Hal Cazalet, opera singer, international cabaret artist and raconteur, has performed his one-man musical tribute to one of this country’s best-loved humourists, in places as far apart as The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai and The Crazy Coqs in London's West End.

In October, Play On Words, A Musical Celebration of P.G. Wodehouse on Broadway comes north on tour to make its eagerly anticipated Yorkshire debut, at the SJT.

“It will be an honour to come to Scarborough and play in the theatre which is so closely associated with Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who went out to America to meet Plum in his senior years,” he begins brightly. Ayckbourn is known to greatly admire Wodehouse’s work, and scripted By Jeeves, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which revived interest in the novels and stories featuring Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, his long-suffering gentleman’s gentleman.

The Scarborough-based playwright whose 91st play, Earth Angel, runs at the SJT from September 13th to October 11th, also stepped in at the last moment to direct the 1975 West End production of the musical.

Thanks to this and not least the television series in the 1990s, Jeeves and Wooster, starring Sir Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, Wodehouse’s name is known to modern-day audiences, synonymous with the gentle leg-pulling of loveable eccentrics in the 1920s and 30s.

It may surprise many to know that this most quintessentially English writer, always affectionately known as Plum (the diminutive of his Christian name, Pelham), was also arguably the founder of the American Musical. Indeed he had a hugely successful and influential career in that country before returning to England to take up a different kind of writing for which we now remember him.

It’s quite clear that Hal (whose middle name is Pelham) has inherited something of Wodehouse’s DNA, if not directly his blood. “I am his step-great grandson,” he says, proudly, explaining the complicated lineage, which stems from Wodehouse’s marriage in New York in 1914 to the then widowed, Ethel Rowley, the grandmother of Sir Edward Cazalet, the retired High Court judge, Hal’s father.

“In the early 1980s I met my great grandmother Ethel shortly after Plum died, who even at 98, would make her entrance into a room in pearls, heels, feather boa and a black sequin dress!”

It was the discovery around the turn of the Millennium of a family treasure trove of scripts, photographs and sheet music relating to Wodehouse’s early years in America that stimulated Hal’s interest in researching the great man’s contribution to the popular musical, in its early golden age, and his work with the great composers such as the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein.

Up to this point Hal had enjoyed an international reputation as a lyric tenor, trained at the Guildhall, in London, and the Juilliard School, New York, and had performed in most of the world’s great opera houses. One of his most memorable roles was in the world premiere, in 1996, of Les Enfants Terribles, Philip Glass’s chamber opera based on Jean Cocteau’s novel. “Working with Philip gave me a real insight into the industry but I’ve always had wide-ranging musical interests and influences,” he says. This explains how he is able to modulate between, say, Mozart and Cole Porter whenever the need arises, as it often has in the last seven years since Play on Words was first devised by the show's director, Hugh Woodridge.

Wodehouse’s career as lyricist spanned two decades from 1915, when Jazz was just emerging from Ragtime, to 1935 when suddenly Swing was King. He contributed lyrics for 25 musicals, all famous in their day, and his early collaboration with Jerome Kern is recognised as having paved the way for that composer’s new approach to the genre with Show Boat, in collaboration with Guy Bolton.

The big show of 1934 was Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, which was packed full of what became standards, like You’re the Top, and the title song, and it was for these two show stoppers Plum was called in to Anglicize the lyrics for the London transfer, in 1935.

“Plum was hailed the first great lyricist of American musical and in 1917 had five Musicals running simultaneously on Broadway,” Hal says, “and my show, with Simon Beck at the piano, is a heartfelt personal homage to his amazing achievement in taking America by storm and writing so wittily and catchily in their popular idiom.”

All of this, we can be sure, will provide the richest of material for this musical tribute and will abundantly support Hal’s passionate belief that Wodehouse’s years on Broadway not only defined the American musical but informed the way he subsequently wrote his novels.

Hal will naturally be singing some of the great songs and relating, often in Wodehouse’s own words, many stories of the man universally admired by fellow wordsmiths, Sir Alan Ayckbourn being no exception, as a comic genius. “No one did word play quite like Plum,” Hal concludes. “He had an inimitable knack of poking fun at human foibles in the most benign way. You just can’t help laughing out loud the moment you start to read him.”

It promises all in all to be a memorable night. What ho!

“Anything in life that’s any fun,” Wodehouse once wrote, “is either immoral, illegal or fattening!” So beware!

Play On Words, A Musical Celebration of P.G. Wodehouse on Broadway is at the SJT, Scarborough, on Saturday, October 18th at 7.30pm. BOX OFFICE, 01723 370541: tickets@sjt.uk.com