By Jeeves, originally Jeeves, is a musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and lyrics and book by Alan Ayckbourn. It is based on the series of novels and short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that centre around the character of Bertie Wooster and his loyal valet, Jeeves. Premiering on April 22, 1975, at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, the show flopped initially, running for only a month. After an extensive rewrite, the show was produced in 1996 in both London and America, and premiered on Broadway in 2001. 1975: Jeeves Background and production Tim Rice conceived the idea of turning P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories into a musical. Originally, he was to work with his then-partner, Andrew Lloyd Webber, but Rice backed out of the project. Eventually Lloyd Webber teamed up with famed British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, and the two of them began work with the personal blessing of Wodehouse. Ayckbourn utilised characters and plot lines from several Jeeves and Wooster stories, notably The Code of the Woosters. The action takes place at the East London Club for Unmanageable Boys, where Bertie Wooster is playing a banjo concert; his banjo keeps breaking down, so he is forced to tell stories to pass the time while Jeeves is sent off to fetch new strings. Bertie recounts how he managed to become engaged to three ladies simultaneously and how his valet Jeeves (through ingenious intervention) unravelled the complications. Tryout performances were held at the Bristol Hippodrome between 20 March and 5 April 1975. According to the programme, the Bristol show was presented by David Land and Guy Bolton. Unfortunately, the loyalty to the Wodehouse material made for an epic length (four and three-quarter hours at the Bristol tryouts), and reducing the duration made for creative tensions. Rows broke out about the presence of an all-male singing sextet accompanying Bertie Wooster and the realization that the first woman did not appear on stage until thirty-five minutes had passed. Additional problems were caused by Ayckbourn's lack of interest in musical theater as a genre: he was quoted at one point as saying, "I think musicals are pretty damn boring, but I hope this one is a bit different", and he ended up writing a book that could hypothetically stand on its own without songs. Lloyd Webber wrote a period score that eschewed all traces of the pop inflections of his work on Joseph