Biography

"More like into the red", wrote one critic, after attending the opening night of this musical drama on 23 November 1994 at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. Another scribe remarked on "the wild courage it takes to create a West End musical in which America's atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, and a terminal case of radiation sickness are the catalysts for catastrophe." The brave (or foolhardy) person who conceived this epic and wrote the sung-through score, was Tokura Shun-Ichi, one of Japan's leading composers of contemporary music. Paul Sand, the British rock musician-turned composer, lyricist, and director, was responsible for the libretto. His story concerns Father Marshall (James Graeme), a Boston Roman Catholic priest, whose wartime memories comes flooding back to him when he receives a request from the Japanese Dr. Akizuki (Michael McCarthy) to speak at his Boston church on the 25th anniversary commemoration of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. As a young American GI in Japan after the war, Marshall (Greg Ellis) had married a local girl, Hideko (Meredith Braun), who died of radiation sickness. After he returned to the USA, Marshall received a letter from her fanatically nationalistic brother, Hayashi (Simon Burke/David Burt), telling him that their daughter, Hana (Paulette Ivory), had also died. However, during his visit to Boston, Akiszuki reveals that Hana did not perish, but is alive and working in his hospital in Nagasaki. In the second act, father and daughter are finally reunited at the Nagasaki Peace Park. Accompanying this worthy and well-meaning, if often sententious, tale with its inevitable reliance of flashbacks between the 40s, early 50s and 1970, was a score "which mixed the styles of East and West, and combined frenzied percussion and whispering synthesisers with fragments of haunting melody', sung by some of the most beautiful voices in London. No individual song titles were listed in the programme. Ironically, set and costume designer Terry Parsons" dramatically angular stage, and chorus of hooded, visored, samurai-like figures, gave the David Gilmore production a kind of space-age look. John Combe was the choreographer. Lighting designer Mark Henderson won a Laurence Olivier Award for his work on this show and others during the year.
As with the other current oriental-type musical, Miss Saigon, some critics recognized echoes of Puccini's Madame Butterfly in Out Of The Blue. That may well be true, but the similarity ended there. For, when the latter closed on 10 December after a run of less than three weeks, Miss Saigon was in the process of overtaking My Fair Lady to become the longest-running musical in the history of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

Encyclopedia of Popular Music
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