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 Meet Me by Moonlight
Aldwych Theatre, London, 1957
Role: Roderick Dashe
Meet Me by Moonlight, a "play with music," was
written by Anthony Lesser with music from the 1880s and lyrics by
David Dearlove and Joy Whitby.
British
Musical Theatre said the play didn't quite qualify as a
musical, calling it a Victorian comedy with "oodles of charm and a
some delightful songs of the period, with Jeremy Brett as the young
romantic interest."
The cast of characters included a Victorian
father, his three daughters and a matchmaking sister. Several
gentlemen seek the hand of his eldest child, Mary Ellen. But she
refuses all these suitors because of her clandestine romance with
the handsome Roderick.
The Brettish
Empire noted the emphasis on romantic:
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A reviewer for the Cambridge Daily
News described Roderick as "a young man, played in a very
bronzed and personable way by Jeremy Brett, who is so Byronic and
romantic that he nightly leaps a ten-foot garden wall and presents
the object of his elevated desires with a rose from her own
father's garden, when all the house is asleep."
Overall, Jeremy received good reviews, and he
enjoyed the part, but it was not the "modern" type of play growing
in popularity on the British stage. Angry young men, not
aristocratic gentlemen were seizing the day -- and the
headlines.
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