Swallowing oysters in the cloisters…

A friend wrote the other day to point out that, “When Betty Blue Eyes and Shrek starts performances, there will be six theatres - Drury Lane, Duchess, Novello, Aldwych, Lyceum and Savoy, all within spitting distance of each other — each showing a musical based on a movie.” The new titles, of course, join the existing roster of Love Story, Dirty Dancing, The Lion King and Legally Blonde. But then audiences do not so much know what they like (if producers knew what that was, there would never be flops) as like what they already know.

As a result, it’s a bold producer who tries something genuinely new; so today I’d like to applaud a quartet of them, Neil Eckersley and Paul Spicer at Speckulation Entertainment and Simon Greiff and Phil Sykes at SimG Productions, who are at least trying to stretch the template of what he watch and listen to. Admittedly they are only promoting single night events, not continuous runs, to showcase new work, but we have to start somewhere. Neil and Paul are offering a showcase to Lance Horne at the Garrick Theatre this coming Sunday, in which Horne’s songs will be performed by a stunning line-up that includes Alan Cumming, Julie Atherton, Lucy May Barker, Alexandra Silber, Hannah Waddingham, Emma Williams and Norm Lewis.

And Simon and Phil are producing The Songs of Bobby Cronin, an as yet unheralded American composer, whose work will be performed on February 27 at the New Players Theatre by a cast that includes the London return of Caroline Sheen (currently touring the US in the title role of Mary Poppins), Sally Ann Triplett, Leanne Jones, Samantha Barks and the dashing Hadley Fraser.

Both Horne and Cronin are American writers, of course; what about the Brits? One organisation trying to do something new is Mercury Musical Developments (MMD), and to declare an interest, I am on the board of it. Last weekend and this they have teamed up with Carrie Cracknell at the Gate Theatre to present Beyond the Gate, a group musical revue written by members that include Craig Adams, Don Black, Dougal Irvine, Frank Lazarus, Richard Stilgoe and Tim Sutton, with a cast that includes David Burt, rising star Stuart Matthew Price and Cath Whitefield.

As that line-up of writing names suggests - including Oscar winners like Don Black, and Tony nominees Lazarus and Stilgoe - we’ve got the writers, and there’s a whole new generation, too, including Irvine (whose Departure Lounge was seen at Waterloo East late last year), to push the form forward. But we need to actually see and hear the work, or where will the next Salad Days come from?

But talking of which, the Riverside Studios is currently hosting an effervescent take on that Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds classic - a show that famously inspired an eight-year-old Cameron Mackintosh towards the path he eventually took. (He is quoted in the programme saying that, taken backstage after the show and shown “how the flying saucer worked, how the scenery came in and out, how, indeed, Minnie the magic piano was a dummy piano,” he remembers “looking at it all rather solemnly, as you do when you’re a young person trying to make up your mind, and thinking this is what I am going to do when I grow up. It was to be the defining moment of my life. Within a few months I’d worked out that the job I wanted to do was called a producer. I thought, yes, I can do this.”)

My own relationship with Salad Days has never been quite as inspiring - I remember an open air summer student production at Downing College, Cambridge, while I was an undergraduate myself, and it all seemed irretrievably silly and dated. But last night at Riverside I got the point at last: there’s hardly a musical more daft and demented, bonkers and brilliant, and it has been sparklingly reinvented with sincerity, innocence and absurdity held in perfect balance, to make it fresh all over again.