Bob Hilliard was stationed in Europe at the end of World War II. After celebrating New Year’s Eve in Paris, he and a buddy spent the first 10 days of 1946 on leave in London.
Three years later, Hilliard wrote a musical based on that period in his life … and in the life of our nation.
The script has resided in a desk drawer for the past 75 years, but it hits the stage of The Laboratory Theater of Florida on Saturday, Dec. 28, for a limited run of five performances.
“This is the premiere because I put it in the drawer,” said Hilliard. “Now, over the years, occasionally I would take it out and if I knew a producer, a director, someone of that kind … and each time, I thought well, maybe someday something will happen and it went back in the drawer. But in recent years, with the urging and help of Roger Williams, the Florida Weekly columnist, Roger finally got Jeff Cull and Ella Nayor to provide the funds to produce it.”
Cull and Nayor have an ongoing relationship with Lab Theater founder Annette Trossbach, who agreed to stage and cast the musical, which is directed by Kaci Davis. But a new challenge presented itself. Hilliard needed a musician to annotate and arrange the score.
Enter Earl Sparrow, Jr.
“I don’t annotate music,” Hilliard said. “I don’t write music. All of this has been in my head…. So Earl Sparrow — and he’s very good, very cooperative — what he has done now is to annotate all of my songs, and to arrange them, so he’s done the arrangements and he has worked on the music for a couple of additional songs.”
The result is a score that evokes the music popular in the 1930s and ‘40s.
“Essentially, it’s blues-based,” said Hilliard. “Earl is working and taking some of these songs and the tracking blues, the real feeling of what we had from the old blues.”
The crux of Hilliard’s story is an interracial romance between a white G.I. and a black entertainer, a topic that was undeniably scandalous at the time Hilliard wrote the script. But the story continues to have legs in light of Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the Dobbs decision questioning the validity of all due process precedents, including the rights to contraceptive access and to same-sex marriage.
While Thomas did not include the decision that sanctioned interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia), it is subject to reconsideration since it, too, is predicated on the right of privacy that Thomas and the Dobbs decision have called into question.
“From my point of view, we’ve not made the progress we should have, but there’s been some incremental progress,” said Hilliard. “It’s moved ahead so that today we do have interracial marriage and I like to think at least in many parts of America, it’s acceptable although the area where I am living now in Florida, I hate to say, very rare.”
Performances are 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, December 28; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, December 29; and 7:30 p.m. on Monday, December 30.
Tickets are $42 each or $15 for students with valid student IDs.
Veterans can reserve free tickets by calling the box office.
For tickets, please call the box office at 239-218-0481 or online at www.laboratorytheaterflorida.com.
MORE INFORMATION:
Bob Hilliard was stationed in Germany at the end of World War II. While there, he witnessed the Army’s treatment of those who’d survived the death camps located throughout war-torn Germany and Poland.
These survivors were known as “displaced persons.”
After leaving such horrific places as Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, Belsen and Sachsenhausen, they congregated in various refugee camps throughout the countryside. They had little more than the clothing on their backs. After years of malnutrition, and plagued by diseases ranging from dysentery to typhus, they were in desperate need of medical attention and proper nutrition –— not the chocolate, jams and rich and fatty foods their well-meaning liberators gave them, inadvertently causing the death of thousands in the immediate aftermath of their liberation.
“The heads of these camps sent letters to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Supreme Headquarters in Paris begging for help because [the displaced persons] continued to die,” said Hilliard. “They had no food, no medical supplies or clothing. They still wore their concentration camp uniforms.”
Their entreaties went unheeded.
“They wrote twice. I have copies of both letters that they sent. No reply from Eisenhower,” said Hilliard.
That’s when Hilliard and another enlisted soldier, Ed Hermann, got involved.
They wrote their own letter, accusing the American people of continued genocide by neglect.
“We did not know what was going to happen,” Hilliard recounted. “We found out later that our letter reached President Truman. Eisenhower, in the meantime, had done nothing for the displaced persons.”
One day, a full colonel arrived to speak with Hilliard and Hermann separately.
“Turned out we had the same conversations that day,” said Hilliard. “[The colonel] said that General Eisenhower just learned about [the plight of the displaced persons].”
There was bad blood between the general and President Truman, so Truman was only too happy to call out Eisenhower for his neglect of the former concentration camp inmates.
“Eisenhower [no doubt] said, ‘Who are these two little bastards who blew the whistle on me,’” Hilliard speculated. “And so this full colonel comes in and says, ‘The general wants to congratulate you on going beyond the call of duty.’ Noting that my feet had suffered frostbite during the Battle of the Bulge, he said, ‘We need soldiers like you and Hermann, because you really go beyond the call of duty, in the Aleutian Islands -- even though the war is over and you’re otherwise eligible for discharge. We can hold up your discharges, because we need people like you.’”
Hilliard and Hermann later learned that Eisenhower had been further embarrassed by the publication of stories about the situation by The New York Times and other newspapers throughout the country.
In fact, the story in The Times on September 30, 1945 garnered a front page headline: “President Orders Eisenhower to End New Abuse of Jews; Likens Our Treatment to That of the Nazis.”
Eisenhower’s indifference to the plight of the displaced persons seems odd in retrospect. After U.S. forces reached Ohrdruf on April 4, 1945, Eisenhower made a visit to the labor camp. He was so shocked by what he found that he immediately telephoned Winston Churchill to describe the conditions, which included the corpses of hundreds of prisoners who’d been shot through the eye on the eve of the camp’s liberation by the American Army. In fact, Eisenhower sent photographs of the dead prisoners to Churchill, who then circulated them to each member of the British cabinet.
But post-war exigencies, including rumored dalliances with at least one member of his staff, kept Eisenhower from ensuring the humane treatment of the concentration camp refugees. Thousands who’d survived the death camps and the forced marches that characterized the waning days of the war in the European Theater died as a direct and proximate result of the Army’s failure to provide them with adequate food, shelter, clothing and medical attention.
“He was doing a lot of stuff, and this took a backseat on his agenda and he was doing nothing about it,” Hilliard summarized.
By virtue of Hilliard and Hermann's intervention, the displaced persons got the aid they so desperately needed. Thousands of lives were saved in the process.
While none of these experiences are directly incorporated into the characters or storyline of Hilliard’s musical, “Piccadilly” did evolve out of the circumstances and atmosphere prevailing in Germany, France and especially England in the weeks and months following Hitler’s death and Germany’s surrender on May 9, 1945.
“All this happened with Eisenhower, and Truman, of course, changed the whole direction of our occupation and made sure [the displaced persons] got aid and opened it up to all aid groups, and that took place in September and October,” Hilliard recalled. “My assistant editor [of the base newspaper, "Second Wing Eagle"], Anthony DeBiasi, and I got leave together and we went to Paris on New Year’s Eve — that’s another story — and did the kind of montage of night clubs that you see in the movies. That was a fantastic experience for two young soldiers.”
Afterwards, they traveled to London.
“And one of the places that we wanted to go to, which was a tourist place, was Piccadilly Circus,” said Hilliard. “It was a place where tourists enjoyed the view. It was a beautiful square. They had a wonderful statue there, and that’s where we saw the kinds of activity that later prompted me to say I should make a play out of this.”
Officially and popularly known as “Eros,” the statue is part of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain. The winged sculpture of the Greek god of love, Anteros, was erected between 1892 and 1893 to commemorate the philanthropic works of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.
While the play is informed by Hilliard’s actual experiences during this time, it is not autobiographical or semi-autobiographical. Rather, it was “Eros,” or to be more precise, “the ladies of the afternoon and ladies of the evening and their johns” the statue engendered who provided the inspiration for the play.
“One of the things that I did notice, coming from at that time Jim Crow America … was there was almost no color line. You had at that time, and the war was over now, soldiers, sailors, Marines from a number of countries would come there. Many of the soldiers would find an afternoon’s entertainment with one of the working girls, and I noticed there were no color lines. It was the kind of thing you didn’t find in America, and I always, always, always believed there should be no discrimination against people, there should be no hate against people because that leads to the worst kind of evil.”
While they were approached by several working girls, neither Hilliard (“I was too young and shy”) nor DeBiasi (“he was married”) hooked up. But they did spend hours watching the action taking place in the Circus.
“This is the type of story your grandparents never told you. World War II veterans will re-live their own experiences, and veterans of any war will find parallels to their own experiences on leave. And everyone else will experience what their grandfathers and grandmothers who were in the war never dared to tell them,” Hilliard said.
“Essentially, the plot deals with two soldiers, Billy and Joe, on leave in London. Joe is older, and supposedly looking after Bill, who’s the younger one. Joe wants culture. Joe wants to go to the museums, wants to go to the concerts. Bill wants to go to the football or soccer games, wants to go to entertainment where there are dancing girls and singing girls.”
Early on, Joe tells young Bill that he’d never be naïve enough to fall in love with a prostitute, but fate intervenes when Joe runs into an old buddy who is accompanied by two working girls. In spite of his protestations, Joe in fact connects with one of those women while Bill, a shy, retiring farm boy from Iowa [think Radar O’Reilly] strikes up a relationship and falls head over heels for an African-British lounge singer.
“And that, to me, is the crux of the play,” said Hilliard.
For context, interracial relationships were taboo in Jim Crow America. Interracial marriage would not become legal until 1967 (with the decision in Loving v. Virginia).
Lena Horne was a case in point. When the singer/actor met and fell in love with white bandleader, composer and MGM musical director Lennie Hayton in 1947, the couple not only had to get married in France, they had to keep their marriage a secret as interracial marriage was a crime in 30 states, including California, where they lived.
“People are people,” said Hilliard. “I didn’t see the prejudice, I didn’t see the hate [in Britain] that I saw in America. I didn’t see the Jim Crow kind of things that I saw in America.”
This stark contrast is what compelled Hilliard to write “Piccadilly.”
That actually happened three years later, in 1949, when Hilliard was in graduate school at Western Reserve University [now Case Western University] in Cleveland, Ohio. A theater major, Hilliard had his sights set on becoming a playwright.
Writing a musical was, frankly, the last thing Hilliard ever expected to do, but he concluded that the plot and characters of “Piccadilly” did not lend themselves to a straight play or drama.
“It would have been too much of a polemic as a drama,” said Hilliard. “If I told it straight, it would be like the educational propaganda plays, in a sense, of the 1930s. And so I thought, musical.”
It also helped that Hilliard had written quite a bit of poetry at the time.
While music has been part of theater since the time of the Greeks, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein revolutionized musical theater in 1927 when they integrated songs into the narrative of "Show Boat" to address serious themes like racial prejudice and social inequality.
This innovation set the stage for future productions to explore complex subjects while entertaining audiences. That evolution led to such groundbreaking classics as “Oklahoma!”, “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “My Fair Lady,” “Oliver” and “The Sound of Music” in the 1940s, ‘50s and early ‘60s.
“Now I knew about ‘Oklahoma!’ Actually, one of the guys in our outfit had been in the chorus of ‘Oklahoma!’ So I thought, this is the future,” said Hilliard. “This is what musical comedy should become. Now I don’t know whether I thought about it in those terms, but at least I felt it. And so when I wrote this, I thought with music, I’m going to say something here that a lot of people would not like, particularly in America, about integration. But if we put it in a musical, maybe they’ll be entertained and will get the point without injecting it because it’s a polemic. So that was the idea behind it.”
So Hilliard wrote “Piccadilly” as a musical, creating not only the book for the story, but the lyrics to each of the songs included in the show. Unfortunately, Hilliard did not know anyone who could finance the project. In addition, he had to earn a living. So he placed the script in a drawer with the hope that he’d find a way to bring the story to the stage someday.
The years turned into decades. Every once in a while, he’d pull out the script and show it to a producer or director he had occasion to meet. While they were always complimentary of his lyrical ability, none offered to produce the musical until Florida Weekly correspondent Roger Williams read it and showed it to then Florida Weekly Executive Director Jeff Cull and his wife, Ella Nayor.
Cull and Nayor talked to Laboratory Theater founder Annette Trossbach, who agreed to cast and produce the show, which Kaci Davis directs. She also put Hilliard in touch with Lab Theater’s longstanding musical director, Earl Sparrow, Jr.
While Hilliard took piano lessons from his mother as a youth, he hasn’t played a musical instrument for decades and neither writes nor arranges music. He’s kept the entire score for the musical in his head for the past 75 years and has worked assiduously with Sparrow to breathe life into each song. Sparrow not only annotated Hilliard’s tunes, he helped arrange them, along with two new songs that Hilliard added to the musical.
While “Piccadilly” explores a number of controversial social themes, the play is not without humor. For example, there’s a fisherman whose wife has borne “one child, two now three, none of them who look like me.”
Levity aside, “Piccadilly” makes a number of statements about the human condition and the nature of relationships. In the musical, the protagonists, Billy and Joe, fall in love incredibly quickly. That happens in many musicals, but it was descriptive of the experience of many service men and women in the weeks and months following their return to civilian life.
“Particularly if you were in a combat situation, you go on leave, if you’re lucky, you meet somebody, you don’t know whether you’re going to die the next day when you go back,” Hilliard wryly observed.
In addition, they were keenly aware of the fragility of life and immediacy of the present as a result of the monumental death and destruction they witnessed both on duty and off base.
“I saw the death and destruction,” Hilliard added. “I saw the concentration camps. I saw the displaced persons, what they were suffering and how so many continued to die.”
But make no mistake, the main thrust of “Piccadilly” is the importance of human relationships and the ability to freely love who you love, regardless of race, religion or other presumed barriers.
“I want to make the point that we still have not made nearly the kind of progress we should have made in human relations,” said Hilliard. “I want people to come away feeling that they should behave and think and do something to make the world a little better, and I hope this will help a little bit.”
Director Kaci Davis adds, “Piccadilly is a story of love and loss set in the magical world of Piccadilly Circus at the end of World War II, transformed into a musical. I am excited to be directing a world premiere. It is a chance to bring to life a never-before-performed work. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to direct this play and allow the playwright the opportunity to see it come to life.”
Piccadilly is sponsored by Ella Nayor and Jeff Cull.
Robert Hilliard is a published author, a WWII hero and concentration camp liberator, a college professor emeritus, and was instrumental in the establishment of public broadcasting. This musical has been a passion project of his since the end of WWII.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.