Harold Fielding

Producer of 'Half a Sixpence' brought down by 'Ziegfeld'

Harold Lewis Fielding, theatrical producer: born Woking, Surrey 4 December 1914; married Maisie Skivens (died 1985); died Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey 27 September 2003.

Harold Fielding was one of Britain's foremost theatrical producers, his shows including such home-grown hits as Half a Sixpence and Charlie Girl, plus American imports such as Mame, Barnum and Sweet Charity. Noted primarily for musicals, he had a canny flair for casting and production values, but his preference for shows which purveyed pure escapism brought criticism that he made too blatant an appeal to coach parties.

Unlike many producers, Fielding would back his judgement with his own money rather than use investors, giving him creative control and all profits, and, though he made millions from his biggest hits, he also lost a fortune on his flops, notably the lavish disaster Ziegfeld. A master of publicity, before moving into the theatre he had been a successful promoter of concert performers, both classical and pop, and he presented variety bills which toured Britain.

The son of a stockbroker, Fielding was born in Woking, Surrey, in 1916 and educated privately. A child prodigy, he studied violin with Josef Szigeti and toured the country in velvet breeches billed as "England's boy wonder violinist" until the pressures of celebrity on one so young resulted in a breakdown on stage. Moving into promotion with £100 capital, he produced tours for musical stars ranging from Richard Tauber and Gigli to Jessie Matthews. For a while he managed Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra until he and the equally volatile conductor fell out.

In 1950, when Frank Sinatra made his first UK visit to appear at the Palladium, Fielding persuaded him to do a Sunday night concert at the New Opera House in Blackpool. Danny Kaye and Judy Garland were other Palladium headliners who did Sunday concerts for Fielding. In 1955 he presented the José Greco Company at the Festival Hall, and with fellow promoter Harold Davidson he arranged Count Basie's first British tour in 1957. From 1961 to 1964 he presented a series of twice-nightly summer shows at the Winter Gardens, Bournemouth, his regular bill-toppers including Ken Dodd, the Beverly Sisters, Arthur Askey, Alma Cogan and Ted Ray.

A small but dynamic man with great energy, Fielding was a tough employer who exacted tight discipline on both performance and budget, and he was not happy when Ray put in new gags at the sparsely attended "first houses" to amuse the staff and musicians. When the singing group the Springfields installed new 3ft-high amplifiers on the theatre stage to capture their "electric" sound, he allegedly boomed from the back of the stalls, "Those bloody things will have to go." Dusty Springfield replied, "Up yours, they're staying." They did, but Fielding told her she would never work in one of his shows again.

During the early Fifties, Julie Andrews was a regular featured performer in Fielding's touring concert series called Music for the Millions. Later his organisation handled such stars as Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Petula Clark. Fielding's first venture as a producer of musicals demonstrated his entrepreneurial flair. In 1957 Rodgers and Hammerstein had written a television version of Cinderella which, with Julie Andrews as star, had been watched by 107 million people across America, the biggest TV audience ever at that date. Fielding acquired the rights for a London stage production, to be part-musical, part-pantomime.

The role of the lovelorn servant Buttons (omitted from the American version) was written into the piece as a showcase for Tommy Steele, the role of the King was heavily adapted for Jimmy Edwards, and the panto tradition of having males play the Ugly Sisters was adopted, with Kenneth Williams and Ted Durante in the roles.

With the score enhanced by three songs from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Me and Juliet, Cinderella opened at the Coliseum in December 1958 to general acclaim. The critic Felix Barker in the Evening News called it "the most sumptuous and beautiful Cinderella that I should think London has ever seen", and Harold Hobson judged it, "the best thing of its kind I have ever seen".

The following year Fielding put on another American television musical, Aladdin, with a score by Cole Porter, starring Bob Monkhouse and Doretta Morrow. With gorgeous sets by Loudon Sainthill and imaginative staging by Robert Helpmann, it was even better than Cinderella. Four songs from other Porter shows bolstered the score, and few who saw it will forget the exquisite staging of Morrow's ballad "I Am Loved". Further American musicals put on by Fielding were The Music Man (1961) in which the movie star Van Johnson was a little over-stretched as the ebullient Harold Hill, and Noël Coward's Sail Away (1962), which was to become one of Fielding's most controversial productions.

First, he refused to pay the orchestrator Irvin Kostal fees or royalties for re-using his work. Kostal, who had just won an Oscar for his scoring of West Side Story, refused to back down, so Fielding hired local musicians to redo the score at the much lower British rates. Days before the show was due to open in London, the Musicians' Union became involved in a dispute with theatre managers and were threatening to strike.

Fielding, who had £40,000 in Sail Away, suddenly resigned from the West End Managers' Association and came to a private agreement with the Musicians' Union that guaranteed the orchestra for two years, whether the others went on strike or not. Coward wrote in his diaries, "Although I cannot entirely take my hat off to him morally, I can certainly drop a grateful curtsey to his guts and determination." Sail Away won far more praise for its star, Elaine Stritch, than the show, but ran for seven months.

Having particular respect for the talents of Tommy Steele, Fielding commissioned the composer David Heneker to write a musical for the former rock star, and the result was Half a Sixpence, an adaptation of H.G. Wells's Kipps, with libretto by Beverly Cross. Opening at the Cambridge Theatre in 1963, Half a Sixpence was a big success, the title tune and Steele's show-stopping "Flash, Bang, Wallop" being its major hits, and Fielding was co-producer of the Broadway version (1965), which also starred Steele. The show was nominated for five Tonys including Best Musical, but it was the year when Fiddler on the Roof captured virtually all the musical awards.

In 1965 Fielding produced Charlie Girl, his biggest hit, though it received some of the worst reviews ever. Cannily cast, with the beloved veteran Anna Neagle co-starring with teen favourite Joe Brown, it was enthusiastically promoted by Fielding and became his longest-running show - five years and 2,201 performances. (When Brown left the cast, another pop favourite, Gerry Marsden, took over and sustained the show's double-barrelled star appeal.)

Fielding's subsequent shows had varied fortunes - Man of Magic (1966), based on the life of escape artist Houdini, ran for only 135 performances, but Sweet Charity (1967), starring Juliet Prowse, was a hit, and Mame (1969) attracted much attention because of its star, Ginger Rogers, who arrived at Southampton in a Jean Louis-designed outfit of lynx fur-trimmed coat over a sand-coloured dress of the same material, with boots in matching sand colour. Rogers wrote,

I walked down the gangplank of the Bremen and right toward a greeting committee, arranged by Mr Fielding, which included a full orchestra playing their heads off.

At the railway station in London, a horse-drawn open carriage was waiting for the star, so that she could wave to people en route to her hotel.

A revival of Show Boat (1971) featuring Cleo Laine and Lorna Dallas, did well, and Barnum (1981), starring Michael Crawford, was a hit, but a lavish Gone with the Wind (1972) at Drury Lane, lost money, as did The Biograph Girl (1980). Tommy Steele continued to be good luck for the producer with his starring roles in Hans Andersen (based on the Goldwyn film) and a stage version of Singin' in the Rain. Though many reviewing the latter show asked, "Why?", it proved very popular.

In 1986 Fielding revived Charlie Girl, starring Cyd Charisse, whose legs he insured for a million pounds. But the show's time had passed, even though this production offered the piquant delight of seeing Charisse sing a duet with Dora Bryan, who stole the show in the role originally played by Hy Hazell.

Fielding's nadir was undoubtedly Ziegfeld (1988), a biography of the legendary producer. One of the problems was an unsympathetic central character, and Fielding later concluded, "People don't want to go to a musical and hear nasty things." After a few weeks Len Carriou, playing Ziegfeld, departed, and Fielding tried to save the expensive débâcle by making extensive revisions, bringing in Topol to play the showman and having Tommy Steele take over direction. After seven months it closed at a loss of £3m, one of the three most expensive failures in theatre history. When Someone Like You (1990), a Civil War musical with melodies written by its star, Petula Clark, ran for only five weeks, Fielding's organisation went into voluntary liquidation.

In 1998 Fielding suffered a series of strokes after which he lived in a private nursing home in Surrey. Though extremely frail, he could be seen on such occasions as the first night of the revival of My Fair Lady.

Tom Vallance