Weave your way round the new exhibition Re:Imagining Musicals at the V&A in London, and you light on a fascinating contrast. Among the 100 objects on display are costumes, props, posters and a kaleidoscopic video of the 30 stage musicals recorded by the museum’s archival department. But sharp-eyed observers will notice at the end a tiny inset panel showing a solitary guy listening to old LPs on his gramophone. Among the album covers I spotted was Valmouth: a 1958 Sandy Wilson musical that has a dedicated cult following.
This is a vivid reminder that while musicals have a mass-market appeal they also attract obsessives who can tell you which numbers were cut from the 1964 staging of Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. What is good about this exhibition is that it is likely to attract both audiences: those for whom the musical is the ultimate form of showbiz escape and collectors of theatrical arcana. The two categories are not mutually exclusive and I confess that, at different times, I could have signed up to either group.
