and costumes.
Indeed, this is the best production Chichester has offered in years.
The Sunday Express (London), 3 May 1987, p.19
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Poetic love tale is real delight
By Showpage Editor Colin Clark
A FINE, excellently-cast production of Robert and Elizabeth delighted last Wednesday's Chichester Festival Theatre audience.
This work by Ronald Millar and Ron Grainer may present a strange amalgam of mood and musical style but, with Chichester’s outstanding cast, its romance, passion, comedy and even farce are tackled with equal aplomb.
The production marks a stunning Chichester debut for new singing sensation Jacinta Mulcahy impressing equally in powerful near-operatic numbers and tender duets in her role of Henrietta opposite Mark Wynter as Robert Browning. [sic – the critic curiously confused Gaynor Miles in the co-title lead role of Elizabeth with that of Miss Mulcahy in the secondary role of her sister, Henrietta].
Mark’s performance as the exuberant yet gentle poet shows a vocal and acting strength surpassing his already long list of stage musical credits. This, however, is a Stewart Trotter-directed production which enjoys vocal strength in depth with faultless performances by Elizabeth's six brothers and two sisters.
Ultimately, the production's undoubted success owes much to John Savident, direct from Phantom of The Opera, in a superb portrayal of a tyrannical and sadistic Edward Moulton-Barrett.
Robert and Elizabeth continues in repertory until June 27.
Worthing Gazette & Herald, Friday, 8 May 1987, p.26
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The Chichester season has opened with two smart fairy-tales of London, legends of the West End. The open stage of the Festival Theatre seems cut out to represent the Octagon Room of the Chilterns' place in Grosvenor Square, where An Ideal Husband begins...
A more surprising Chichester revival is Robert and Elizabeth, tunefully opening "on a corner of Wimpole Street and Cavendish Square." The verses of Robert and Elizabeth Browning are not often set to music: they are too crunchy and chunky. But some singable Browning lines are included in this pleasant libretto: "Escape me never" and "All’s right with the world."
Two Ronnies, Millar and Grainer, created this show in 1964 from a play of 1930 by Rudolph Besier, "The Barretts of Wimpole Street." Besier was old enough to remember the era of the Victorian heavy father—and modern enough to blame Elizabeth's possessive father for incestuous feelings. This heavy matter is not allowed to overwhelm the light musical, though John Savident is powerful enough to do it justice, and he does look rather like Cedric Hardwicke, the original Mr Barrett.
Stewart Trotter, the director, has set up a proscenium stage in the midst of the Chichester expanse, as if his show was being performed by strolling players, but it opens up with a Victorian railway train to take Robert and Elizabeth off to sunny Florence. We enjoyed the powerful voice of Gaynor Miles as the bedridden Elizabeth and the robust operetta style of Mark Wynter as Robert: he used to be merely a famous pop star. All the performers can sing well and the band does justice to Grainer's melodious score.
D.A.N. JONES
Sunday Telegraph (London), 17 May 1987, p.17
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In the Press
MILES AHEAD
By SUE WILKINSON
SITTING pretty is Gaynor Miles — so far, the find of Chichester Festival Theatre summer season. With a strong soprano voice and fine acting talent, the Southend star has charmed both critics and audiences with her role in the musical “Robert and Elizabeth”. She has transformed the traditional picture of poetess Elizabeth Barrett as a frail and frightened female into a memorable madam of the musical stage. The love story between Elizabeth and the robust and romantic Robert Browning was chronicled in a stage play and later the film “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” in which Charles Laughton gave a terrifying performance as the tyrannical patriarch. in the Chichester version emphasis is on fun and comedy but with no attempts to gloss over the seamier almost incestuous relationship which existed between Elizabeth and her father.
Frailty
But to arrive at the slick, enjoyable end product Gaynor has worked and thought hard to make Elizabeth Barrett come alive from the score.
"I have to be stronger on stage. You cannot get away with that kind of frailty”, she says. "She can be irritating because you feel ‘Why doesn't she get up and go?’ But you have to realize it is 1845 and take into consideration the oppression of her father. She also genuinely believed she was dying and she loved her father.
“It was a very hard decision to make and create the scandal,” explains Gaynor. “It is certainly the most difficult character I have had to portray, simply because she can come across so negatively."
In the second half Gaynor is helped by some superb music, particularly a powerful soliloquy. On the opening night she had the audience hanging on her every word and carried them on to a heartwarming finale.
Gaynor managed to stun the audience into attention and from then on it did not waver.
In act two Elizabeth is desperate to get well. The song tells of defiance, woman, man, it exalts love and denies everything her father has taught her.
Gaynor intensively researched the part. The characters are based loosely on real life — it is musical comedy not biography.
“I read their letters and went to the house in Florence where they lived after they eloped. It was not really helpful with the interpretation but it was interesting to know something about the real characters.”
Although the two women are decades and cultures apart Gaynor does not think there is that much difference between them.
“We are both feminists, believing in equality. When she was younger she was very unorthodox and tearaway. We are both interested in English Literature and during my university degree I made a special study of Browning.”
Gaynor’s unorthodoxy is clear in the way she entered life on the stage. “I drifted into it," she says, after jobs editing a railway engineers' magazine and teaching English.
She says she was very academic and embarked on a degree course with thoughts of being a journalist or politician.
Training was done privately and part-time at a well known drama and music school which she is reluctant to name.
"It did not like part-timers saying where they trained so now I am here I don't think I will, ” she says with a hint of comic wickedness.
Barriers
Singing in a restaurant earned her an Equity card and since then she has played Mabel in “The Pirates of Penzance" in the West End and the famous soprano role of Sombra in a revival of “The Arcadians” at Exeter.
Subsequent roles include Jenny Lind in a USA production of “Barnum” and Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute.”
But she does not want to be pigeon-holed as an opera singer. “I like both acting and singing. In opera the voice is the most important thing, dramatic interpretation is second.
“I would like to broaden my sphere of performance and take on straight acting. One should not be pigeon holed and I want to break down the barriers and go into other fields of performance.”
Her mother, from whom Gaynor says she inherited her singing voice, wants her to play Carmen but she says her voice is wrong.
But who knows where the girl from Southend, which she denies is all cockle-shells and winkle stalls, candy floss and kiss-me-quick-hats, will turn up next, or in which guise.
Portsmouth Evening News, Saturday, 30 May 1987, p.20
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Musical Theatre historian Kurt Gänzl recalls the Chichester revival
(recorded for Musical Theatre Melodies hosted by Rob Morrison broadcast on Melbourne community radio 96.5 Inner FM on 13 November 2012.)
English stage Director (and Shakespearean scholar) Stewart Trotter recalls the Chichester revival
