Born on this day 100 years ago, in South Africa, was Herbert Kretzmer, a man with an unusual combination of careers – journalist and songwriter. In the latter capacity, he co-wrote the best forgotten Peter Sellers/Sophie Loren song, 'Goodness Gracious Me', wrote the English lyrics for 'She' and 'Yesterday When I Was Young', and the book and lyrics for the musical Our Man Crichton (based on J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton), among other things. In the former capacity, Kretzmer was a feature writer on the Daily Sketch, and a profile writer on The Sunday Dispatch and the Daily Express, where he also served as drama critic. It was while he was working as a TV critic at the paper that pays my pension, the Daily Mail, that he had his big break – just about the biggest break any lyricist could hope for: he was commissioned by Cameron Mackintosh to write the English language version of a musical called, after its unlikely literary source, Les Misérables, a show which became, for reasons not readily apparent to me, a gigantic, a stratospheric hit. In a few days' time it will have completed a West End run of 40 years, and there's no sign of it ever ending. Kretzmer retired from journalism a wealthy man. He is believed to have made something in the region of £15 million in royalties from his big break. That's big.
Good for him. Yet I sat through a high school production of Les Misérables once (at a girls' high school, so that I think of it as Les Ms.), and remember about two lines of the songs. Somehow they didn't stick.
ReplyDeleteThanks George – and the songs are indeed eminently forgettable. The show was expected to bomb and was duly slaughtered by the critics – but apparently that critical pile-on was what first got The Public interested, and the rest is box-office history.
ReplyDelete