But first! Of course, we must finish off Chapter Three.
How fast indeed the time doth go! We at Our Lady's have barely finished our run of performances of Mad About Musicals, and we've already begun rehearsals for the next show, Little Red Riding Hood. I ought to write some more about the recent show.
To be perfectly honest, before I got involved in the show, I didn't really expect to enjoy it all that much. I absolutely disliked (and, for the most part, still do not like) the music which would be in it - you know, all the music hall stuff - and didn't imagine that the show itself could be much better than the music it contained, and so I contented myself with the knowledge that I was doing the society a favour by playing the bass and hopefully improving the overall production. In short, I did learn a fair bit from being in this show.
For a start, I learnt not to judge people too severely (or too kindly) before speaking to them personally, or seeing them 'at rest', when they're not having to perform. I mean, generally I'm not prejudiced at all, and never judge people before actually seeing or meeting them, but I've now properly learnt not to judge somebody's character from how they appear on stage. There is one person in particular who this applies to. I had seen her in a few shows, and thought of her as a simple lime-light junkie and an overall bad egg, but after meeting her and speaking to her in the rehearsals and after the performances, I've discovered that she's not that bad at all, and I do like her. But she isn't going to be in the Little Red Riding Hood panto. Nice one.
But, besides not judging people before meeting them properly, I've discovered how enjoyable it can be to simply put on a show, whatever preconceptions I might have had about it. It had been so long since I had been seated in an orchestra pit, playing music down there while the action goes on on stage, that I had forgotten how good it is. I had thought about this a couple of weeks ago, and I know that the orchestra pit is certainly my natural habitat. The wires, neatly arranged by me, to try and minimise the frequency of people tripping over them, to maximise the distance from the power source the equipment can be positioned, and to dispose with the need for untangling when we are to pack everything away; the lack of space, making it necessary for us to make ourselves as compact as possible, also reducing the freedom for where we can position the music stands and lights, and making us have to sqeeze gingerly into our chairs, trying not to send all the carefully arranged equipment through the wooden partition and into the front row of the audience; the discovery of wrong notes in the music on the first night, and correcting them on the spot, making a mental note to write the correct notes in properly for the next night; and the panic when you realise that there is only a minute or so until the second act begins, and you're still stood at the toilet, the whole length of the auditorium away from your seat in the orchestra pit. These are some of the things that make putting on a show so magical. It didn't matter that I hated the music, or that I didn't find anything particularly inspirational or moving about the show itself - I simply enjoyed being in the pit, playing my bass, looking over Fr. Dearman's shoulder for songs that I still hadn't written up (except for four or five songs, all of the second act) in time for the last night, and putting on a show for people to enjoy. And I think for the most part they did. I got the obligatory compliments (one especially sticks out: one of the stage guys told me I'm "the Phil Lynott of Our Lady's"), and a few of the better people in the company signed my music for me, but the best part was simply putting on the show. With the messages in my music coming a close second.
So that was Mad About Musicals. I'm still not mad about them in the slightest - I'll never forsake Slint, Chopin, Sibelius, Tortoise, Ravel - but I do know that playing music and entertaining people is the way for me, and I don't intend straying from that path. When I arrived for the second performance on the Friday, Lynnden (the choroegrapher, producer, etc.) said to me, 'You play the piano, don't you, Matt?', to which I replied, 'Erm... yeah, oh dear, where can this be going?' Then she told me that Fr. Dearman really wanted a rest from being the Musical Director for a bit, and asked me if I'd like to jump into his shoes for the next show. I asked her if I could think about it for a bit, which I did, and I am now the Musical Director for the November panto. We had our first rehearsal on Wednesday, it went pretty well - although I hadn't rehearsed the music sufficiently, and didn't play as cleanly and crisply as I could have done - but I am looking forward to arranging all the music, and even though I don't particularly like pantos, and again the music that we're playing is all music-hall garbage, I think it should be a lot of fun. I can finally exercise a fair proportion of my musical imagination (obviously severely limited by the music we're playing, but for bits that could be ad libbed, i.e. character motifs, and general atmosphere setting music, I will have a fair amount of freedom) and it should be a pretty good show. Despite the awful script. Some of our better members might not even be in the show due to the crap script, but hopefully I can help to improve the script, and then with our full cast it could be a huge success.
This chapter now has even more variety, so now is the time for us to say farewell to it before it gets too various and sporadic, and smoothly change gears out of Chapter Three...
