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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and welcome to episode 18 of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud.

[0:15] Tim Rice: I've done a few podcasts about several well-known shows I've worked on, and there will be more. But this time I want to chat about a show that to date hasn't set the world on fire, but I think it still could, and it's one I still love. So I'll start with a song from the show, which happens to be one of my favorite songs of the 500 plus I've written words for for many shows for many years. And the song is Fight the Fight, sung by Robert Lonsdale, who played the part of Robert Ely Pruitt in the 2013 musical From Here to Eternity. Music by Stuart Brayson. The song is Pruitt's credo, his philosophy. He's a GI in Hawaii at a time when World War II is raging in Europe and America is not yet quite in the war. Pruitt refuses to bow to most of the demands of his superiors. He's a great bugler, but he refuses to play the bugle. He's a terrific fighter, but he won't box for the regiment. Here is Fight the Fight.

[0:48] ♪ Musical number: "Fight the Fight" — performed by Robert Lonsdale ♪

[0:48] Tim Rice: Music by Stuart Brayson, lyrics by me. It ran for six months from October that year. Six months is nothing like long enough for a big musical to pay its way, so the show, sad to say, is officially, or perhaps just financially, a flop, despite getting fairly good reviews. However, unlike one or two other less than successful shows I've been involved in, I genuinely feel that From Here to Eternity has every chance of returning to the West End. And that the score is very strong. So is the story, based on the award-winning 1951 novel by James Jones about US soldiers in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It's a truly great novel, long but fully deserving of its official status as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

It was filmed in 1953 by Fred Zinneman, starring Bert Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Carr, Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture and supporting actor wins for Sinatra and Donna Reed. His success in the movie relaunched Frank Sinatra's career into the stratosphere from which he never descended. The film often crops up on television and remains truly absorbing and totally plausible, albeit many of the raunchier and grittier aspects of the book's 800 plus pages had to be dealt with fairly delicately and briefly in 1953.

[6:01] Tim Rice: The idea for the show was Stuart Brayson's. He's a fine composer, as I hope you've already appreciated, thanks to Fight the Fight. I've known him for many years. When he was a young singer, performer, he spotted me in the street and pressed a cassette of his pop rock compositions into my surprised hand, if hands can be surprised. I do get sent quite a few tapes and CDs, and it's difficult to listen to more than a very few. But something about Stuart made me feel that he might be somebody worth paying attention to. And when I heard his songs, I realized that he was. I attempted to help him make his mark in the pop world, but I was not really the ideal Svengali. And although he and his band recorded some interesting tracks and played some marvellous gigs, they never made it.

Some years later, Stuart announced he wanted to write musicals, and in this area, I felt that could be more useful. He sent me many demos of entire musical scores he'd written, one or two of which were actually staged. A musical based on From Here to Eternity was something like his 13th or 14th idea, and as I already knew it was a good story, I felt it had potential. When I heard Stuart's music, I knew it did. It took a long, long time, but in the end I managed to assemble a team for the show. Plenty of ups and downs, but I can save that for my memoirs, volume two, if I ever get round to them. The original key players were Tamara Harvey, director, Bill Oakes, Book, and David White, musical director and orchestrator, plus, of course, the actors.

It's hard enough shortening the 800 pages of the novel into two hours of theatre, let alone 25 minutes of podcast, but the story centres around two love affairs, one between Private Pruitt and Lorreen, a working girl from the Congress Club in downtown Honolulu, the other between Pruitt's immediate superior, Sergeant Warden, and Karen, the wife of his superior, Captain Holmes. Both relationships are fraught with huge risk and are played out against the background of ever approaching war. The climax is, of course, the attack on Pearl Harbor. Karen Holmes is stuck in a dead marriage in the middle of the Pacific and finds her first happiness in a long time when she becomes involved with Sergeant Milt Warden. In James Jones's novel, I was struck by the phrase, another language, as Karen reflects. Something told her.

[8:51] Tim Rice: This brilliant portrait of Karen and her failing hopes inspired our song Another Language. Here's Claire Teal's version.

[9:21] ♪ Musical number: "Another Language" — performed by Claire Teal ♪

[11:06] Tim Rice: We are simply hanging out to dry.

[11:12] Tim Rice: We don't know where we are, we don't know why another language till now spoken another life, another gentle, a spark of passion suburb in me, another round of death, love and its sensations by a reason to exit before I die.

[12:33] Tim Rice: Claire Teal with a magnificent interpretation of another language, doing us the great honor of covering a song from the score on one of her albums, as did Michael Ball, who recorded a rousing version of "Fight the Fight," the song I played at the start of this podcast.

[12:48] Tim Rice: One of the numbers I enjoyed writing most for From Here to Eternity was a blues duet between Pruitt, Robert Lonsdale, and Warden, Darius Campbell. Partly because the lyrics only took me about 45 minutes. The two soldiers have got drunk together, and forgetting their respective ranks, complain as inebriated equals about their disillusionment and dead-end prospects in uniform. The song also serves as a tribute to Chuck Berry, mentioning as it does a gunny sack, an expression I first came across in "Johnny B. Goode," and never anywhere else since. Here are Robert and Darius with "Ain't Where I Wanna Be Blues."

[13:21] ♪ Musical number: "Ain't Where I Wanna Be Blues" — performed by Robert Lonsdale and Darius Campbell ♪

[16:06] Tim Rice: I mentioned that the lyric of that song only took me about 45 minutes to write. I've always found it much easier and quicker to write songs that are humorous or able to dive into the dictionary of slang and cliché. Love songs and serious arias take much longer, sometimes more like 45 days. I think as producer of the show, or co-producer anyway, I should take most of the blame for its lack of commercial success. The biggest mistake was not trying it out of town first, as we would have spotted a lot of problems that could have been much more easily changed away from the pressures of the West End spotlight. We also felt that we couldn't present the show in a theatre of fewer than around 1,200 seats.

This was another mistake, which was made clear to us when the first two American presentations of the show did very well in provincial theatres of 500 and 700 seats, without any of the impact of big events such as the marching platoons and the Pearl Harbor bombing being any less dramatic. There was nothing wrong with our London theatre, the Shaftesbury, a fine playhouse with a 1,400 seat capacity, whose staff were enthusiastic supporters of From Here to Eternity, but it was quite a challenge to sell 1,400 seats every night or matinee. We usually got a thousand, but the place didn't look full and not looking full is not good for future business. We had the most marvelous cast and company of actors and other creators.

Tamara Harvey did a wonderful job controlling the considerable forces required, and the choreography, Saviour de Frutos, the look, Sutra Gilmore, and musicianship of the show were terrific. The four leads, Robert Lonsdale, Chavon Harrison, Darius Campbell, and Rebecca Thornhill, and the fifth lead in the Frank Sinatra role of Maggio, Ryan Sampson, were all we could have wished for. I'm glad to say their performances have been preserved on both DVD and on the original cast album. But in the end, it didn't really work. There's a fine line between victory and defeat, and when five million quids at stake, it's quite an important line. There were things in most departments we could have done better.

But the American shows, directed by Brett Smock, considerably revised with book editions by Donald Rice, were very encouraging and were well received. Pandemics permitting, we hope to bring the piece back to British audiences closer to its revamped American form before too long. There really are several songs I'd love to play from this score, and maybe I will in a future podcast, but I've only got room for one more. I could play the anthem that emerges from the chaos and slaughter of Pearl Harbor, "The Boys of 41," sung by the women who fear that their fathers, husbands, lovers, sons have been lost. When the Military Wives Choir joined the company on stage on December the 7th, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, to sing this song after one of the shows, it was a very moving occasion, which I think you can find on YouTube.

But I've decided to close with "Lorreen, the Working Girl," and her song of love to Pruitt, the song that recognizes that they may not be together forever. So here, from the original cast album of From Here to Eternity, the original Lorene, Siobhan Harrison sings, "Love Me Forever Today."

[19:27] ♪ Musical number: "Love Me Forever Today" — performed by Siobhan Harrison ♪

[22:18] Tim Rice: That was episode 18 of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud, written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced by Peter Holtz.