Sandy Wilson, the British composer and playwright whose hit musical “The Boy Friend” starred Julie Andrews in her Broadway debut, died on Wednesday in Taunton, England. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by the office of his agent, Nick Quinn.
Mr. Wilson wrote the book, music and lyrics for “The Boy Friend,” a romantic parody of 1920s musicals. A boy-meets-girl story set at a finishing school on the French Riviera, the show featured flapper dress and self-consciously innocuous songs like “I Could Be Happy With You” and “Won’t You Charleston With Me?”
The show began as a Players’ Theater production in London in 1953 but drew such an enthusiastic response that a longer version opened at Wyndham’s Theater in the West End in 1954, where it would be performed nearly 2,100 times before closing.
Later that year the show opened at the Royale Theater (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater) on Broadway.
“Mr. Wilson’s light cartoon of the standard musical play of the ’20s is extremely well done in manuscript as well as onstage,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in a review in The New York Times, going on to praise Mr. Wilson’s “satirical inventiveness.”
The show proved a breakthrough for Ms. Andrews, who was only 19 at the time and whose performance won the hearts of many critics.
“She breathes such lunatic sincerity into the pink lozenge of ‘Boy Friend’s’ plot that you’re not sure whether it’s your leg or your heartstrings that are being pulled, and you don’t much care,” Helen Markel wrote in a New York Times Magazine profile of Ms. Andrews in 1954. Her next Broadway part was Eliza Doolittle in the original production of “My Fair Lady,” followed by the films that made her an international star, “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music.”
“The Boy Friend” ran for more than 480 performances at the Royale and has been revived both on Broadway and off.
A film adaptation, written and directed by Ken Russell and starring Tommy Tune and Twiggy, in her feature film debut, was released in 1971. Reviews of the film, whose elaborate staging included chorus girls spinning on a gigantic turntable, tended to be much cooler than reviews of the stage show had been.
Alexander Galbraith Wilson was born in Sale, Manchester, England, on May 19, 1924, too late to see much of the Roaring Twenties. Nevertheless he felt their influence.
“I was brought up with my cradle being rocked to the Charleston,” he was quoted in a 1970 article in The Christian Science Monitor.
He attended Harrow School and served in the army in the Middle East during World War II. He graduated from Oxford, where he wrote and produced student productions, and then attended the Old Vic Theater School before he began contributing to revues for West End theaters.
Mr. Wilson also wrote the book, music and lyrics for “Valmouth” (1958), an adaptation of the Ronald Firbank novel set in an imaginary British resort, and “Divorce Me, Darling!” (1964), a sequel to “The Boy Friend” that spoofed 1930s musicals. He is survived by his partner, Chak Yui.
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