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)
No comments:
Post a Comment