’Ere’s ’Olloway
Stanley Holloway
with the Loverly Quartet
James Morris
Herb Surface
Glenn Kezer
Reid Shelton
Orchestra conducted by Arthur Lief
- Let’s All Go Down the Strand!
- “My Word! You Do Look Queer!”
- Hello! Hello! Who's Your Lady Friend?
- The Little Shirt My Mother Made for Me
- You Can Do a Lot of Things at the Seaside
- I Live in Trafalgar Square
- And Yet I Don't Know!
- I’m Shy, Mary Ellen, I’m Shy
- Oh, I Must Go Home To-night!
- Sweeney Todd the Barber
- Evings’s Dorg ’Ospital
- The Spaniard That Blighted My Life
- My Old Dutch
- Harry Champion Medley:
- A Little Bit of Cucumber
- I’m Henery the Eighth, I am!
- “Any Old Iron?”
- It’ll Be All the Same
■ Perhaps there is nothing so completely winning as a thorough-going seallawag. At any rate, when the Mark Hellinger Theater opened its doors the night of March 15, 1956, to the first-nighters come to view the now. much-heralded My Fair Lady, it was all but preordained that honors for pure comedy were in store for Stanley Holloway. As Eliza: Doolittle's unrepentant father, Alfred P., Mr. Holloway has a ball. The part seems made to order for him and his two numbers, With a Little Bit of Luck and Get Me to the Church on Time, are all-out broadsides of undiluted frolic.
But "the part seems made to order for him" is a phrase people have been tying to Mr. Holloway's name for some time, and with a score of different parts in mind. There was Bottom in the lavish Old Vie production: of A Midsummer Night's Dream, seen at the Met in New York in 1954. There were roles in the screen comedies Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob, Brief Encounter, This Happy Breed, Major Barbara, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, and as henchman to Claude Rains' Caesar in the film version of Caesar and Cleopatra.
He is widely famed as a humorous monolo- gist and creator of such improbable but enchanting characters as his Sam Small, the Lancashire lad, and Albert, child lion. fodder, whom he recently trotted out for viewers of the Maurice Chevalier show.
■ Behind this façade of jaded roguery and obvious talent is a gracious and easily witty man with a longish history of perfecting his craft. Born the son of a London law clerk, he gravitated to musical doings at about age ten. His summary of subsequent events to The New Yorker magazine ran more or less as follows:
"I was really an alto, but they called me a soprano, and I gave concerts in seaside resorts and town halls, singing The Lost Chord' and other popular ballads... I earned two pounds a week and felt extremely inde- pendent. Once I'd grown up and become a baritone, I started singing in what we call concert parties, which are rather like revues. I saved up enough money to go to Milan and study to be an opera singer. Hadn't been there six months when the First World War broke out. I spent four years in the P.B.I. poor bloody infantry, that is. After the war, more concert parties and some musical comedies...I put in ten years in the music halls the equivalent of your vaudeville. Two turns a night, six nights a week. In 1921, I started making films. In 1935, I moved to the country, to a place in Buckinghamshire. I just relax and putter."
The thirty years or so that he has spent brightening the London theatrical scene may have fixed his point of view a bit but they haven't dented his rare enthusiasm. Faced with a non-replaceable role in a show that is likely to run forever, he brings to it, night after night, a freshness that is as rare as it is rewarding. "I keep experimenting with my makeup," he remarked to The New Yorker. "It's pretty much what I used to put on in my music hall days. There are of course, certain traditions of makeup for comedy roles. In this case, Doolittle being a bit of a boozer, I put red on my nose. Nowadays, most comics won't touch red. They prefer, heaven knows why, to be clean-faced comics. I cling to what I remem- ber reading a long time ago in a book of instruction for actors. 'If the part be humor- ous, that old book said, 'a little bit of red should be applied to the nose.' Good advice then, good advice now."
■ The material he has chosen for this record is of the vintage of Pygmalion, the Shaw play on which My Fair Lady is formed. In other words, it is not unreasonable to suppose. that Alfred P. Doolittle might pay his "thrup- pence" to sit in the gallery and hear these. numbers sung on a music hall stage of 1910- 14 and then return to the pub and sing them for his cronies.
They are cockney songs, or songs with a cockney flavor, and are what Stanley Hollo- way calls "the tried and trusted material."
The composers and lyricists of these songs. are, for the most part, not well remembered. It is, instead, the comic singers who sang them that are connected with them in the memories of older folks yet about. For each song was written for a particular comedian and when he bought it, and paid for it, it was his, no one else's.
In the heyday of the comic singer there were many types, and so today there are left us many different kinds of songs. There was the Shy comedian, the Abbreviating comedian, the Quick-fire comic (one of whom was Harry Champion) and other varieties. They are all gone now, washed out in the flood of popular music for the mass market, but their contribution to the wit and gaiety of the world far outweighs their numbers, and will far outlast their day.
■ And so, without more ado, 'Ere's 'Olloway (with a little bit of red on the nose).
Let's All Go Down the Strand! is a music : hall romp that explains itself ("That's the place for fun and noise, all among the girls and boys") and contains that cherished line of English theater lore: "Have a banana."
"My Word! You Do Look Queer!" is a blow-by-blow account of the first day out of bed of a poor suffering fellow who is quickly edged toward Black's Undertaking Depot. and nearly into the box before he meets a true friend. This one is noted, too, for a wonderful bit of social advice, to wit: "Don't die in the pub, it looks bad."
Hello! Hello! Who's Your Lady Friend? is the revealing question asked our hero as he parades his wife before a cronie who re- marks rather rudely: "It isn't the girl I saw you with at Brighton!"
The Little Shirt My Mother Made for Me turns out to be a little less than adequate as a bathing suit.
You Can Do a Lot of Things at the Sea- side that you couldn't get away with in town, it says, and gives examples.
I Live in Trafalgar Square, remarks the man "Fountains and statues all over the place, and the metropole staring me right in the face." But then, if it's good enough for Nelson!....
And Yet I Don't Know! is the careful de- liberation of a man with just a touch of Scottish blood as to what might be best as a wedding present for his sister's daughter Elizabeth May.
I'm Shy, Mary Ellen, I'm Shy is the con- fession of a poor soul who may be too shy to kiss a girl but isn't so dumb when it comes to public bathing procedures.
Oh, I Must Go Home To-night! is the joyful begging-off of a confirmed companion of late hours for the special reason that causes Mr. Holloway to break up in compas- sionate sympathy.
Sweeney Todd the Barber details the de- lightfully gory life of S. Todd who kept shop before the invention of police and operated. to the benefit of many an orphan boy in mak- ing available the ingredients for a constant supply of hot meat pies that were all the tastier for having been so recently alive.
Evings's Dorg 'Ospital is a Cockney ac- count of how this master of the hounds. readies his charges for the hour of their joyful return to their mistresses..
The Spaniard That Blighted My Life is the sometimes familiar declaration of bloody intent towards one Alfonso Spigoni, bull- fighter, who shall die, diddly-i, die, die, die, die.
My Old Dutch is a pet name for a companion of forty years whose position is safe ("There ain't a lady livin' in the land as I'd swap. for my dear Old Dutch.")
Next is the Harry Champion medley, three. shafts of music hall gaiety called A Little Bit of Cucumber, I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am, and "Any Old Iron?" The middle one of these little wonders is explained by the lovely lines:
I got married to the widow next door. She'd been married seven times before. Every one was a Henery. She wouldn't have a Willie or a Sam!
No sad adieux for him, Mr. Holloway bids. us be of good cheer, It'll Be All the Same a hundred years hence. For though you and I won't be around to help kill the bottle, "Somebody else will be well in the cart."
Notes by CHARLES BURR
■ Stanley Holloway can also be heard en- joying himself, along with the Loverly Quar- tet, in Columbia's original cast show record of My Fair Lady, OL 5090.
■ Library of Congress catalog card number R56-1078 applies to this record. Cards may be purchased from Card Division, Library of Congress, Washington 25, D. C.
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