The first time I went to a musical was in 1988. Over 20 years later, I revisited that feeling, wearing my new beige suede platform wedges, looking up at one of my favourite sights in the world – the Civic ceiling – and hearing, once again…
The first time I went to a musical was in 1988; for my eleventh birthday my father took me and my best friend Abigail into the West End on the train.
We caught a proper London taxi from Kings Cross to the Prince of Wales Theatre where we saw the Rogers and Hammerstein classic ‘South Pacific’.
It was a slightly bizarre choice for an eleven-year old transplanted New Zealander and her Caterham born-and-bred friend, but we were mainly interested in the spectacle, the food, and the chance to dress up.
My father had recently been presented at the Royal Society, London, and had hired a dinner suit for the occasion – he’s a tweed sports coat-wearing professor usually, and he wore the dinner suit for this auspicious occasion, taking his daughter to her first real experience of The Theatre.
Last week I had the opportunity to go to an Australian production of The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber – a kind of two-hour medley of Lloyd Webber’s greatest hits from decades of writing for the musical theatre – from ‘Starlight Express’ to the recent Phantom sequel, ‘Love Never Dies’.
A dedicated eight-person troupe gamefully skipped from story to story, managing to convey the heights and depths of emotion that a Lloyd Webber song tends to encompass. Like Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘South Pacific’, Lloyd Webber’s works tend to take a classic story and redraft it for the peculiar, charming idiosyncrasies of musicals.
When I was ten, I wore a navy silk ruffled skirt with a white satin blouse and my first pair of high heels, and I stared in awe at the beautiful Prince of Wales Theatre, London, with its Moorish-themed foyer and interior fountain. I adored Gemma Craven and the chorus singing ‘Gonna wash that man right out of my hair.’
Over twenty years later, I revisited that feeling, wearing my new beige suede platform wedges, looking up at one of my favourite sights in the world – the Civic ceiling – and hearing, once again, the passion and pain of the slightly cheesy but oh-so-fun world of the musical.
By Kate Hannah, 11 May 2011.
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