Did you know that I wrote 70% of a musical once? It was called “Down the Plug Hole”…
…Although, actually, I didn’t come up with the title, so it’s more like 69%, isn’t it? Christ, did I actually write any of this sodding musical?
As mentioned we played to ten Primary Schools in five days, doing two shows a day. Quite a busy little tour. But our tolerably-written musical was tolerably well-rehearsed. We were fit and young though. Full of pre-Britpop brio. The early 90’s, on the threshold of the best of times.
And we had our nice, shiny primary-colour painted costumes. A few problems with those, actually.
First problem: the week of the tour was very humid. The school halls we were performing in weren’t air conditioned, the best you could do was open a window. The think winter suits and hats we’d bought and painted with several coats of gloss paint didn’t let out much heat. Any heat. The show was only an hour long, but after sixty minutes of acting, singing and throwing ourselves about in those costumes we were absolutely poached. Twice a day.
On the fourth day of the tour the guy playing the Private Eye, Harry Lake, passed out in between scenes. Heatstroke I suspect. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. He went down like a felled tree. I think his head might have bounced off the gym floor a bit. Still, what can you do? We dragged him back to his feet and pushed him back on stage.
Serves him right for deliberately getting that “flying back from Chicago” line wrong in rehearsals.
Second problem: at the end of each performance we had to change out of suffocating outfits. And after a couple of performances the stench coming out those rigid suits was quite indescribable. Proper “kill a skunk at 10 paces repugnant”. Some more than others, the personal hygiene of the cast varied.
The worst bit was the second performance of the day. Because that involved squeezing back into the slimy, sweaty, stinking costumes for another hour of torture. I can’t describe the sensation of trying to get those suits back on for the afternoon performance. I think we burned the costume at the end of the run. You’ve never seen anything quite so flammable.
Third problem: the suits were a bit brittle. It was quite a physical show; we were young, invulnerable and weren’t thinking about all the joint pain we’d be facing in later life. And because the suits were mostly comprised of perspiration and gloss after a couple of performances they began to crack and tear.
They had to be patched up with coloured masking tape and the jagged edges of the tears drew blood against flesh several times a show. It’s a minor miracle none of us got sepsis.
By the end of the week we were all exhausted, smelly and wrinkled like prunes. I think I lost a stone, and that was back in the day when a stone in weight was a far more considerable loss.
Did I enjoy it, though? Of course I did. Looking back I enjoyed more of the time I spent earning that useless BTEC in Performing Arts than I realised.
And if I hadn’t been stuck with that useless BTEC I wouldn’t have ended up at Sunderland University and I wouldn’t have missed that for anything in the world.
The Flog 