![]() What I recall through the fogbank of jet lag is that the musical started off on a fishy note with the six sisters (like the Andrews Sisters, times two) greeting the audience onstage with a harmonizing “Thanks for the Memory,” a song so familiar as Bob Hope’s sign-off that planting it here seemed like borderline larceny. It was not an evening in the theater to bring Kenneth Tynan springing out of retirement. The lavish mini-series adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac postwar romance, Brideshead Revisited-starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Claire Bloom, and Laurence Olivier-premiered within a week of The Mitford Girls’ opening in 1981, and the sumptuous trappings and muffled intrigues of the landed nobility made for a cultural moment that had everyone abuzz then and has endured, all the way up to Downton Abbey. ![]() Perhaps it was the Brideshead Effect that prompted me. Why I chose that concoction over so many other marquee-blazers remains a muddle and a mystery, my awareness of the Mitford clan and their fabled rap sheet being somewhat sketchy. ![]() ![]() In those footloose days when I thought little of popping off to London once or twice a year to pad around Piccadilly and catch the latest shows, I found myself at a new musical called The Mitford Girls. ![]()
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