AUDIO QUACK
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Some of my friends hate musicals. They just can’t get on board with fifteen people singing about a daughter working out who her dad is, or the French Revolution or two teenagers hooking up over the summer.
Sex-Ed Tom and I, though, love a musical. On Saturday, we went to see Titanique, a mock musical where ‘Celine Dion’ tells her version of the story Titanic. It was my third time seeing it because, honestly, it’s the funniest musical I have ever seen on stage. (This Quack is not sponsored by Titanique).
My love for musicals goes way back to when I saw Annie. I was around five and had learned all of the songs. For a period of time, I would sit on my bedroom window ledge and look out to the skyline of Didcot and sing, “Maybe far away. Or maybe real nearby.”
I asked my Mum for a red cardigan so I could look like her.
“We can get you a red cardigan,” she said.
“And I want to be an orphan,” I demanded.
“Erm….”
I got my red cardigan, and Mum slept with one eye open until I moved on to my next musical fixation, Lion King. And then it was Cats. (DO NOT mention the film). And then Blood Brothers. West Side Story. Jersey Boys. Whatever musical it was, I fell in love with the big songs, the dancing, and the dramatic stares that the actors do when holding a note.
In the hope that my passion would turn into talent, my parents signed me up for a theatre school in Abingdon. It was three hours every Saturday afternoon, an hour of acting, singing and dancing. I learnt to leap across the room, sing Bare Necessities, and how to do BIG expressions on stage from a white-haired woman named Pam, who only had one expression which read, I could have been Judi Dench.
The school put on West Side Story. I was with the younger kids who came on stage once to sing Somewhere. “There’s a place for us…”
I was an Italian gang member in 1950s New York and wore combat trousers and a blue T-shirt from Gap, which I was super proud of. My grandparents came to watch my debut in Abingdon, and my grandmother’s critique was that I wasn’t pushy enough on stage.
“If you want to be on stage, Mary, you must push yourself to the front.”
I didn’t know what she meant. As far as I was concerned, if Verity felt strongly about being at the front of the stage, then who was I to stop her?
Sadly, my road to becoming a West End musical legend came to a grounding halt one Saturday when I refused to get out of Mum’s MX5. I was not in the mood for leaping anymore. I hated singing Bare Necessities over and over again. And Verity was being a bitch. The day after my MX5 sit-in, I quit drama school, and my parents had to wave goodbye to their hope of having a West End star daughter.
What made this blow worse was when their friend’s daughter became an actual West End Star. Siobhan competed in How to Solve A Problem Like Maria and went on to be the lead in musicals like Sandy from Grease and Sally Bowles in Cabaret.
“Siobhan is so talented,” Dad would say. “She can act. She can sing, she can dance.”
“She sure can,” I would reply, and then continue to eat my Ben & Jerry’s Caramel Chew-Chew.
Even though I knew I would never be a star, I still loved watching musicals on stage and the screen. When I was 17, my boyfriend took me to Cineworld for a gift to see High School Musical 3. I watched with gooey eyes as Zac Efron spun Vanessa Hudgens around a flower garden in the rain, singing, “Can I have this dance?” I turned to my boyfriend to see if he was as moved by the scene as I was. Nope. He had his head resting on his hand and looked as bored as someone in a maths class.
As a grown-up, musicals still have that same effect on me. I’ll watch a show and obsessively listen to the soundtrack for weeks afterwards. In a post last year, The Euro Final: The Musical, I wrote about the Euro final day being musical. It’s a small but very real fantasy of mine to live in a musical world where people break into song.
This is how it would be:
A man and a woman are sitting in the corner of Starbucks. The man says, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got so much on at the moment, so I don’t think I can give you the time and attention you deserve.”
Out of nowhere, a piano starts playing.
The man closes his eyes in despair. (He hates living in a musical world).
The woman starts singing.
🎶Oh, look what I have…. another emotionally unavailable man. 🎶
At the song’s crescendo, everyone in Starbucks is on the tables singing.
🎶Another.
Another.
Another.
Just another emotionally unavailable man! 🎶
Until that world exists. I will have to make do with the songs on stage and the screen…or do I?
After Titanique, Tom took me to a bar in Soho called “The Room Where It Happens.” I had never heard of it, but it’s an upstairs piano bar on Greek Street, which only plays musical theatre numbers until 3 am.
It was a dark, creaky place, with a layout of an old house that probably once was filled with a plague-ridden family. Tucked up next to a wall was a piano surrounded by (primarily) women screaming Let it Go. Sex-Ed-Tom and I slotted into the crowd and joined in. Summer Nights. Don’t Rain on My Parade. Colours of The Wind…We sang them all. Well. Sex-Ed Tom sang them. He sings in a choir every weekend and has been on choir tours, so he’s actually a good singer.
I, on the other hand, refused to do any more theatre school by the time I was 8 years old, and that was, audibly, very, very obvious.
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