Gay's the Word (musical): History and Key Facts

Gay's the Word is a musical with book and music by Ivor Novello and lyrics by Alan Melville. The musical is a backstage comedy that parodies Novello's own swashbuckling Ruritanian romance plots. The story centres on Gay Daventry, a bankrupt operetta producer who opens a drama school at her country house. This also turns out to be unsuccessful, but it leads to a theatrical comeback for Gay.

The musical premiered at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, England, on 17 October 1950. It transferred to the Saville Theatre in London, opening there on 16 February 1951, where it ran for 504 performances and starred Cicely Courtneidge as Gay, Lizbeth Webb as Linda, and Thorley Walters. While it embraced the new style of musical theatre from America, it also contained traditional British humour for Courtneidge and glamorous soprano solos for Webb. The British Theatre Guide concludes: "The musical was never that good and without [Courtneidge] it would most certainly have failed. But with her, thanks to her indefatigable vitality, the show was a hit." This was Ivor Novello's last musical, and he died a month after it opened, aged 58.

The musical was revived in 2012 at the Finborough Theatre, London, with a book revised by Richard Stirling, directed and choreographed by Stewart Nicholls.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Gay's the Word (musical) by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.