Whisky Galore is back … and this time it's served up with a musical twist

NEARLY 70 years ago, the grounding of a wartime cargo of whisky off a Hebridean island spawned a comic novel, a classic film and a stage play.

But, for the first time, a musical of the famous yarn is now heading for a major Scottish stage, with dreams of taking it to London and Broadway.

Whisky Galore! The Musical will play to up to 16,000 people in one of Scotland's most popular summer theatre venues, Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

The show, based on Compton Mackenzie's novel, mixes the haunting sound of Western Isles song with 1940s big-band numbers and is the first musical in the theatre's 50-year history.

"We would like this to go much further, to London and Broadway," said Shona McKee McNeil, who wrote the script for the show.

Part of this year's Homecoming Scotland programme, it would be an ideal export for a future "Tartan Week" in New York, she said.

The show, which includes music composed by Ian Hammond Brown, had its first outing at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe, earning critical acclaim in a small church venue.

The Pitlochry production is nearly twice the length, with more of the original characters in a larger cast, on a bigger stage and with bolder ambitions.

"We are hoping to have a mock-up of a huge side of the ship on stage," said Ms McNeil.

Auditions for a principal cast of 12 actor-musicians, who can both sing and play instruments, plus extras, are beginning this month.

For several years, a Scottish production team has been trying to remake Whisky Galore!, the memorable Ealing comedy film from 1949, but has struggled to raise the cash.

The musical is firmly based on the novel, because the makers acquired the rights to the book, not the film, which are separately owned. Ms McNeil has not even watched the film.

It returns to the book's comic take on the religious divide, where Protestant and Catholic islanders differ on whether to salvage spirits from the ship on a Sunday.

The original idea for a musical from Compton Mackenzie's work came from the theatre impresario, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Ms McNeil revealed.

Derek Allen, Pitlochry's deputy chief executive, said: "Pitlochry has never done a musical before, it's a first for us in this genre.

"We have wanted to do one for some time, but the scale and cost of producing one are quite large," he said .

"We didn't want to compete with the traditional musicals format. It is unique in that it will play to all the Scottish strengths of culture and tradition, and the folk music of the Highlands and Islands."

Mr Brown based his songs on traditional Gaelic mouth music and walking and rowing songs, but he added it does have a "musical theatre feel" with some rousing choruses.

"I loved the story from Whisky Galore! when I was younger, it's pure entertainment for me."

250,000 bottles and one cunning plan

THE SS Politician ran aground off Eriskay in 1941 carrying about 250,000 bottles of whisky bound for the United States.

Islanders took thousands of cases from the wreck before it was blown up by customs officers. The few surviving bottles have fetched more than £2,000 at auction.

Compton Mackenzie, the novelist and intelligence agent who settled on Barra, used the incident for his comic novel Whisky Galore in 1947, setting the story on the fictional islands of Protestant Great Todday and Catholic Little Todday.

The 1949 Ealing comedy, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, starred Basil Radford as Captain Paul Waggett, Catherine Lacey as Mrs Waggett, Bruce Seton as Sergeant Odd, Joan Greenwood as Peggy Macroon, and Wylie Watson as Joseph Macroon. The film's marketing tagline was: "A Highland fling on a tight little island."

In 1966 the Edinburgh People's Theatre, a company first formed with close ties to Scottish Labour, produced the first stage play. Shona McKee McNeil, who wrote the script or "book" for the musical, went to Barra for research.

"I interviewed one of the chaps who took some whisky off the boat, got to know Barra, where you can't do anything without everyone knowing it," she said. "He kept going on about oil, that everything was covered in oil, so whenever they came out they were filthy."