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[H]ere's the guy behind one of the most successful British musicals of all
time, Oliver! Lionel Bart was a lovely man. I was too young to have
partied with him in his LSD-fuelled heyday, but I got to know him as a
soft-spoken cautious sipper of mineral water at London dinner parties
during his long recovery from excess. As he put it to me, he did so many
drugs in the Sixties that he had no memory of the Seventies: he'd passed
out at a party in 1969 and came round circa 1982. "Did I miss anything?"
he asked. "Not really," I said. When he died, The Daily Telegraph reported
that he'd been "romantically linked with Judy Garland", a sweet
formulation that told you everything about where Lionel's real interests
lay. Oliver! is perfect summer theatre: his songs are fun to listen to,
but even more fun to sing. The only blemish on the show is that, ever
since the impeachment era, I associate it with Monica Lewinsky and her
first "lover" (and first married man) Andy Bleiler, her drama teacher --
or, as he prefers to be styled, "drama technician". His technique was
certainly impressive. They had sex in the lighting booth during a
rehearsal for the Beverly Hills High production of Oliver!, as the Artful
Dodger and his Cockney lads chirruped away on stage:

   Consider yourself at 'ome!
   Consider yourself part of the furniture!

There's a song for Monica: Andy Bleiler considered 'imself at 'ome; Bill
Clinton, the most artful dodger of all, considered her part of the
furniture. The following thoughts on Lionel Bart and his show come from
Broadway Babies Say Goodnight:

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Oliver's twist

American musicals celebrate America, both the city that doesn't sleep and
the corn of Kansas in August. But British musicals are about cats and
trains and deformed creatures who live in the Paris sewers. For all they
tell us about Britain, they might as well come from outer space. In fact,
one of them did: Dave Clark's Time (1986), with its intergalactic supreme
court judge played by a giant hologram of Laurence Olivier's head with one
nostril in the wrong place. But, twenty years Before Cats, for a few
seasons, there was a distinctive native strain of contemporary London
musical, written by a man who filled the stage with British types -- Blitz
babies from the forties, coffee-house spivs of the fifties. He blazed like
a comet across the West End, and then just as spectacularly fell to earth.
Yes, that's a cliche. But it always used to be the Americans who
self-destructed, who couldn't cope with the price of fame. This guy gave
Britain one of its own.

'I don't get a penny piece from Oliver!, you know,' says Lionel Bart, as
we part on the pavement. So why then is he on his way to yet another
rehearsal for yet another production?

'Well, it's my name on it, isn't it?'

Yes, it is -- technically. But, just as Oliver! isn't his any more, so
neither is the name. It's hard to connect the gentle, genial stage thug, a
fellow who looks like he's the fourth crap shooter from the left in Guys
and Dolls, with the mythic figure conjured by the words 'Lionel Bart'. He
wrote the most successful British musical Before Cats, but, instead of
forming a limited liability company and winning the Queen's Award for
Exports, he descended bumpily through a series of limp exclamatory
ejaculations -- from Oliver! through Blitz! to Twang!!, an exclamation
mark too far. By the late sixties, he'd ended up losing the rights to his
most profitable work. Lionel! was supposed to be the story of Britain's
Irving Berlin but somewhere along the way it turned into Britain's Fats
Waller -- an irresistible tale of artistic dissipation, of valuable
copyrights squandered to sustain extravagant appetites. He was always
better at show than business, the product of an era when celebrity meant
partying the night away with Princess Margaret, rather than hiring Prince
Edward to make the tea. He used to have the swankiest pad in town, but now
he lives in a small flat above a shop in Acton, West London. It's the sort
of modest accommodation to which first-time buyers might aspire after
seeing Bart's charming 'Abbey Endings' commercial for the Abbey National
Building Society, In the years since his fall, announcements of Bart's
comeback have peppered the newspaper diaries, but so far only this -- one
30-second TV spot -- has come to fruition.

Meanwhile, Oliver! goes on and on -- from Wimbledon (1960) to the West End
to Broadway (1963) back to the British stage (1967) and screen (1968) and
stage again (1977, 1983) back to New York (1984) and Sadler's Wells (1990)
and the London Palladium (1994). It's one of the most solid and revivable
musicals ever written -- all the more remarkable because, in a
collaborative medium which encourages specialization, the book, music and
lyrics are all the work of one man. So is Frank Loesser's The Most Happy
Fella (1956) and Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1957), but neither
approaches the enduring success of Bart's show -- a British hit in
Broadway's Golden Age. Like Loesser, he'd written pop and film songs, but
Loesser's apprenticeship had begun twenty years before Guys and Dolls and
The Most Happy Fella. Bart, a London art school boy, had started out in a
skiffle group in 1956, written some songs for its lead singer Tommy
Steele, and then, in the space of a year, wrote three musicals -- two for
Joan Littlewood's semi-improvisatory Theatre Workshop in the East End and
then Oliver! It's the efficiency of Oliver! which surprises: like Disney
with Kipling's Jungle Book, it takes Dickens' source material and recasts
it in another form, consistent in its own tone.

The secret of the show's professionalism is an elusive one. When I called
to discuss the work, Bart wanted to meet in the Royal Court Hotel, which
for some reason I'd assumed to be an old haunt of his from the swingin'
sixties. As it turns out, he's been here only once before -- one summer,
when he was passing by and suddenly felt the need to duck out of a
heatwave. 'It was air-conditioned, which a lot of these places aren't. But
I don't suppose,' he adds, looking through the window at the grey wintry
morning, 'that air-conditioning's a very big consideration at this time of
year.'

I'm not really that interested in the air-conditioning, but Bart has an
endearing habit of derailing the thrusting, probing questions -- or at any
rate re-routing them down unexpected branch lines. What, I wonder, were
his major influences?

'I was very influenced,' he says in his even soft-spoken Cockney, 'by Sam
Wanamaker with his tight pants, and those elastic-sided boots. Ultimately,
they became Beatle boots. But I started it, in terms of making it a bit
more fashionable.'

Actually, Bart's present wardrobe is pretty nineties. But, metaphorically,
our entire conversation comes fully kitted out in Beatle boots and Nehru
jackets. It's not just the references to John and Paul and Mick and Brian
Epstein's assistant. He got so spaced out in the late sixties that the
seventies and eighties seem barely to have impinged on him. Ask him about
recent shows, and he pauses thoughtfully before citing Kander and Ebb's
Chicago, which opened in 1975 but which he only caught up with at a
nineties charity performance. Doesn't he feel a bit of a Rip Van Winkle?

'No,' he says, cautiously sipping his mineral water, 'because, frankly, I
look at Les Miserables and all John Napier's other sets, and I see Sean
Kenny's influence. The only thing that seems to have changed is the
merchandising, and the ability to put on 30 productions of the same show
around the world.'

He seems bemused by the mega-musicals, but not intimidated by them. 'The
form is just a word, isn't it? Opera, operetta, melodrama . . . they're
just words. We can change the words, so we can change the form. When I
started, there was this thing called "living newspaper", which Ewan
MacColl was doing, based on a Czechoslovakian art form. That doesn't
happen much today, but it was all the go for a while. Fings Ain't Wot They
Used T'Be . . . Somebody said it was Guys and Dolls with its flies undone,
but what it finally was was a play with songs, not a plotted musical.'

All the same, in an age when show composers talk about recitative and
leitmotifs and extended musical scenes, there's something to be said for
songs. 'I have fancied the sung-through musical,' he says, 'but in my case
it would be slightly pretentious. I'm not a composer, I just make tunes
and sing them, and I sing harmonies, and some of my chord progressions are
not logical, but often they work. For Oliver!, I did Tom and Jerry music.
I thought in terms of people's walks. The Oliver! theme was really the
Beadle's walk, a kind of dum-de-dum

   O-li-ver! O-li-ver!

'Fagin's music was like a Jewish mother-hen clucking away. But I don't
want to get high-falutin' about it. Music is important -- fair enough. But
just to have some kind of drab tune fitted on to even more drab dialogue
seems rather pointless to me.'

Since Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern 75 years ago, musical comedy writers have
felt obliged to have theories about their work. But there's something
rather admirable about the way Bart just seems to do what he feels like.
The lyricist Gene Lees, in the introduction to his rhyming dictionary,
chastises him for the first line of 'Where Is Love?', where a one-syllable
word is stretched over five notes:

   Wh-e-e-e-ere is love?

Ira Gershwin wouldn't have done it, nor Cole Porter, though Otto Harbach
and Oscar Hammerstein were happy to make 'you' a seven-syllable word in
Rose-Marie:

   When I'm calling you-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo

Still, it seems less odd at the end of a line. Lees reckons Bart should
have tried something like 'Someone tell me where is love?', but Bart isn't
exactly perturbed by the criticism. 'He should hear Johnny Mathis' cover
version: at the end of it, he makes about 20 syllables out of the word. I
mean, what's he going to do? Start giving Handel a hard time for the
Messiah? Nah, I did it because it just felt okay.'

As one of the few self-contained songwriters, Baa usually produces words
and music which fit together with a deceptive ease:

   Got to do my best to please her
   Just 'cause she's a
   Livin' Doll...

You won't find 'pleezer'/'sheezer' in any rhyming dictionary, yet it sings
as naturally as (to use Bart's own model) walking. 'But, if the rhyme gets
too clever, if it obtrudes on the situation, I have to write that out. Of
course, not long after that we had the Beatles and a lot of the pop things
which had stature, but not because they rhymed brilliantly. Noel Coward
gave me a rhyming dictionary and he wrote on the front of it...

   Do not let this aid to rhyming
   Bitch your talent or your timing.

'You can hear him saying that. But I use it only as a very last resort. I
like to get behind the character I wrote a song in Maggie May which is a
lullaby, ostensibly being written there and then by this hooker to her
sleeping lover. Around this time, Richard Rodgers wanted me to be his
partner, and he looked at this lyric and said, "It works . . . but there
are impure rhymes." I said, "That's because she's not a very good lyric
writer."'

It's a neat defence, if not entirely convincing. But it also illustrates
the problems faced by Bart in trying to straddle two worlds that were
drifting apart. He was clearly flattered to be one of the few musical
comedy boys accepted by the rockers: 'John [Lennon] used to say, "I hate
that ding! cue for a song. But your stuff's not so bad. You don't see the
join so much."

But, ah, what might have been: Rodgers and Bart has a certain ring to it,
even if at first sight it looks like a spelling error. 'It could be
argued,' he concedes, 'that instead of being the doyen of flower power I'd
have been a lot cleverer to have stayed in my metier, writing for the
theatre and doing the odd movie score. But I was trying to be all things
to all children.'

Today, he seems more aware of his limitations. 'One of the things I'm
thinking about doing is a piece about contemporary London, set in front of
the Festival Hall, and developing into some kind of fantasy with the
homeless. But, if it involves certain music that I'm not into writing,
like hip-hop or whatever, then I'll get another writer in.'

So Bart, composer/lyricist/librettist/director of Blitz!, didn't feel like
writing his own hip-hop?

'Well, I'm not doing a lot of hip-hopping myself these days. In fact, I've
got to the point now where strobe lighting really does me up. I can't
handle it, I really go weird.'

Will it come to anything? Bart has several projects he's been toying with
for a long time -- Quasimodo, La Strada -- but there are those who wonder
whether he really wants to get back into a full-blown musical. He
certainly has a knack of knowing which musicals not to do -- disengaging
early, for example, from both Winnie and Budgie, two West End flops of
1988. He insists, though, that he's up for it and he's got as far as
lunching with Cameron Mackintosh, who's wound up owning most of Bart's
rights in Oliver!

'Of all the people I know in this business who have had ups and downs,'
says Mackintosh, 'Lionel is the least bitter man I have ever come across.
He regrets it but, considering that everyone else has made millions out of
his creations, he's never been sour; never been vindictive.'

The houses in London, New York, Malibu, the castle in Tangiers were blown
in a rash of bad business decisions and a haze of 'experiments with LSD'.
Staying with Princess Margaret in Mustique, Bart staggered in for
breakfast late one afternoon and found Her Royal Highness in specs poring
over the accounts ledgers. 'Oy, wot you doin'?' said Bart.

'I'm doing my books,' said the Princess. 'If you'd done your books, you
wouldn't be in the mess you're in, you silly bugger.' Bart's West End
heirs would take her advice.

'We had too much,' says Bart. 'Sometimes -- often -- limitations can be
your best asset.'

'His blending of recitative and dialogue and song was way ahead,' says
Mackintosh. 'He ranks alongside Frank Loesser as a naturally gifted
musical theatre writer. Go and see Blitz! and Maggie May and you see what
an extraordinary gift he had. But his fame and his power were so great
that the method of theatre he had -- which was really working with a bunch
of mates and throwing it together -- he outgrew that. And he didn't have
people who could keep him at it. He needed a really strong producer and a
really strong director. I hope he finds the collaborators he needs to
finish the work.'

'Cameron always said, "When you're ready, Lionel, I'll be here." Well, I
am, but he's not. He said, "Look, Lionel, while you were out there doing
whatever you were doing with those 12 years, I've acquired other loyal
ties." I'm sure if I did something new he'd change his mind,' reflects
Bart, 'but I don't seem to be getting a great deal of encouragement.
Cameron said, "Oh, we've got to have a script on the table." I said, "But
with that formula you'd have turned down Oliver!" We had six songs when we
went into rehearsal. I love spontaneity and I don't think things should
take five years.'

--- Peter T. Chattaway ---------------------------
peter@... ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
   claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee

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