Edwin Sums It Up
There was a most remarkable event in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, this afternoon, and I’m not even referring to a technical run-thru of the (still) three-and-a-half hour Lord of the Rings musical…it was a celebration in the Grand Saloon of the career of Edwin Shaw, box office wizard and ticketing supremo these last 50 years for Stoll Moss Empires, the London Palladium, the Delfont Organisation and the Really Useful Group.
Edwin recalled how he had started out in Sheffield with Harry Hanson, Tessie O’Shea and Wilson, Keppel and Betty. He’d ended up by ushering Stoll Moss into the credit card era, and helping out Peter Thompson, press agent extraordinaire, with all his first night allocations. His half-hour speech was a vivid potted history of the British theatre of the past half century.
When rep actors changed trains at Crewe on a Sunday afternoon, he said, Olive Gilbert would regale them with a selection from The Dancing years in the station cafe. When the Glasgow Empire took more than £300 a night on the box office, the staff went home with a police escort. The Queen Mother used to nip into the Victoria Palace for the second half of the Crazy Gang shows on a regular basis; Edwin was always there to oil the wheels (and top up the gin and tonics).
He held the fort at the London Palladium for twenty-three Royal Variety Shows and was moved to that address by Bernard Delfont to supervise the first ever musical on that famous stage: Sammy Davis Jr in Golden Boy. His most precious memory was of a Robert Nesbitt pantomime in which Santa Claus flew in his sleigh, drawn by reindeer, over the revolving stage of a sleeping village. Magic time.
Andre Ptaszynski, chief executive of RUG, said that Andrew Lloyd Webber was absent cooking up a plan about who might be cast as David Ian in the next television reality show, Tarzan, King of the Jungle. Edwin said that the the real jungle was the ticketing jungle (”Full of sharks!” cried a colleague). Ptaszynski also said that Edwin would not be retiring because RUG had not yet worked out a succession plan. He was going to be offered a three-and-a half-day week — in ten years time! And, anyway, who could possibly replace him? “There is nothing,” said Andre,” he doesn’t know about all of our businesses.” Many friends and colleagues drank a huge amount of champagne to that, and to him.