A few years back, I was on an early date with the bass player of a storied punk rock band. I’d been comped two tickets to School of Rock, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical theatre adaptation of the frolicsome comedy about a schlubby rock slacker who cons a bunch of school kids into forming a band. At intermission, I turned to my date and enquired brightly, ‘So, what do you think?’
The bass player leaned in, fixed me with a look, then whispered: ‘I hate musicals.’ Oh. In the musical version of this date, that’d be the cue for a record needle scratch sound effect, and the set-up for an adorable he/she spat song à la Gershwin’s ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’. But in the unsoundtracked, laboriously prosaic real-life version, there was just an awkward, slightly mortified silence. ‘Well, why did you agree to come?’ I managed to splutter. ‘Because I wanted to see you,’ came the answer. Okay, so that was sweet, but how much sweeter would it have been had the orchestra swelled behind us and my swain launched into Rodgers and Hart’s ‘My Funny Valentine’? Basically, there’s nothing that can’t be improved by singing it out.
My love of musical theatre is a chicken/egg proposition: yes, my first trip to the cinema was at the age of five to see The Sound of Music, and also yes my first ‘performance’ was around that same age garbling Adler and Ross’s ‘Steam Heat’ from The Pajama Game, dramatically staged under the weeping willow tree in front of my house to the bemusement of passers-by. By the time I was nine, I’d memorised every song off the original cast recording of Webber/Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, and to this day I am available for hire to perform the entire work as a one-woman show from salons to stadiums. Bafflingly, my religious father forbade a family outing to see JC Superstar during a London trip because of the ‘nudity’. I later realised he’d mixed up the decently loinclothed Messiah with the altogether more louche crowd of Hair, a contemporary production featuring a naked ‘be-in’. (I presume Dad hadn’t heard his tween daughter trilling Hair’s ‘Black boys are so damn yummy, they satisfy my tummy!’ to the cast album spinning in the rec room.)
High school was where it all came together for this song-and-dance nerd: our acclaimed theatre department provided an outlet for what the jocks sneeringly referred to as ‘drama fags’, an epithet we DFs proudly accepted. Productions of Webber/Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Stephen Schwartz’s Pippin allowed me to take my first steps towards becoming the director of my own daily life.
Through singing, through dancing, through choreographing, through navigating rehearsals and prickly people and my own insecurities, I was empowered to create and to collaborate, two life skills that help knit a skein of individuals into community. Whether it’s medieval morality plays or Matilda, onstage hammery has always been a sneaky source of information about how the world really works. To wit.
School of Rock: raw potential is a superpower. Matilda: justice demands courage. Hamilton: history dudes love a bitch-slap fight. Jesus Christ Superstar: being an influencer isn’t as rosy as it’s cracked up to be.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I feel a song coming on…
