First Song Released From STEPHEN WARD Cast Recording, '1963'

The first full song from the original cast recording Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton's highly anticipated new West End musical STEPHEN WARD has been unveiled - a spirited, swingin' ditty titled "1963", also featuring a dialogue scene and dramatic final coda.

Instantly evoking the bouncy, breezy sound of early '60s pop radio, the first section of the song finds Christine Keeler (Charlotte Spencer) and MAndy Rice-Davies (Charlotte Blackledge) celebrating their planned future romantic conquests and letting off some steam.

"We will raise our game / And gain our share our fame," the girls sing while preparing to party (and proceeding to do so).

But, President Kennedy?! Well, given how this plays out, they'll have to settle for a Prime Minister or some members of Parliament.

Indeed, the tune soon takes a far darker tone shortly thereafter - "Jesus, Christine! Now, what?!" Mindy Rice-Davies says to Christine Keeler at the dramatic conclusion.

A tantalizingly tidbit, to say the very least! What an eclectic score this is turning out to be from the master musical chameleon!

The official synopsis for STEPHEN WARD is as follows: "STEPHEN WARD deals with the victim of the Profumo Affair - not, as is widely supposed, John Profumo himself, the disgraced Minister for War, nor even the fatally wounded Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, but the society osteopath whose private libertarian experiments blew up in his own and everyone else's face. In a trial as emblematic to the twentieth century as Oscar Wilde's was to the nineteenth - from which he was the only protagonist to emerge with some dignity and honour. Ward became the targeted scapegoat of a furiously self-righteous Establishment. By no means a hero, he was a reluctant martyr, thanks to an unholy alliance between Press and police of a kind we can all too readily recognise today; inadvertently, he was the hinge between two worlds and the harbinger of a revolution in manners, music and morals when the ordered, stuffy, respectful universe of the fifties gave way to the classless, truculent, unstoppable sixties."

STEPHEN WARD was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Christopher Hampton and Don Black, beginning previews in the West End on December 3. For more information, check out a previous article on STEPHEN WARD here.

Visit the official STEPHEN WARD Facebook page here.

The official West End cast recording for STEPHEN WARD will be released on December 30.

Listen to "1963" from the original cast recording of STEPHEN WARD below.