Surprise arrival in the big time

“None of us set out to write the first West End musical set in a black British community,” Paul Sirett reflects. “In fact, not until just before we opened in the West End was it pointed out that this was what we were about to do.”

Sirett, 46, is talking about “The Big Life,” an exuberant musical about Caribbean immigrants arriving in Britain in the late 1950s. Loosely based on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” it tracks the fortunes of four men and four women who meet aboard a passenger ship. This is the legendary Empire Windrush, which for years, starting in 1948, brought thousands of immigrants from Jamaica to England. The men agree to give up women and alcohol to concentrate on making a success of life in their new homeland.

In the first act, these characters sing optimistically in Jamaican patois: “Kyan wait to get to Inglan / We mek it big in a Inglan ... mek it all de way.”

The West End has had black musicals before, noted Philip Hedley, who recently stepped down as artistic director at Theatre Royal, which developed the musical. One, also originally developed by Theatre Royal, was “Five Guys Named Moe,” based on the songs of Louis Jordan, which ran for three years. “But 90% of them are American, and audiences for them are almost all white. The other 10% have been African musicals, largely based on dance,” Hedley said. “This truly is something new.”

“The Big Life” opened at the Apollo Theatre in early May to enthusiastic reviews and has since disproved the conventional wisdom that black British shows cannot sustain sufficiently large West End audiences. The show is accepting bookings as far as November.

“I don’t think any of us thought it would be as successful as it’s been,” said Clint Dyer, director of “The Big Life,” whose parents arrived in Britain from Jamaica in the 1960s. “But different generations of people are coming to see it, sometimes all from the same family. I think the reason is that this is a part of history that isn’t talked about much.

“In a West Indian family, who wants to tell their children that when they came over to Britain, white people thought they had tails? When would my parents have found the right moment to tell me that when they first walked down the street here, they were called ‘nigger’? It’s a really powerful tool for educating both black and white people.”

Dyer and other members of the production are heartened by the ability of “The Big Life” to attract a diverse audience. (On one evening last month, described by the show’s principals as “typical,” about 40% of an almost-full house was white.)

Meet Mrs. Aphrodite

For all this, the aim of “The Big Life” is to entertain rather than educate. In fact, racism only briefly becomes a theme in Sirett’s story.

“We were determined to make it clear that though racism is a really depressing factor of life for black people, it’s not the overriding thing that determines everything we do,” Dyer said. “It doesn’t define us. These people get through it, they look for love, they want children, they laugh. They’re like everyone else. They’re survivors.”

To underline this point, “The Big Life” has a cheerful, grandmotherly Caribbean character, Mrs. Aphrodite (played by Tameka Empson, a much younger actress), who sits among the audience in a balcony and comments on the action between scenes in an outspoken, hilarious manner. One sees “Mrs. Aphrodites” in Britain, often immaculate in colorful floral frocks.

“She’s our way of saying it’s the people you see walking down the street who went through this,” Dyer noted. “It’s our parents, and if their opinions and values now seem outmoded and dated, maybe we should have a little more respect for them. You don’t often see representations of them within our community -- not done with love, anyway.

“You rarely see them as the mad, wonderful characters they are, and their bravery to pick themselves up, come to big old England and try to survive it. When you go back to the West Indies, you realize -- what they came from was really, really poor.”

The show has been helped by the current high level of awareness in Britain of the experience of the immigrants who arrived on the Windrush. This is largely due to the success of the novel “Small Island,” by Anglo-Caribbean writer Andrea Levy, which covers exactly this historical period. (Her book is referenced by name in “The Big Life.”) Levy has achieved a first, winning the Whitbread and the Orange Prize for women’s fiction -- two major literary prizes -- in the same year, with “Small Island.”

All this makes it sound as if “The Big Life” has sailed into the West End, effortlessly making history while becoming a hit. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The show was created almost five years ago at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (a working-class, ethnically diverse London suburb, not Shakespeare’s Stratford). This small theater has a history of staging groundbreaking productions, notably “Oh! What a Lovely War,” under the auspices of its innovative, long-serving director Joan Littlewood.

“The Big Life” was developed as part of a musicals project initiated by the Theatre Royal about eight years ago. Hedley, who had served as its artistic director for 25 years, invited Fred Carl and Robert Lee, two lecturers from New York’s Tisch School to address the company at Stratford. “The Big Life” was workshopped twice at Stratford and had two productions before its recent transfer to the West End.

This is hardly surprising when one considers the lack of experience of its core creative team. Hedley, who has effectively godfathered the show into the West End and has stayed on in an associate producer capacity, pointed out: “It’s a black British musical, the first to be written by its white writer [Sirett]. It has a black composer [Paul Joseph] who had never even seen a musical. And it’s the first time its black director [Dyer] had directed.”

‘We had such problems’

In fact, Dyer, 36, is also an actor who has been with the Theatre Royal for 20 years; he joined as a member of its youth theater and today sits on its board. “We had such problems putting it on,” he says of the show. “We ran out of money. I got Paul Sirett to do 10 drafts. Paul Joseph got frustrated at the number of times I asked him to change the songs. For first-time musical writers it must have been a grueling process I was prepared to put them through. I hope they’ve forgiven me, but it was necessary.”

Although it finally triumphed in Stratford East, “The Big Life” had an equally hard time securing a West End transfer. “Producers would say to me, ‘It’s a wonderful show,’ ” Hedley recalled. “Then they would look at me sideways and say: ‘But will your audience come into the West End for it?’ They meant a black audience. Yet at Stratford East the audience was half black, half white.”

In the end, prolific West End impresario Bill Kenwright decided to finance the show. But the cost of staging it, 300,000 pounds (about $525,000), is a fraction of the budget enjoyed by mainstream West End musicals from the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, which start at 4.5 million pounds (almost $7.9 million).

Still, as Hedley observed, this gives “The Big Life” a fighting chance of making its money back. “Its break-even point is about 60,000 pounds a week,” he said last month. “And this particular week, it looks as if it will do between 90,000 pounds and 100,000 pounds.”

At the show’s opening West End night, the 12-strong cast (11 of them black) immediately felt an air of change, Hedley said. After receiving sustained applause for the long opening scene aboard the Empire Windrush, they dashed backstage, punching the air joyfully and shouting “Revolution!”

Americans may be surprised it has taken so long for a black British musical to reach the West End. But Anglo-Caribbean culture and experience is vastly different from that of Afro-Americans. Music is one way the difference makes itself apparent, and Joseph’s compositions for “The Big Life” embrace several Caribbean styles: reggae, ska and calypso.

In retrospect, Sirett can see why “The Big Life” works. A dramatist who has had four nonmusical plays produced, he was once a member of a ska band and set out wanting to write a ska musical based on “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” “This story grew out of that scenario,” he said. “You have four men who, to better themselves, decide to give up women. And where do you get people most likely to be giving up something of themselves? In any immigrant community trying to survive.”

The logic may be impeccable, but Dyer still finds himself scarcely able to believe the show’s success. “Sometimes I walk down Shaftesbury Avenue,” he said, laughing. “I see the marquee for ‘The Big Life’ and I think: ‘That’s my show!’ ”