I’d do anything (to squeeze as many musicals references as I can into one post…)

 

Our next stop in this journey told through musical programmes takes us back to some of the local amateur productions that I saw in 2009 and 2010 in Angus and Dundee. For a small town, there was almost always a show on in Montrose and there were some very high-quality productions too, partly due to several talented performing families in the town, one such family being the Tomlinsons. The three sons in the family (Chris, Nick and Matthew) appeared in many of our local Song Shop shows (musicals and pantos). Chris, for example, was as good a pantomime dame as you’re ever likely to find - many of us will never forget his Beyoncé, his Miley Cyrus and his Britney Spears! The brothers also appeared with other local theatre groups and sometimes even all appeared in the same show. 

 In fact, the first production coming up in this blog post (the Montrose Amateur Operatics Society’s production of Oliver in March 2009) was one that featured all three Tomlinson brothers. The youngest brother, Matthew, played Noah Claypole in this amateur Oliver and he is now acting and singing professionally (I have seen him in recent years in a production of Footloose in Aberdeen and being a professional pantomime prince in Dundee). The middle brother, Nick, played Oliver’s intimidating, villainous Bill Sykes in 2009, which was quite a shock to those of us  who were primary-age at the time as we still saw him as Troy Bolton, the character he had played in the local 2007 Song Shop production of High School Musical. 

For many of my generation HSM was a big deal and especially in 2007 so having our own Troy Bolton sometimes spotted in the local supermarket or, even more exciting, teaching at a primary school in nearby Dundee (that one of my friends attended), this was as exciting as small-town life got! As for Chris, in this production of Oliver, he once again proved his commitment to performing and his impressive skills, as he stepped in to play Fagin just one week before the show opened, after the original actor fell ill. Not only that but he did a superb job and my Gran, my Mum and myself, all thought the show was of an incredibly high standard.

  Oliver may not be my favourite musical (in terms of child-led musicals, I’m Annie all the way), but the ‘Who will buy’ song from Oliver is very meaningful for my family, as my Gran (who was mentioned in the Joseph post), suddenly started singing it in the last few weeks of her life in the spring of 2010 and it was played at her funeral in May of that year. Was it because she came to see the 2009 production with us that this song came to her mind? She did love her literature and, interestingly, the last show that she ever saw with us was another classic mid-19th century London story from Charles Dickens, as it was the 2009 Christmas production of A Christmas Carol at the Dundee Rep. Dickens didn’t shy away from death in his stories and death is a fate that befalls some of the major characters in Oliver, as Oliver is an orphan and Nancy and Bill Sykes both die near the end in every version (sorry for any spoilers). However, despite Nancy being the central female character in the musical, almost no time is spent on her tragic death, and the other characters seem to just move on as if it never happened. No one is visibly upset or does anything to remember her and it doesn’t even suggest through the songs or dialogue that they’ll miss her. Poor Nancy, (RIP), she certainly deserved 'more' and better than a tragic, untimely death at the hands of her monster of an abusive partner (Bill) with nobody even really mourning her, I’ll always stan Nancy.

  The story of how Dickens’ Oliver Twist was turned into the stage show and 1968 movie musical is quite interesting in itself. The original novel, Oliver Twist, which was published in 1838, was adapted into a stage musical in 1960 by Lionel Bart, who wrote the music and lyrics and won a Best Original Score Tony in 1963, despite not being able to read music himself. Eight years later, the movie musical was released and went on to win six Oscars, including Best Picture, and was one of only ten movie musicals to win this particular award*. It was also directed by the talented Oscar-winner Carol Reed, who directed the highly acclaimed The Third Man (1949) with Orson Welles (which even came up on one of our film modules at uni – I’m still waiting for a whole movie musicals module btw, I’d do anything etc.).

  The musical and 1968 movie does deviate quite a bit from the Dickens novel in some ways, as the plot in the novel is a lot more complex with several characters who are absent from the show and film and some new subplots, backstories and revelations. Nancy is also older and definitely a grown-up woman and maternal figure towards Oliver in the musical, whereas she is more like a teenage girl or very young woman in the novel. Fagin and the Artful Dodger have very different endings in the novel too (not quite as happy – not the skipping off into the distance, more like a trip to the gallows/penal colony).

  Back to the programmes collection and the 21st century, however, and in November 2009, I went to see a personal favourite musical of mine that does have a happy ending (we’re back to Annie again, sorry, I can’t get enough of it but I understand if you can). The production was another brilliant show, this time put on by a Dundee amateur group called the Thomson-Leng Youth Music Theatre. The musical Annie was based on Little Orphan Annie, the Harold Gray comic strip from the 1920s, and opened on Broadway in 1977 (17 years after Oliver’s London debut, musical-spotters!), as well as having film versions that came out in 1982, 1999 and 2014 (each one having a slightly different collection or interpretation of the songs). There are quite a lot of similarities between Annie and Oliver and some of the only differences are that Annie is American and set in the 1930s, as opposed to the 1800s, and features a girl as the protagonist. In fact, I just had a thought when writing this that the billionaire, Oliver Warbucks who adopts Annie, could maybe be a grown-up Oliver Twist, who moved to the U.S.A, after starting life as an impoverished orphan. I mean, it’s perhaps a bit of a stretch but you never know… As well as being orphans, another thing that the characters Annie and Oliver Twist share is being an only child and, whilst this might not be the case for every lead character in a musical, many stories that focus on a child or young person don’t include siblings, to allow the audience to focus on that particular character and their journey or development and their relationships with parental figures or friends. As an only child myself, I find this interesting - perhaps it’s common for people with older siblings to look to them for advice or guidance but if you don’t have older siblings, or indeed any siblings at all, then you may be more likely to take inspiration from and follow fictional characters or even sometimes look to them as role models.

To finish this run of local shows and programmes here is the programme from another show I saw locally in 2010 (Beauty and the Beast, put on by a different Montrose local group the Apollo Players). And who was in this show? Why all 3 Tomlinson brothers and even their parents (Kirsten and John). What a family! What a town…

*The other nine musicals to win the Best Picture Oscar so far are:

• The Broadway Melody (1929)

• The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

• Going My Way (1944)

• An American in Paris (1951)

• Gigi (1958)

• West Side Story (1961)

• My Fair Lady (1964)

• The Sound of Music (1965)

• Chicago (2002)

 

 

  

 

Any sheep will do

 

 Does anyone else have specific memories of seeing a show with a close friend or relative? One special memory for me is connected to this next programme in my journey through theatre programmes, which is the production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat at the Caird Hall in Dundee in February 2009 (when I was very nearly nine). As a general rule, Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals aren’t usually my favourites, but this is a significant memory, as I went with a very special person who really liked them, my maternal grandma (photo below of us on the night we saw Joseph). I have been lucky enough to have two lovely grandmas but my maternal grandma lived with us from 2004 until she passed in 2010 so in some ways this one, Grandma Margaret, was a bit like a naughty big sister as well. She was an amazing person, and any theatre outing with her was always fun and memorable, as she loved a show and a fancy evening out. She was also quite funny, and very generous, as she even bought me a rather extortionately priced toy sheep when we went to see Joseph, which might not have happened if I’d gone to the theatre with anyone else. At Mary Poppins (see last post) my Mum was absolutely not going to buy me the extravagant items on the merchandise stall there (umbrella with parrot head? No! Carpet Bag? No, no, no!) but Grandma Margaret… that was another story!

 Joseph was also the first show that I performed in with The Song Shop, our local musical theatre school in Montrose (see programme below, I mentioned Song Shop in the first post). This was all the way back in March 2007 and I played an angel for two nights that week in the chorus – the show was even performed in the town’s main kirk (church). And yes, there are photos and no, you can’t see them. I have good memories of singing and listening to the songs with friends and classmates from school – there does seem to be something about Joseph songs that appeals to children and senior citizens. 

The 2009 professional production in Dundee was also interesting to me as a few people who were my age that I knew from school and Song Shop were actually in the show, which is perhaps partly why I wanted to see it. Was I envious of their place up there on the Caird Hall’s big stage? Maybe a tiny bit but I also know taking part involved a lot of really late nights and while I like to drink and sometimes go to clubs, I still only have a few very late nights a year (even in my twenties). Another thing about this production was that Craig Chalmers, one of the actors playing Joseph, who was from Edinburgh, actually took part in the 2007 Andrew Lloyd Webber TV show Any Dream will Do that was looking to cast the role of Joseph. 

I researched Craig for this post to see what he was up to now and almost got more than I bargained for as he is currently doing something just a little bit different to musical theatre (porn). Well, the Caird Hall does have a particularly impressive organ (my Mum suggested that line, I apologise). Casualty and Holby City actor, Lee Mead, was the winner of the Any Dream Will Do TV competition, and he’s since been in many well-known musicals, including Wicked and Legally Blonde (I even saw him in Wicked in London in 2010 but more on that later... I do get to the West End eventually... or something like that). Lee Mead also makes a very funny cameo appearance in the Halloween episode of the recent series of the TV show Motherland. I haven’t mentioned this much yet but I am a TV comedy addict too (current obsession Brooklyn 99).

Next time - please sir, can I have some...? In the meantime, here's a toy sheep (though not the one from 2009... any sheep will do!)

A spoonful of brimstone and treacle

 Does anyone else miss shows and live theatre? If you are missing these things, I can certainly empathise and relate. In fact, this post, which explores the next programme in my collection, also discusses my first experience of watching a professional musical, which was Mary Poppins at the Edinburgh Playhouse in October 2008, when I was eight and a half. Not that whether a show is amateur or professional necessarily makes a big difference to a child; many non-professional shows are great and feature extremely talented casts and can have more of a personal touch if you know members of the cast or get a ‘shout out’ at pantomimes at Christmas, which some kids might enjoy.

  Mary Poppins is arguably one of the most iconic and beloved films of all time. The first Mary Poppins book, which was written by Australian author, PL Travers, was published in 1934, and was followed up with seven sequels. The classic musical film starring Julie Andrews came out in 1964 and while some events may have been changed, the 2013 film Saving Mr Banks shows how different the original vision that PL Travers had for her most beloved character, the titular, Mary Poppins, was to how Disney wanted to present her. For instance, whilst in both the original 1964 film and the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns (more on that later…), Mary is a strict, old-fashioned type of nanny who believes in discipline, she is still notably sweeter, cheerier and friendlier than she is in the novels, which are much darker with some unsettling, slightly frightening moments. 

 

  It was interesting, then, that the 2008 production of Mary Poppins in Edinburgh, a show which opened in London in 2004, took on some of these darker elements from the novels, as although many of the same songs appear in both the film and the musical, there are some new songs in the stage musical, which create a very different tone and evoke some new messages or interpretations. For example, some of the new songs give more of an insight into the motivations and feelings of the parents, Mr and Mrs Banks (Winifred and George), and are more emotional and try to capture how they feel about their marriage and what they wanted from life. Also, in the musical, Mrs Banks is no longer a comedic character. A song that appears in the film but was removed for the stage show was ‘I love to laugh’, sung by Uncle Albert during the memorable, mostly light-hearted scene when they all laugh to float up to the ceiling. It is possible that when adapting the story to be a stage musical, more of an emphasis was put on presenting the vision that PL Travers had for her Mary Poppins and doing her vision justice, as she had been quite unhappy with some changes that appeared in the Disney film. The stage musical focuses instead more on the emotional core and familial relationships and the harsh, dark, ‘Brimstone and treacle/Cod Liver Oil’ aspects and creative punishments and learning lessons, rather than the ‘Spoonful of Sugar’,  rose-tinted glasses or sugar coating that is a feature of the movie.

 The stage musical is also a lot darker, for instance, and not particularly aimed at children at all, in my opinion. One of the most haunting and scary things that has slightly stayed with me, is a scene from the stage musical, when the toys belonging to the children, Jane and Michael, come to life, as a result of a spell that Mary Poppins put on them to reprimand the children for not looking after their toys.

  As a contrast, the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns, starring the supremely talented Emily Blunt in that iconic, titular role, features a very different take to the stage musical, as the sequel is filled with homages and references to the 1964 film and puts the now grown up Jane and Michael in the position that their parents were in in the first film. However, although the 2018 film has a more feel-good and generally sweeter tone than the stage show, it still has emotional moments and songs, as Michael’s children learn about loss and grief from losing their mother. Despite the 2018 film being set many decades ago, it still feels so much more recent and modern because of the massive gap between the first film and the sequel and the appearance of so many talented people who are ‘so hot right now’ (Did I use that right?) For instance, the absolute sensation and legend that is Lin-Manuel Miranda stars in the film and even raps! (Did someone say Hamilton?) It’s interesting to wonder if, for young children and future generations, Emily Blunt will be their Mary Poppins or if the iconic performance from Julie Andrews will be what we all still think of whenever this particular, extra special, enigmatic, unusual, ‘practically perfect’ Mary is mentioned.

Caroline Sheen, cousin of actor Michael, was the Mary Poppins we saw in Edinburgh.