Dudley Moore Little Miss Britten

Dudley Moore Little Miss Britten
Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. It played in London's West End and then in America, both on tour and on New York's Broadway in the early 1960s. Hugely successful, it is widely regarded as seminal to the rise of satirical comedy in 1960s Britain.

   

 
 

 

 

 Dudley Moore (piano), Pete McGurk (bass), Chris Karan (drums)

 

 

 

In this clip from the 1950's-60s British comedy group "Beyond the Fringe," Dudley Moore plays a very funny but also very musically well-done parody of a Beethoven Piano Sonata, using the famous whistling tune from "Bridge Over the River Kwai" as a thematic subject. 

 

 

The show was conceived in 1960 by an Oxford graduate, Robert Ponsonby, artistic director for the Edinburgh International Festival, with the idea of bringing together the best of revues by the Cambridge Footlights and The Oxford Revue, which had both transferred to Edinburgh for short runs in previous years. John Bassett, a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, who was Ponsonby's assistant, recommended Dudley Moore, his jazz bandmate and a rising cabaret talent. Moore in turn recommended Alan Bennett, who had had a hit at Edinburgh a few years before. Bassett also chose Jonathan Miller, who had been a Footlights star in 1957. Miller recommended Cook.

Bennett and Miller were already pursuing careers in academia and medicine respectively, but Cook had an agent, having written a West End revue for Kenneth Williams. Cook's agent negotiated a higher weekly fee for him, but by the time the agent's fee was deducted Cook actually earned less than the others from the initial run.

The majority of the sketches were by Cook and were largely based on material written for other revues. Among the entirely new material were "The End of the World", "TVPM" and "The Great Train Robbery". Cook and Moore revived some of the sketches on their later television and stage shows, most famously the two-hander "One Leg Too Few".

The show's runs in Edinburgh and the provinces had a lukewarm response, but when the revue transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London, in a revised production by Donald Albery and William Donaldson, it became a sensation, thanks in some part to a favourable review by Kenneth Tynan.[1]

In 1962 the show transferred to the John Golden Theatre in New York, with its original cast. President John F. Kennedy attended a performance on 10 February 1963. The show continued in New York, with most of the original cast, until 1964, when Paxton Whitehead replaced Miller, while the London version continued with a different cast until 1966.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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