IVOR Novello returns to Buxton next week when Present Company stage Glamorous Night, its fifth Novello production in recent years in the High Peak town.
With The Dancing Years, Perchance to Dream, King's Rhapsody and Gay's the Word under its belt, the Derby-based group turns to the one that began the 15-year Novello phenomenon in 1935 with a cast of 41.
Leaving aside Gay's the Word, his last show which doesn't fall into archetypal Novello show category, it means the Jean Gemmell-run theatre company have put on his four biggest hits.
Two years ago she wasn't inclined to tackle Glamorous Night.
Whereas the other three had just about 'do-able' librettos and plots, Glamorous Night hadn't. So what's changed?
Jean says: "Nick Gaze at the Ivor Novello Appreciation Bureau asked me if I had come across a revised version of Glamorous Night which David Slattery-Christy had written."
She hadn't and he sent a copy.
"I read it and it interested me. We talked about the possibility of it being done, decided there was, so we're doing it."
Slattery-Christy, author of a recent, much-acclaimed Novello biography, In Search of Ruritania, and Novello consultant on the 2001 Oscar-winning film Gosford Park, wrote the revised version some ten years ago for a West End revival which never happened.
How Glamorous Night was conceived, Novello making up a spectacular story-line off the cuff over lunch (cobbled as a prologue by Slattery-Christy in his revision), is the stuff of legend.
Filling it out afterwards, he penned a rambling, rather convoluted libretto, plus its lasting glory, its immortal songs which, in all his shows, have ensured Novello's immortality.
In Glamorous Night they include the title song, Shine Through My Dreams and Fold Your Wings.
"If people come to see it, which I hope they will, there'll find that the story is all there but tightened up," says Jean.
She mentions that the non-singing part Novello wrote for himself, Anthony Allan again played by Novello lookalike David Walters, is a TV journalist, as opposed to TV technician, in the revision.
"Some Novello songs from other shows have been inserted. Fortunately, he wrote so many (over 250) you can find songs which will fit into the libretto to carry forward the show.
"We've put some in and David Slattery-Christy added Some Day My Heart Will Awake (King's Rhapsody) because he discovered it was written for this show but never used.
"He's also put The Girl I Know, originally sung as curtain song by Elisabeth Welch (enabling a scene change), into the context of the show and, in the prologue, a cabaret singer is singing And Her Mother Came Too" – a Novello song, not as often thought, from the pen of Noël Coward.
After talking to Jean, a little digging establishes that The Girl I Know becomes The Girls We Knew, sung as a duet by the opera singer Militza Hajos and Cleo Wellington, who is recast as her companion, while her maid Phoebe disappears.
Other added items include Why Isn't It You? (Crest of a Wave) and Why Is There Ever Goodbye? (Careless Rapture).
"It's huge show to do. He wrote it as a huge show!" exclaims Jean.
"My house is awash with white and cream ballgowns (an idea pinched from masquerade scene in the Phantom of the Opera film, she says) which the ladies will wear in the dream sequence at the end and in the show within a show, the opera gala scene, where there is the attempted assasination of the heroine.
"It's like having giant meringues everywhere!"
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