Basil Hood
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Basil Charles Hood (April 5, 1864 – August 7, 1917) was a British librettist and lyricist, perhaps best known for his libretti of a half dozen Savoy Operas and his English adaptations of operettas, including The Merry Widow.
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[edit] Early life and military career
The younger son of Sir Charles Hood, Basil Hood was born in Yorkshire, educated at Wellington and Sandhurst, and was commissioned into the Green Howards in 1883. He was promoted Captain in 1893 and retired in 1895, but joined the 3rd (Militia) Battalion later the same year. He resigned his commission in 1898.
[edit] Early works
Hood began writing for the theatre in his mid-twenties, and his first one-act piece, The Gypsies, was mounted as a curtain-raiser at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1890. He provided the lyrics to Lionel Monckton's song "What Will You Have to Drink?", interpolated into the Gaiety Theatre burlesque Cinder-Ellen Up-too-Late.
Hood wrote two other short operettas (with music by Walter Slaughter), before the two completed Hood's first full-scale musical comedy, the very successful Gentleman Joe, the Hansom Cabbie (as a vehicle for comedian Arthur Roberts) in 1895 (running for 391 performances). This success prompted Hood to leave the military to concentrate on his writing. In 1896, Hood and Slaughter wrote the hit, The French Maid, followed by six more Slaughter musicals in rapid succession, including another successful vehicle for Roberts, Dandy Dan, the Lifeguardsman (1897).
[edit] Librettist of Savoy Operas
After Arthur Sullivan finished collaborating with W. S. Gilbert (The Grand Duke (1896) was their last joint work), Mr. and Mrs. Richard D'Oyly Carte, the proprietors of the Savoy Theatre, looked for other librettists to provide operas for Sullivan to set. After a number of less successful operas with other librettists, Sullivan finally found success with Hood in The Rose of Persia (1899). Hood also wrote the libretti for two short companion pieces at the Savoy. The first was Pretty Polly, which ran with The Rose of Persia in 1900 and with Patience in 1900-01, and the second was Ib and Little Christina (1900), which played in several theatres including the Savoy (in 1901, as a companion piece to Hood's The Willow Pattern).
After the success for Hood and Sullivan of The Rose of Persia, the pair were soon writing a second opera, The Emerald Isle (1901). Sullivan died while writing this new work, and the task of completing it fell to Edward German. Hood and German went on to collaborate on the successful Merrie England (1902) and the less successful A Princess of Kensington (1903) before their producer, William Greet, turned away from light opera, which effectively ended their work together.
[edit] Later works
Between 1903 and 1906, Hood worked on several musical comedies, including one based on Romeo and Juliet, but when producer Charles Frohman started altering his work to suit casting considerations, he withdrew his name from the libretto of what was produced as The Belle of Mayfair (1906). He also adapted Victorien Sardou's play Directoire as the libretto for George Edwardes's musical at Daly's Theatre, Les Merveilleuses (1906). Next, he supplied the Gaiety Theatre with lyrics for the successful The Girls of Gottenberg (1907).
With the resurgence of interest in Continental European operettas, Edwardes hired Hood to prepare the English versions of what became a series of extremely successful productions, including The Merry Widow (1907), The Dollar Princess (1908), A Waltz Dream (1908), The Count of Luxembourg (1911), and Gypsy Love (1912). Hood's original works were few in these years of Continental domination. In 1909, his Little Hans Anderson was produced under the management of William Greet. In 1913 he wrote a superior but unsuccessful musical comedy, The Pearl Girl, that turned out to be his last work.
In 1912, actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree proposed another collaboration between Hood and German to provide a musical production based on the life of Sir Francis Drake, but German declined the commission feeling that its Elizabethan setting would merely result in re-covering old ground already explored in Merrie England. With the outbreak of World War I, German operetta lost its popularity. After that, Hood supplied lyrics for individual numbers for some musicals and wrote some non-musical plays.
Soon, however, Hood took a job with the British War Office.[1] He died four years later in his chambers at St. James Street at age 53.
[edit] Work as a director
Hood was also known as a director, directing among others a number of his own short pieces.
[edit] References
- Biography on the British Musical Theatre site, adapted from The Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre by Kurt Gänzl, retrieved 26 July 2006.
