Set in London during the “jazz age” of the 1930s, this new musical tells the story of Bernard Chalmondly, a musical theatre composer and singing teacher, who falls in love with his new student Nancy Pilkington-Smythe. But the course of true love never did run smooth, and nothing is helped by the interference of Nancy’s harridan of an aunt, Miriam Wensley, especially as Bernard’s new show is soon to open at the London Palladium!
With music reminiscent of the works of Nöel Coward, Julian Slade and Sandy Wilson, this semi-staged concert performance is a world-premier not to be missed!​​​​
​
A History
My show has been forty years in the making starting in 1981 while I was teaching in Nottingham. Like so many inspirational ideas ‘it’ happened upon me and I was compelled to write it down. As writers know, ideas don’t wait for an appropriate moment to arrive so I found myself writing while in my car in traffic jams, late at night as I was dropping off to sleep and so on. The songs appeared in the style of that great heart throb of the 1930s – Ivor Novello who was a composer and creator of wonderful and hugely popular musicals.
​
I completed it by 1984 but had no idea what to do with it so it went into a box file. Then in 1989 I took it out, made a tape recording of a dramatic precis of the story accompanied by some of the songs and entered it into the Buxton Festival. Needless to say, the competition was fierce and, really, the whole thing wasn’t complete anyway, so along with a rather lukewarm letter from the competiton panel, it went back into the box file and stayed there.
Then in December 2023 a friend persuaded me to take it out of the box file and we organised a table read with actor friends. The evening was a success and two people very involved in the theatre world, David Phipps-Davis and Chris Huntley, stepped forward and offered to help me develop it. You can read about in their interesting biographies in another section
All through 2023 Dave, my dramaturg, helped me to work on the story by developing the original ideas and adding new characters and songs to punctuate the plot of comedy, romance and dilemma. Chris, my Musical Director, was at hand to arrange the new tunes resulting in Draft 2 of the show. Having discovered the show would be far too long for, even the kindest audience to endure, more refinement was needed until the final draft of Once in a While (originally entitled Dear Bernard) was born.
Jane Morgan
​