I feel compelled to write about Blushes Winebar because that was a very memorable place. Even though I didn’t work there, I could go there once a week and sort of sponge up the zeitgeist there and the general feeling of dissatisfaction over whatever the staff was feeling that week -- a strangely entertaining pastime.
Sometimes it was the way the management was (mis)treating them. Sometimes it was their love lives. Sometimes it was their general dissatisfaction with life and the desire to do something else with their lives. . .
Then I knew I had to start writing a musical about it and call it “Welshes Winebar.” Partly because Welch’s was a grape juice, and welshing was another word (“informal, sometimes offensive”) for cheating, or going back on one’s word. A lot of that happened there, too, let me tell you!
At any rate, I wrote a bunch of songs that made sense in the context of a winebar musical, including “London Rain,” “At Long Last When I Leave,” and “Someone Else’s Girl” (from writing with Stephen). I started work on the script or “book” and only got up to act 2 or so. The characters were based on Roger, Kevin, Simon, Stephanie, Phyllida, Tim, Felicity and Martin. . . so in my head, they were all pretty vivid and could come to life, presto.
Alas, I have yet to finish a musical. . . because my weak links, as a dramatic writer, are plot and conflict. Sigh. But maybe some day, with encouragement, I’ll actually write something for a musical (my birthday’s the same as Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, oddly enough -- though in a later year, of course!). . . songwriting really is my forte (over my life so far, writing and co-writing hundreds of songs -- good ones!).
I would welcome a collaborator in creating a musical set in London in the early 1980’s. . . any takers?
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