155. Music(als) and movement
The power of a stage show even decades on.
In which Rebecca explores her love for stage musicals, reminds herself of her Desert Island Discs shortlist and books her seat for a matinée performance on her birthday.
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Dear Reader,
My first experience of a stage musical had been Cats1 on Broadway in the early 1980s, on a trip to New York to visit my uncle. As a small child I wasn’t sure what we’d see happening, but it certainly wasn’t human-sized cats prowling the auditorium as soon as the house lights went down. When the show started my brother was so overcome by surprise and excitement that he suddenly stood up, his folding seat snapping shut behind him.
The music was wonderful. I knew one of the songs already, because I’d been listening to Elaine Paige’s record, Stages, on repeat. Paige, who’d been cast in a number of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s2 productions over the years, had played the role of Grizabella in the London show. Her character song3 is Memory.
After only a few bars of my tuneless vocal accompaniment to Grizabella, during which she and I sang with equal and impressive gusto, I heard a strangled ‘shhhhhhhhhhhh!’ from the seat next to me. ‘But it’s my favourite sooooooong!’ I hissed back.
Mum shook her head. Reader, I stopped singing. 🙄
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Before The Greatest Showman4 had even been a glint in Twentieth Century Fox’s eye there was Barnum5, which we saw in the early 1980s at the London Palladium. We came home with the soundtrack on cassette, and one song would stop me in my tracks every single time I played it.
One Brick at a Time marks the point at which Barnum and his team are building his museum, and Barnum’s wife Chairy uses the build as a metaphor for the determination required to achieve success.
Here are some lines I still sing in my head when I need to remind myself that I can achieve whatever I’ve set my mind to. The excerpt below is taken straight from my memory, but in the interests of accuracy I have checked the lyrics here.
Extract from One Brick at a Time from Barnum
Music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Michael Stewart
That empty field it can yield miles and miles of flowers
You don't need no magic powers
Just a seed and showers
From the floor to the sky
You can soar if you're wise enough to climb
One brick at a time.
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The original production of Starlight Express6 had premiered at the Victoria Apollo Theatre, London, right next to Victoria Station, in 1984.
My Girl Guide troupe had organised a group trip to the theatre, and Mum and my brother joined the gang of giggling girls for the occasion.
Reader, it knocked my socks off. There was so much colour and movement that it was hard to know where to look. And the music – oh, the music! Something I love about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s productions is the variety of genres he includes in many of his works. Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, for instance, features a calypso number, and Starlight Express includes the country & western song U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D. in amusing homage to Dolly Parton’s D.I.V.O.R.C.E. After seeing the show, and right up until it closed in 2002, I’d look at its billboard outside the theatre every time I took a train to or from Victoria, and would dream of seeing it again.
We purchased the soundtrack to Starlight Express on a double cassette, and I played it again and again. I loved reliving in sound everything I’d seen as the story developed and characters skated around me, and one song would always hit me right between the eyes. It was nothing to do with the inevitable ‘boy meets girl’ element of the plot – heck, I was too young to care – but something about the journey of one of the characters through the story – the fact that they had stepped up, tried, failed, tried again and succeeded – has never left me.
WARNING
This audio-only clip from YouTube is a teensy bit of a plot-spoiler. Listen with caution if you haven’t seen the show and have plans to do so! Oh, and grab a hanky…
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Reader, all of these songs would make it onto my list of tracks for Desert Island Discs, a programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Each week a guest, called a "castaway" during the programme, is asked to choose eight audio recordings, a book and a luxury item that they would take if they were to be cast away on a desert island, whilst discussing their life and the reasons for their choices.
Taken from Wikipedia.
I found myself listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs in the car on my way to a recent appointment. The castaway was The Honourable Lady Rita Rae – lawyer, judge and the current Rector of the University of Glasgow – and her interview was fascinating.
I was running a little late but my car really needed fuel, and just as I was indicating to pull into the garage I recognised with a gasp the opening notes of Lady Rae’s eighth and final Desert Island Disc.
Reader, the context in which we hear a song can have a huge influence on how it affects us. If I choose to put on a song which means a great deal to me, its impact on my emotions and the reaction I have to it will be far less than if that same song takes me by surprise. In this case, the opening bars of Climb Ev’ry Mountain from The Sound of Music took my breath away – and along with it any chance that my car would get its fix of fuel that day.
I couldn’t not listen. I drove straight past the pumps and back onto the road, just so I didn’t miss a single note of a song which ever since I saw The Sound of Music for the first time has to me represented grit, determination and the promise of happiness.
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A couple of weeks ago I was flicking through the ‘Review’ section of the Saturday newspaper and recognised what was depicted on the front cover. Starlight Express! I could hardly believe it – my favourite musical is back in London!
The show, which is not a revival of the original production I had seen all those years ago, opened for previews earlier this month. It is described by its new creative team as ‘a completely new experience, rather than one that recycles the look and feel of past productions.’
Well, I’m up for it. We’ve just bought tickets for the matinée performance on my fiftieth birthday later this year, but for now I’m going to resist the temptation to seek out the soundtrack we’d brought home on cassette nearly forty years ago.
With apologies for this mash-up of musical mentions, I’ve learned that it takes just one brick at a time to build something amazing, and that I can climb every mountain I need to in order to find my dream.
Could it be that I am the instrument of my own happy ending; something which the musicals I have loved since my childhood had first shown me all those years ago?
Yes, I am, because I am the starlight.
I’ll remember that while I watch those anthropomorphic trains whizz past me in a whirl of colour and sound in a few months’ time, and I can’t think of anything in the world that will move me more on my milestone birthday.
Love,
Rebecca
📚 Reading 📚
📚 In a break from drafting this post on Wednesday I came across this essay by writer and artist
, in which he wrote ‘I have found power and energy from songs that I hadn’t heard for probably over 30 years’.
Slart’s tribute to 1980s cartoon theme tunes and how they move him is the perfect accompaniment for my own newsletter this week, as I told him in the comments.
📚 Regular readers of ‘Dear Reader, I’m Lost' will be no strangers to my ongoing light-hearted letter-writing project with fellow Brit Terry Freedman of Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life. It’s my turn to reply to him on Wednesday, and you can find the archive of our chortlesome correspondence here.
Terry writes on a variety of subjects in his own newsletters, and his regular Experiments in style posts – in which he, as he puts it, ‘tells the same story in umpteen different ways’ – are among my favourites. This latest one, in which he recklessly encourages his fellow writers to break the rules, is super:
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Cats is a sung-through musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It is based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make the "Jellicle choice" by deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. As of 2024, Cats remains the fifth-longest-running Broadway show and the seventh-longest-running West End show.
Taken from Wikipedia.
Andrew Lloyd Webber (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass.
Taken from Wikipedia.
This super blog post from Jolly Roger Youth Theatre describes the various song types in musicals.
The Greatest Showman is a 2017 American biographical musical drama film directed by Michael Gracey (in his directorial debut), written by Jenny Nicks and Bill Condon, and a story by Bicks. The film stars an ensemble cast [and] is a heavily fictionalized depiction of the life of P. T. Barnum, a showman and entertainer, and his creation of the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the lives of its star attractions.
Taken from Wikipedia.
Barnum is an American musical with a book by Mark Bramble, lyrics by Michael Stewart, and music by Cy Coleman. It is based on the life of showman P. T. Barnum, covering the period from 1835 through 1880 in America and major cities of the world where Barnum took his performing companies. The production combines elements of traditional musical theater with the spectacle of the circus.. The characters include jugglers, trapeze artists and clowns, as well as such real-life personalities as Jenny Lind and General Tom Thumb.
Taken from Wikipedia.
Starlight Express is a 1984 musical, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe. It tells the story of a young but obsolete steam engine, Rusty, who races in a championship against modern engines in the hope of impressing a first-class observation car, Pearl. Famously, the actors perform on roller skates.
Taken from Wikipedia.
When I graduated from college in 1983, my mother-in-law gave me a celebration in NYC. We had a meal at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center, and seats on the stage for Cats. Previous to that the only Broadway musical I'd seen was the touring production of Chorus Line, so it was a big deal to me. I still remember the cast members crawling over and through us there on the stage.
We went to see Phantom of the Opera in Toronto when I was heavily pregnant with my first son and when that candelabra started dropping from the ceiling, he swooped inside me - not joking! I am always so moved whenever I go to see a play it can impact me for days afterwards.
I think this was what Aristotle was going on about right, lol.
Anyway, thanks for such an uplifting overview!