Billy

Sale & Altrincham Messenger's Review

Liar, liar, pants on fire

By Rick Bowen

As far as stories go, it's charm is impossible to resist and it certainly deserves the label classic'. By day, Billy Fisher holds down a humdrum job in an undertaker's office but, in his head, he's a captain of industry, making executive decisions that firmly put the 'i' back into the word important. Waterhouse and Hall's Billy Liar, a hilarious journey through the mind of one of modern literature's most enduring fantasists, was turned into a musical and is the final production in Altrincham Garrick's 2006-2007 season.

John Barry, a composer most famous for a string of James Bond themes, and Don Black wrote the show. Is it faithful to the original? "Most of the things that happen to Billy in the stage play happen to him in the musical. It's tailored a little bit - there are bits where he becomes a pop star and there's a bit where he becomes a Hollywood film star, so his fantasies might be a little bit different but, in essence, it's faithful to the play of Billy Liar," says director Terry Chandler. Terry remembers seeing a professional production of?Billy?in Manchester in the 1970s and that's when his love affair began with the show that allowed Michael Crawford to leave his accident prone comedy alter ego Frank Spencer behind him and re-invent himself as a star of the musical stage.

The story of Billy Liar has remained enduringly popular, even though the world it re-visits now only exists in folk memory. For me, that's part of the appeal - it takes us back to what seems like, on the face of it, a less complicated, a less pressurised and a more innocent age. Okay, Billy might tell a few fibs, but he's not really a bad lad, is he? What does Terry think? "A lot of people can identify with some of the situations. Billy's imagination is ripe - in the real world he's an undertaker's clerk and in his fantasy world he's president of Ambrosia. Everything that happens to him in his fantasy world, although it's all mixed up, is how he escapes from reality," he says. But when he gets the opportunity to turn dreams into reality, will he seize the opportunity with both hands? To find that out, you'll have to come and see the show.