Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a playwright. He started life as a hairdresser and it was only when his future wife took him to see a play at the Liverpool Every Man theatre that ambition stirred within him.

Plays he realized could be about everyday life and everyday language. him. end hit. It changed his life. Since then he's written many popular and successful plays

and musicals, often capitalizing on his ability to write for women. Educating Rita and

the one woman show Shirley Valentine were both turned into highly successful

films and Blood Brothers is now in its 11th year in London and first year on Broadway.

He is Willie Russell. Blood Brothers Willie running successfully on

Broadway despite a terrible mauling by Frank Rich, the butcher of Broadway.

Frank Rich didn't give us a good review, but after receiving virtual cyanide pills from the rest of the critics,

Frank's review looked like a fairly good review.

But yeah, uniquely, really, Blood Brothers has managed to survive that sort

of critical battering.

But when...

Weren't you in the middle of a wonderful party celebrating the great first night on Broadway when these

Oh the classic is the classic you have to go through that you know you have to sit

there and what happens of course is it's not the newspapers that come in the first

reviews that come in at the other TV stations you know and the first one Julie came

through and they called it bloody awful or twin reeks or something like that and I

thought oh here we go and sure enough from from then on every

review was damning and I thought we'd be closed within the week despite the

fact that the audience has risen to its feet yes but, but audience can be very fickle, I mean, especially on Broadway, if they're told that they should not like a show.

...