The first book to deal exclusively with British musical flops, Must Close Saturday presents a rolling panorama of the good, the bad and the ugly, reassessing their place in theatrical history. The ominous announcement "Must Close Saturday" too often heralded the demise of British musicals. Looking forward from the vantage point of Lionel Bart's spectacularly successful Oliver! in 1960, Adrian Wright's authoritative chronicle of the commercially unsuccessful British musical of the last half a century uncovers a wealth of fascinating material. In the wake of the resurgence that briefly blew through the British musical at the end of the 1950s with verismo works such as Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be and Expresso Bongo, the British musical was shaken by Bart's adaptation of Dickens, but was quickly left floundering in the face of constant critical complaint and financial failure. The first book to deal exclusively with British musical flops, Must Close Saturday presents a rolling panorama of the good, the bad and the ugly, reassessing their place in theatrical history.Wright reveals a consistent striving at invention, with subjects including the electric chair, the Holocaust, the Virgin Mary, social inequality and Trade Unionism, sexual problems and murder, as well as biographical treatments of Hollywood stars, French painters, tragic novelists, royalty, and the Rector of Stiffkey. Discursive and provoking, Must Close Saturday at last prises open the neglected history of the British musical flop up to 2016. ADRIAN WRIGHT is the author of Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley (1996), John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (1998), The Innumerable Dance: The Life and Work of William Alwyn (Boydell & Brewer, 2008), the novel Maroon (2010) and The Voice of Doom (2016). His previous books on British musical theatre are A Tanner's Worth of Tune: Rediscovering the Post-War British Musical (Boydell & Brewer, 2010) and West End Broadway: The Golden Age of the American Musical in London (Boydell & Brewer, 2012). He lives in Norfolk.

A comprehensive reassessment of British musical films 1946-1972 including King's Rhapsody, Beat Girl, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners, The Golden Disc, and Oliver! Acting as a sequel to Adrian Wright's Cheer Up! British Musical Films, 1929-1945 (Boydell, 2020), Melody in the Dark offers the first major reassessment of the British musical film from the end of Second World War up to the beginning of the 1970s. In the immediate post-war world, British studios sought to reflect fast-changing social attitudes as they struggled to create inventive diversions in an effort to rival American competition. Hollywood stars Errol Flynn, Vera-Ellen, Jayne Mansfield and Judy Garland were among those brought in to provide Hollywood glamour. Embedded in the British consciousness, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were represented in three productions. Studios occasionally attempted adaptations of British stage musicals, among them King's Rhapsody and Expresso Bongo, and sexploitation movies turned musical via Secrets of a Windmill Girl and Beat Girl. It was left to minor studios to acknowledge the impact of rock'n'roll on social change in three early films, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners and the iconic The Golden Disc. Through the sixties, British cinema seemed intent on flooding the market with entertainments promoting pop singers and rock groups such as Cliff Richard, Billy Fury and The Beatles. Towards the end of the period, it aspired to more grandiose projects such as Oliver! and Oh! What a Lovely War.

David Hemmings directs this supernatural horror based on the novel by James Herbert. A mid-air jet disaster leaves only one survivor, the pilot (Robert Powell), who is wracked with guilt and puzzled as to the cause of the crash. With the help of a young woman (Jenny Agutter) he sets out to avenge the deaths of the passengers - who will not release their grip on him until he does so.

The first book to deal exclusively with the British musical film from the very beginning of talking pictures in the late 1920s through the Depression of the 1930s up to the end of World War II. Cheer Up! is the first book to deal exclusively with the British musical film from the very beginning of talking pictures in the late 1920s through the Depression of the 1930s up to the end of World War II. The upsurge in production at British studios from 1929 onwards marked the real birth of a genre whose principal purpose was to entertain the British public. This endeavour was deeply affected by the very many emigres escaping Nazi Germany, who flooded into the British film industry during this decade, as the genre tried to establish itself. The British musical film in the 1930s reflects a richness of interest. Studios initially flirted with filming what were essentially stage productions plucked from the West End theatre but soon learned that importing a foreign star was a box-office boost. Major musical stars including Jessie Matthews, Richard Tauber and George Formby established themselves during this period. From its beginning, the British musical film captured some of the most notable music-hall performers on screen, and its obsession with music-hall persisted throughout the war years. Other films married popular and classical music with social issues of poverty and unemployment, a message of social integration that long preceded the efforts of the Ealing studios to encourage a sense of social cohesion in post-war Britain. The treatmentof the films discussed is linear, each film dealt with in order of its release date, and allowing for an engaging narrative packed with encyclopaedic information.

Robots Won't Save Japan addresses the Japanese government's efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale. This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

This first extended biography of William Alwyn sets his works in full context and uses hitherto unpublished material to give a vivid account of his marriages, his operas and his relationship with Britten. This book is the first full-scale biography of William Alwyn since his death in 1985. Alwyn's early life as a flautist was altered when he became a leading composer of the Documentary Film Movement in the 1930s, going on to a prolific career in writing for feature films, including commissions for Walt Disney and Carol Reed. By the mid 1950s his reputation was established by the beginning of his four-symphony cycle, his many tone poems, concertos, chamber and piano pieces. An habitue of the London film studios and concert halls, and a prominent professor at the Royal Academy of Music, a major crisis in Alwyn's life precipitated an escape to the Suffolk coast in 1960, where he turnedhis back on film music and immersed himself in the writing of operas [including Miss Julie], poetry, essays, fiction and painting. Adrian Wright's book balances detailed analysis of Alwyn's work with a vivid account of his marriages to the musician Olive Pull and the composer Doreen Carwithen, relationships that profoundly affected the course of his career. Using a mass of hitherto unpublished material [including an unexpurgated version of his noted Ariel to Miranda] and interviews with prominent figures in Alwyn's life, the volume places his achievements in the musical context of his time, along the way dealing with his relationship with Benjamin Britten,and such hitherto almost unknown works as Don Juan, The Fairy Fiddler and the radio opera Farewell, Companions. ADRIAN WRIGHT is the author of the acclaimed Foreign Country: The Life of L.P. Hartley (1996) and John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (1998), and is a contributor to The New Dictionary of National Biography.

" A] first-class psychological study . . . the character drawing, although a little cruel, is admirably done and the writing is consistently excellent." - "Times Literary Supplement"
"It is original, it is strangely exciting, and the logic of its plan is repeated in the behaviour of its characters." - L. P. Hartley
"It is really a detective story in which the clues, instead of being actual, are psychological. The reader is made to feel all the tension and curiosity which a good crime novel inspires, and he is not disappointed." - "The Tablet"
Twelve years ago Claude Carlice was found dead of a gunshot wound. The verdict was suicide brought on by a fit of insanity, but his sister Isabel has never believed it. Now the day approaches when Claude's son Ronnie will come of age and take possession of Carlice Abbey. Preparations for the birthday party are underway, but it will not be a festive occasion: Ronnie, who has imbibed Marxist ideas at Oxford, intends to throw his aunt and stepmother out of the house and sign the entire estate over to the Communist Party for use as a propaganda centre. As tensions rise and the big day arrives, a strange series of events will unfold, revealing the scandalous truth behind Claude's death and resulting in an unexpected fate for Carlice Abbey and its occupants.
C.H.B. Kitchin (1895-1967) was both a best-selling crime writer and a critically acclaimed author of literary fiction. In "Birthday Party" (1938), he combined the two, resulting in a novel that is both a fascinating examination of a changing English society on the eve of the Second World War and a suspenseful psychological mystery full of unexpected twists and turns. This first-ever republication includes a reproduction of the original jacket art and a new introduction by Adrian Wright.