1990: Someone Like You King Bernadette

‘Blood and No Guts’ and ‘Dixieland Blues’ were two of the discouraging headlines after the first night of yet one more ‘musical love story’, Someone Like You (Strand Theatre, 22 March 1990; 44). It would have stood very little chance of reaching the stage without the involvement of Petula Clark as both star and writer. Clark was inspired to write it after visiting the Civil War battlefields around West Virginia; co-inspired, in fact, as she credited Ferdie Pacheco with sharing the original idea. Some of the music had already been composed by the time she teamed up with lyricist Dee Shipman, but by the time the show premiered in October 1989 at Cambridge Arts Theatre it had been through a pretty rough war of its own. Its ace card was Clark in the lead role of English nurse Abigail, searching for her missing husband and falling in love with ‘The Major’ (the show's other main asset, Dave Willetts). With a cast of twelve and one static (and, for him, quite dull) set by Tim Goodchild, and an eight-piece band, Someone Like You was taken up for London by producer Bill Kenwright. Novelist Fay Weldon was brought in on the book to create a female triumvirate of writers, altering the tone of the show by turning it into some sort of allegory of Greek tragedy. Once in rehearsal at Cambridge, director Robin Midgley rewrote it with (and without) Weldon. Midgley's apparently autocratic manner towards Clark and the company was an unsettling influence. As the show headed for London, the project was taken over by Harold Fielding, about to be brought down by his own financial problems.

Willetts thought that the show might have suffered from so strong a feminine basis. Argumentative rehearsals did not help. Along the way, it slipped away from the piece it had started out as, something supposedly life-enhancing about how the human spirit overcomes devastation. Someone Like You got stuck with being worthy and took a turn for the worse by being dreary, and nothing – its songs, its set, its stars – could pull it back. It was ‘ponderous entertainment’; it had ‘an execrable script and tuneless songs’.