Secret Love

When I was younger, Doris Day’s music was always considered by the “cool” crowd, sickly sweet, sentimental and suitable only for mums and grannies. Her persona didn’t help - golden blonde, perky, wholesome and virginal even while playing opposite Rock Hudson in those risque and cheeky rom coms of the ’50s. You were not supposed to be a Doris Day fan if you were an aspiring intellectual back in the rough, tough ’80s.

But now that I’ve given up being pretentious, I can shout it out loud to the golden daffodils and whoever else might be listening: Once I had a secret love… and it was Doris Day.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one. The new musical about her life, Sentimental Journey, was packed the other night with Doris Day fans - mums and grannies, gay boys and us. The thing is, though, the mums are now women my age as opposed to women my mother’s age as they would have been back in my youth! It looked like they had all come for a girls’ night out, leaving hubby home with the kids - there were gaggles of them, singing and swaying along to the songs.

Like Mama Mia and other recent musicals created around pop songs, Doris’s songs were strung together like fairy lights along the narrative chain. They came every few minutes, taking us from her birth as Doris Kappelhoff in Cincinnatti, Ohio to her present day retirement in Carmel, California. While this “and then” form of narrative thrust did not make very good drama, there was hardly ever a pause between songs so you could just give in to the sway and caress of the songs. Sally Hughes, in the lead role, has Doris’s perky athletic build and approximates her crooning style of singing to a tee. The rest of the cast of four played all the other different characters with gusto and somehow managed to give the impression of a cast of hundreds! And they all did a variety of American accents pretty well. By the time Doris appeared in her Calamity Jane outfit and drove a wagon round the aisles, whip cracking away, the crowd was in heaven, gasping in delight at her outfit, clapping and yee-ha-ing away to the song…

I have to tell you about the theatre, too, which I think contributed to the lively, relaxed atmosphere. Usually, when you go to a show in London, you stick to the group or couple you’ve come with. But this evening, we found ourselves chatting to a number of people and got the sense that others were also making new friends. The Wilton Music Hall is the oldest music hall in the world. Built in the 1850s, it saw vaudeville style shows, classical music, opera and variety acts as well as the first can-can act in Victorian times. Over the years, it was a Methodist mission hall and a rag warehouse before being taken over by a charitable trust whose main objective is to restore it to its former glory. And it really does need restoring. The walls are peeling and decrepit and the decorative carvings are faded and chipped. There was a slightly Gothic air because of this in spite of the bright lights and cheerful crowd. And that was all part of the magical charm of the evening. Many people were here as much to experience the music hall as much as for the show itself!

Sentimental Journey is on at the Wilton Music Hall until Sunday 04 April 2010.

Photos:
Doris Day, thanks to Little Blog Too
Poster, thanks to Wilton Music Hall website
Wilton Music Hall, thanks to Tower Hamlets Archive, via NZorgan.com