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:

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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