Spit & Polish: RIP Joan Brickhill, the great producer who brought glamour into our lives

When I heard about the death of Joan Brickhill, I stopped what I was doing and went to sit in the sun for a while, to remember the grand musicals that she and her partner, Louis Burke, staged.

For at least a decade, they were South Africa's top theatrical producers and in 1990 they scored a major coup when they took their production of Meet Me in St. Louis to Broadway - where it earned a "best musical" nomination.

The couple also did the city of Johannesburg a favour. When greedy officials at the municipality wanted to close down His Majesty's, the Brickhill-Burke team spruced up the grand old theatre and staged a string of shows. Their commitment to their craft added at least another decade to the life of His Majesty's.

One day I found a bulky envelope in my post box, with an unsigned note saying, "I hope you enjoy it!" When I opened it, I found a 1949 playbill, featuring pictures of the stars of a South African production of the show Annie Get Your Gun.

That surprised me. The Broadway debut of that show was in 1946 and a mere three years later, the play became a hit in Joburg. It reminded me that South Africa, at that time, was still part of the wider international world, but that soon changed.

The Annie Get Your Gun playbill was more like a 22-page consumer magazine. There were pictures of all the actors, with their real names and the names of the characters they played. The rest of the programme was advertising, which I would usually just ignore, but this magazine was 65 years old and I wondered what 1949 style looked like.

On the back-cover of this magazine there is a cartoon of a buxom cowgirl brandishing a rifle, with the slogan: "Someone's hijackin' the Castle beers."

Well, South African Breweries was founded by Charles Glass in 1894, but before that the oldest beer in South Africa was made by Jan van Riebeeck at the Castle in Cape Town, which is how the SAB product got its name.

Then there was an ad for Du Maurier cigarettes, with a drawing of a glamorous woman reaching for her cigarettes so that she can enjoy the extra smoothness "peculiar to Du Maurier cigarettes - thanks to the filter tip". What is interesting is that in 1949 a pack of 20 cigarettes cost just "one-and-six".

I remember as a youngster walking Joburg's streets and peering into Bermeisters camera shop on Kerk Street between Rissik and Joubert streets. I saved up my pocket money to buy my own camera. I was also surprised to see in the playbill that the men's clothing company Rex Trueform started in 1937.

Another long-standing business advertised in the playbill was Bothners. Back in 1949, they sold the recording of the music from Annie Get Your Gun. There was another music store, Polliacks, which has been in business since 1896. The original store was the first shop on Hanover Street in Cape Town's District Six.

My favourite advertisement, however, was for "Rondi's Mellowrich Ice Cream", which had the slogan: "They say it's wonderful".

Which brings me back to the death of Joan Brickhill, and the memories of how she and Louis gave theatre audiences fun and glamour with the songs and stories they sent onto the stage.