#as a theatre enthusiast i have never heard of twang!! and now i am so so curious (via @theragamuffininitiative)
So. Lionel Bart is pretty much exclusively remembered now for Oliver! which was a huge success in its time. It's not the only thing he ever did (though his artist page on Spotify would probably want you to think that).
In the summer of 1965, Bart announced that he and his longtime collaborator, director Joan Littlewood, were going to collaborate once more on a Robin Hood musical called Twang!!. Everybody seems to have thought this was a great idea.
Littlewood and Bart seem to have had very different ideas for what the show was supposed to be.
Littlewood was very experimental. She was not afraid of improvising or rewriting shows on the fly. Littlewood was also familiar with Medieval and Early Modern English drama, which was much more improvisational than contemporary English drama. I think this matters, because Robin Hood has a long history within Medieval and Early Modern English theatre. Maybe Littlewood wanted to lean into that history, because by all accounts she was playing very fast-and-loose with the book, and was encouraging improv.
And Bart wasn't unfamiliar with Littlewood's directing style at all! The two were both active in London's Marxist theatre scene, and had worked together previously on Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, which was also very improv-heavy. (iirc they also worked together on Blitz!, but I can't recall.)
But I'm beginning to suspect Bart wanted something more structured that riffed on more contemporary Robin Hood media. Like, this is the guy whose main knowledge of Oliver Twist was from a movie adaptation he'd watched once. It's not entirely impossible he'd read the early plays, but the more research I do, the less I think he'd personally read any early sources. I don't think he was entirely opposed to improvising, but I think Littlewood wanted something much freer than Bart envisioned.
In any case, news reports of the time describe how their two visions kept clashing. Bart once griped to the press that the musical was more Littlewood's than it was his.
Everything came to a head on opening night December of 1965, when Littlewood just. walked out. mid-performance.
(At the time Littlewood insisted she didn't QUIT quit, but for all intents and purposes, she was gone.)
The musical bombed. Critics had no idea what to make of the show at all. Bart called in Burt Shevelove (a librettist and playwright whose name you may recognize from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, among other things) to help him fix the show, but it was to no avail.
The show ran for less than a month. Bart insisted his career was not over, but in the end, it effectively was.
So, you may be asking, is Twang!! any good?
I'd say no, not really. By all accounts, there's not enough of a story to string any of the music together. Having listened to all of the music quite a bit while researching it, and having listened to a decent chunk of Bart's catalogue, it's decidedly not Bart's best work.
That said, I do think some of the reviews of the time were marred by classism.
For more background, Bart was from London's East End. He grew up in a relatively poor Jewish family. Bart cut his artistic teeth on Yiddish theatre and the English music hall tradition. If you've listened to a lot of Bart's work, these influences are noticeable, especially the latter (even in his non-musical theatre stuff! I think you can spot English music hall humor in some of his rock-n-roll lyrics!).
Before Twang!!, there's virtually no mention of this. After Twang!!'s disastrous premiere, British newspapers regularly bring up Bart's background as the "son of a Cockney tailor". Before that, he was the self-taught songwriter behind the enormously successful Oliver!. It's like people couldn't help but comment on Bart's working-class background.
That classism even infiltrates some of the reviews. The character Delphina is derided as a "chirrupy Cockney sparrow" who "carn't sing" on account of her accent. The show itself got called "Cockney Camelot" (which I think is a riotous comparison, since Camelot and Twang!! have heck all to do with each other, barring both being set in the Medieval period).
So while I would hardly defend Twang!! as good, and while I wouldn't even say I like it, I would at least offer the defense that a lot of the negative reviews were classist and uncalled for.
In a lot of respects, it's not all that different tonally than A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, which I mentioned earlier. They're both bawdy 1960s musicals that are grounded in older theatrical traditions (Plautus in Forum's case).
That said, if you're looking for something that has anything to do with the Robin Hood stories we all know, though, Twang!! is absolutely not it. A lot of the characters are there (Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian), but its sources are pretty obscure.
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