Turds and Music

I'm in the middle of trying to write a musical. I'm not writing the music bit of the musical, just the 'al' bit, which in the musical world is called 'the book'. I'm writing all the stuff people say between the songs and some of the words of the songs, and then someone else who has trained in musical theatre in New York and can actually read music is writing the music. My co-writer is more than happy to listen to my musical suggestions, although so far my only contribution has been to suggest a melody that later turned out to be 'The Gambler' by Kenny Rogers. I blame my parents. They loved a bit of Kenny Rogers and thrashed the phonograph with him, John Denver, Nana Mouskouri, James Last, and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass all through my formative years, so it's no surprise Kenny's been incubating inside me like a silver beardy alien just waiting to burst out and embarrass me in front of my collaborator.

I used to love a good musical. Some of the first shows I was involved in were musicals put on by the St Joseph's Light Operatic Society. I'm not sure who St Joseph was but he obviously loved his light opera. Here's a picture of him in The Sound of Music.

The resemblance to Julie Andrews is uncanny, although he could have shaved. Here he is with a pipe wrench in West Side Story.

Bit of a dodgy prop but you work with what you've got. Finally here he is in the role he's best known for, Joseph, with his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was the first musical that started to really get on my tits. I think Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote it as a high school musical before High School Musical and boy did he nail it. There's only so many years a young man can be forced to sing, 'I closed my eyes, drew back the curtain, AH UH AHHH, to see for certain....AH AHHHHHH, what I thought I knew', before his thoughts turn to self harm and Silver Dollar Vodka brewed in Kaiapoi. And the line makes no sense. So, this young man thinks Andrew Lloyd Webber is outside his window furiously masturbating, but to make sure of it he draws back his curtains to have a look...with his eyes closed. You can't blame him, but he still won't see for certain what he thought he knew. Not content with inflicting horror on high school students the globe over, ALW decided to prolong the agony by letting rip with this little gem in 2007.

Holy Hannah. It was called 'Any Dream Will Do' and kept viewers gripped for 9 weeks to see which boy Andrew would choose to handle his big part. ALW was looking for a young man, "who's a bit of a Justin Timberlake, tiny touch of the Michael Jacksons and a bit of the Jude Laws", and in the only disturbing episode I saw was sweating like a sea bass on heat as young men descended into his dungeon studio in nothing but loincloths for a bit of one on one mentoring.

Andrew Lloyd Webber waiting for his next Joseph

But before Joseph I was really into musicals. I sang 'Dites-Moi' in South Pacific and 'This Was A Real Nice Clambake' in Carousel, even though I didn't and still don't have any idea what a clambake is. I was the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz in Form One, and the lead in some bizarre Form Two show called Hunter's Gold that was set in Central Otago and ripped off all the songs from Paint Your Wagon. I may have been the first and last person to ever sing 'Wand'rin Star' in the register of a choir boy. I was Oliver on alternate nights in Oliver! for The North Canterbury Musical Society, Bugsy Malone in Bugsy Malone, and the retarded boy who got killed at the end of the first half in The Doctor and The Devils, which wasn't a musical but probably should have been.

I went and saw Cats! in Sydney with my mother when I was about 13 and loved it. I even wrote a puff piece gushing about it for the school rag. I saw Le Mis and loved it as well. All the musicals I'd been in I loved. And then we started singing Every bloody Dream Will bloody Do every bloody year and I decided musicals were a bit shit. It didn't help I went and saw some touring production of Chess and got sick as a dog half-way through while the Arbiter forgot his lines. Even just watching this makes me sweat and shake and go all foetal. By the time an international musical makes it to New Zealand all the good people have long since scarpered, and we end up witnessing a bunch of bored understudies dance around Ray Woolf. I finally saw Phantom, thankfully with free tickets, and the best part was the dry ice.

The final nail in my musical coffin came while I was living in London. My parents were coming to visit and wanted to see a musical. They'd seen all the usual West End suspects, so I booked three tickets to see a show that had been getting rave reviews called Passion, by Stephen Sondheim. It had Tonys coming out of its arse and Sondheim had written the lyrics for West Side Story which has lots of finger clicking in it, so it was bound to be good. The curtain went up and my parents and I were greeted with two people shagging and singing a song that sounded nothing like 'Something's Coming'. It was all highly uncomfortable and I couldn't make any sense of it and there was no finger clicking. My parents bravely stuck with it to the very end and we made a pact never to speak of it again. I'm sure it will cost me some of my inheritance.

And now I'm helping write a musical of my own. I can't tell you what it's about, but it's going to have lots of dry ice and finger clicking.