Toomorrow review
Most of the people in Toomorrow (at the London Pavilion; director, Val Guest) are students at the “London College of Arts,” which seems to be mainly concerned with music. And almost at once, we get a hint that the story’s basis is to be that deadly old cliché about the conflict between serious music and pop, as if they were totally different phenomena.
But it turns out to be not quite as bad as this. On one level it’s about the (not very remarkable, and casual enough to suggest on-the-spot improvisation) adventures of the students, particularly a pop group of four called Toomorrow; on another it concerns Alphoids, beings watching the whole thing from a space craft “20,000 earth miles away” (nice of them to measure in earth miles), who have an “observer” earth (Roy Dotrice).
There are some good comic ideas, but the attempt to combine the youth-and-pop scene with SFI (the youngsters are transported to the space craft and told by the Alphoids “You generate certain vibrations in your music and we need to study them”) seems laboriously artificial. The design of many of the special-effects devices is reminiscent of the nineteen-thirties, and that’s the trouble with the whole thing. They’re modern young people, in modern situation, but in detail their doings constantly suggest conventional old-style comedy. The frantically smart visuals (Panavision, Technicolor; Dick Bush), the stream of pop, and the carefully contemporary language can’t disguise this.