Editor’s Note

here’s no people like show people, they smile when they are low. Even with a turkey that you know will fold, you may be stranded out in the cold. Still you wouldn’t change it for a sack of gold, let’s go on with the show.” As a kid growing up on a diet of musicals, these were my favourite lyrics. They were written for the 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun by Irving Berlin and filled me with a fervent desire to become an actress, singer, dancer in musicals —“nowhere can you get that happy feeling, when you are stealing that extra bow”. I know hundreds of lyrics from musicals like Cabaret (one of my best), Chicago (the name on everybody’s lips — though Andrea doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Roxie).

There are songs that make me weep like Maybe sung by orphan Annie fantasising about her parents: “Their one mistake was giving up me” and the uplifting joy of Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård dancing together on a boat crossing the Aegean Sea in Mama Mia 2, while Pierce Brosnan dances the ladies to the harbour to the Abba classic Dancing Queen.

As you can tell, my taste in musicals tends to the cheesy. I adore La La Land with it’s beautiful but tragic love affair set in Los Angeles, where there’s always “another day of sun, sun, sun, sun, sun”. They’re also a great medium for parody. The Book of Mormon, written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the warped minds behind South Park) was one of the best I’ve seen (on Broadway).

With it’s tough subject matter, enlivened by the amplified angst of the rock/pop score, Spring Awakening, directed by Sylvaine Strike, fresh from her success with the staging of The Promise, definitely makes it onto my top 10 musicals list ... in no particular order. Read about it in this week’s feature.

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