Follow That Girl is a musical

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

 adapted by Julian Slade

Julian Slade

Julian Penkivil Slade was an English writer of musical theatre best known for the show Salad Days, which he wrote in six weeks in 1954 and became the UK's longest-running show of the 1950s with over 2,288 performances....

 and Dorothy Reynolds from their original Bristol Old Vic

Bristol Old Vic

The Bristol Old Vic is a theatre company based at the Theatre Royal, King Street, in Bristol, England. The theatre complex includes the 1766 Theatre Royal, which claims to be the oldest continually-operating theatre in England, along with a 1970s studio theatre , offices and backstage facilities...

 production Christmas in King Street. The story centers on a girl named Victoria Rooms, whose parents want her to marry one of two businessmen. She objects and runs away. Her capture after a long chase by a policeman, Tom, leads to Romance and finally marriage to him. The original production contained many topical and local Bristol references — the heroine Victoria was named after the Bristol University Students Union

University of Bristol Union

BURST or Bristol University Radio Station is a student-run radio station, based in the University of Bristol broadcast online from the university's student union building, and occasionally via FM with a Restricted Service Licence. The station also holds an AM licence, and plans to begin...

 building — but most of these were replaced when the show was revamped for its West End production.

Victoria was played by Susan Hampshire

Susan Hampshire

Susan Hampshire, Lady Kulukundis, OBE is an English actress, best-known for her many television and film roles.-Early life:Susan Hampshire was born in Kensington, London, the youngest of four children. She had two sisters and one brother...

 and Tom by Peter Gilmore

Peter Gilmore

Peter Gilmore is a British actor, perhaps best known for his portrayal of Captain James Onedin in the BBC Television period drama The Onedin Line. He also had roles in eleven Carry On films, and played the heroic lead in the adventure film Warlords of Atlantis...

. Others in the cast were James Cairncross – a prime collaborator with Slade and Reynolds in their musicals both as a performer and writer – Patricia Routledge, Robert MacBain, & Phillip Guard. Follow That Girl opened at the Vaudeville Theatre

Vaudeville Theatre

The Vaudeville Theatre is a West End theatre on The Strand in the City of Westminster. As the name suggests, the theatre held mostly vaudeville shows and musical revues in its early days. It opened in 1870 and was rebuilt twice, although each new building retained elements of the previous...

 on 17 March 1960 and ran for 211 performances.

Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds also wrote Salad Days and Hooray for Daisy. Profits from Salad Days were donated towards the purchase of premises for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, opened by Laurence Olivier in 1946, is an affiliate of the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama, an organisation securing the highest standards of training in the performing arts, and is an associate school of the Faculty of Creative Arts of the University of the...

in 1956 and this contribution was honoured forty years later when the School's new purpose-built dance and movement studio was named after them in 1996.

Songs

• "Tra La La"
• "Where shall I find my love?"
• "I'm away"
• "Follow that girl"
• "Solitary Stranger"
• "Victoria, Victoria"
• "Lost, stolen or strayed"
• "Three Victorian mermaids"
• "Mermaid scales"
• "Song and dance"
• "Let's take a stroll
• "Shopping in Kensington"
• "Taken for a ride"
• "Lovely meeting You at last"
• "Waiting for our daughter"
• "Wilbertan soap commercial"
• "Doh, Ray, Me"