by Lisa Gee
I took Dora round to the stage door, where she skidded off to join her friends. I chatted with a couple of other parents. Mixed in with the buzzing excitement of the show opening was a slight sadness, as there weren’t many more occasions when the kids would all be together: once the show was up and running, except for the Gretls, and if a child had to cover for another who was ill, they would only see the kids in their own team. They would, we thought, miss being together. We would miss being together.
Once the chaperones had channelled the children down the ramp and through the stage door, a tableful of parents settled ourselves down in Café Libre for a drink, a giggle and some gossip, anticipating the upcoming ‘period of relative calmness’ that Jo had promised us. Then Carol, Michael’s mum, looked down and checked her phone. When she looked up again, her eyes were round with shock. ‘Oh my God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Michael’s just texted me to say that Simon Shepherd’s left the show!’ Simon Shepherd was Captain von Trapp. A couple of the parents had reported back from the first two previews that he didn’t look particularly happy in the role. But still, we were all stunned. You don’t expect the leading man to go after two previews. Was it true? Or had Michael misheard or mistexted? If it was true, who would step in and replace him as our children’s father? Were they upset? Would they be able to relate to another actor in the same way? And, most significantly for me – much more so, I’m ashamed to say, than ‘Is Simon Shepherd all right?’ – would my daughter’s first performance that night be cancelled? Jackie (Olivia and Alicia’s mum) headed off to do some shopping and phoned through to say that Simon’s photo had already been removed from the front of the theatre. I pulled out my trusty laptop and checked my email. There was one from Jo, telling us that there were going to be more rehearsals over the next week than had been anticipated, but she couldn’t yet tell us why. Then I Googled, but couldn’t find out any more information. After about half an hour, when I could no longer cope with the suspense, I called Jo to check whether that night’s preview was still going ahead. ‘Yes, of course,’ she told me. ‘The show must go on!’
On the way back to the tube, clocking the Sound of Music posters that had been hastily put into the frame at the front of the theatre that had previously housed Simon’s photo, I popped into the box office again, just in case. The tickets were there, which I was very relieved about, as the heady combination of excitement and nerves was bubbling up inside me already, and having the tickets in my hand meant one less thing to worry about later – by which time I knew that I’d be frothing over in a fidgetingly childish, unable-to-standin-a-queue sort of way. I also asked the staff if they knew anything about who’d be Captain von Trapp now, and what had happened – did he jump or was he pushed? – but they didn’t. Then I apologised for being a nuisance, which I hadn’t really been yet, but suspected I would become over the following few months.
I headed home to prepare for the course I was running the next day, but found it impossible to concentrate. So I stopped trying, rang Auntie Ruth to confirm that she and her friend could have the two upper circle tickets, and arranged to give them to her outside the front of the theatre at seven o’clock. I managed to sort out what I was going to wear that night (nothing too smart) and what I’d wear for the course (semi-casual), but couldn’t really get my head around anything more intellectual than that. Every so often, the phone would ring: Simon Shepherd’s departure had made the news, so friends and family wanted to know if I had any inside information, which I didn’t, although I was happy to speculate. I surfed a bit more and discovered, from a press release posted on the Really Useful Group’s website, that Simon would be replaced by someone called Alexander Hanson – a famous and established actor with a lot of musicals under his cravat. Even though I’d never heard of him, I thought he sounded promising. But would Dora think he was nice?
Then, as Laurie and I would be driving into town, I paid the congestion charge online, carefully noting down the receipt number in my diary. This led me on to worrying about parking. By the end of the technical rehearsals, I’d managed to work out where the best single yellow lines and the spaces where you only had to pay for parking until 6.30 p.m. were. The trick was to arrive just before then, when you were almost certain to find a space, then sit in the car, listening to Radio 4 until the 6.30 comedy show started, when you knew you could safely lock up and go. The only difficulty would be chivvying Laurie out of the house in time to make sure we got there early enough to get a space – and today that felt very important.
It’s not that Laurie tends to the tardy. Well, not especially. It’s just that I am slightly neurotic about getting to places early. Consequently, when he takes a bit of time deciding which shoes he should wear, asks me, makes a decision on the basis of my recommendation, gets in the car, changes his mind, gets out of the car, goes back into the house, changes his shoes, remembers something else he’s forgotten and can’t manage without, answers the phone, deals with the call, picks up the shoes he was previously wearing and one other pair just in case he changes his mind again, then stows the two spare pairs of shoes safely and neatly behind the passenger seat before getting back into the car, I get a bit ratty. This is usually entirely unnecessary, as I will have begged, nagged and, on occasion, dragged him into the car half an hour before we really need to set off. It is always counterproductive. One day I’ll learn.
I drove us into town and we arrived just in time to find a place to park. I walked round to the front of the theatre to find Auntie Ruth, while Laurie headed off in search of a couple of bottles of water and a bar of Green & Black’s milk chocolate with almonds for us to squabble over during the show. The pavement outside the theatre was packed and noisy. People, mostly smartly dressed, were milling about in the road, while the odd taxi tried to inch past. Theatre staff in red and black uniforms were standing up at the theatre entrance yelling, ‘Stalls to the left, please, royal circle to the right, thank you.’ Everyone – with the exception of the odd few best-dress-wearing little girls – was taller than me. How on earth was I going to find my aunt? Or, for that matter, Laurie?
In fact, there weren’t that many people there. We all knew what each other looked like, where we were due to meet and when. We all had mobile phones and knew each other’s numbers. The potential for disaster was, barring the sudden intervention of a freak tornado (don’t laugh, a month later there was one near where we live), severely limited, which could only mean that I was experiencing a stress-and excitement-induced over-reaction. Never let reality get in the way of a good panic, that’s what I say.
A few minutes later I spotted Auntie Ruth, handed over the tickets, said I hoped she and her friend would have a fantastic evening, hooked up with Laurie, and dragged him into the theatre about half an hour before we needed to be there. Laurie and I rarely shell out on theatre programmes. Although I often feel like I need to read one during the performance, because I’m very nosy and generally want to know as much as possible about the people up on the stage, I can never decide whether to keep them or throw them away afterwards. Keeping them is a waste of space as, under normal circumstances, I never look at them again. But throwing away something made of paper that thick and luscious feels like a bad and wasteful thing to do. Also, there’s always the possibility that this time I might want to look at it again … Better not to give myself that dilemma in the first place. Tonight, however, was different. Obviously we would buy a programme, treasure it, admire it frequently and force lots of other people to look at it too.
I skipped off to buy ours the moment I got into the theatre and, in an unaccustomed feat of self-control of which I’m still very proud, managed to restrain myself from telling the programme-seller that my daughter was that night’s Gretl. Then we found our seats. We were right in the middle of the front row of the royal circle, in two of the best seats in the theatre. We would have a terrific view. I begged Laurie for some chocolate, whilst flicking through looking for Dora’s picture. I was too excited and nervous not t
o eat. While I gobbled down as much of the Green & Black’s as I could wrestle out of Laurie’s grasp, I wondered if Dora was feeling as nervous as I was and hoped she wasn’t.
At 7.30, the lights went down, and we were invited to turn off our mobile phones and welcome Simon Lee, who would conduct The Sound of Music orchestra. I bounced up and down on my seat, squeezed Laurie’s hand too hard and grinned at him. Simon Lee lifted his arms and the music swelled into the auditorium, Lesley Garrett’s voice soaring over the top as she knelt at the front of the stage before a curtain with a clear oval window in it, through which a golden religious icon shone. A chorus of nuns filed past her, carrying nightlights in jars, and harmonised their way off stage up through the stalls. The icon lifted, the lighting changed and suddenly there, visible through the window where the icon had been hanging, was Connie, singing ‘The Sound of Music’, lying on what looked like a grassy hillside. Then the curtain lifted and the hillside was revealed as an oval disc, clothed in wild astroturf with a few rocks peeping through, and tilted at an alarming angle (‘We call it the mouldy pitta bread,’ one of the box office staff told me). The disc untilted gently as Connie – now thoroughly Maria – danced, sang and twirled around it, her voice gloriously pure, pitch-perfect, the orchestra exuberant. It was wonderful, captivating, enchanting, and a smile stretched itself across my face in an instant – ages before my daughter made her first entrance.
I had, fortunately, stocked up on hankies. In the run-up to the previews, anticipating the show’s effect on us, several of us mums had, jokingly, considered approaching Kleenex for sponsorship, but hadn’t got round to it. The Sound of Music has lots of Kleenex moments.
Still, I got through the opening dry-eyed. I got through ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ and ‘I Have Confidence’. And through the scene where Maria meets the captain – Christopher Dickins, the understudy Georg von Trapp, did an excellent job in very difficult circumstances, although he didn’t look quite old enough to have heroically captained ships in the First World War and then fathered seven children.
Then he blew his whistle and the kids came marching on, dressed in sailor suits and in height order. People cheered. And that was it. Out came the tears and tissues and they stayed out for the rest of the show. I couldn’t see a lot of the second half properly because by the interval, my contact lenses had salted up. But while I could still see, it was obvious that all the children looked inexpressibly sweet and gorgeous. Their singing was spine-tinglingly good, their acting convincing. ‘It’s an amazing feeling,’ Wendy, whose daughter Christine was the Louisa in Mittens, emailed me, ‘seeing your child on that stage, isn’t it?’ Yes, it is – especially when it’s the first time. It is very easy to see how you could get hooked on your child being up there. It’s not as amazing as when they’re born and you first get to hold them – but it’s a lower-intensity version of the same sort of feeling. You suddenly see your child from a completely different perspective, with most, but not quite all, of the familiarity stripped away. It was breathtaking and awe-inspiring. There she was, a person entirely in her own right, doing something I could never have done, not at her age, or since.
I was also very nervous (much more so, it turned out, than she was). Please let her not make any noticeable mistakes, I prayed. Let her enjoy it, let her do her best, let her best be good enough. But what was uppermost, as the scenes changed, the lines were spoken and the songs sung, was a sheer heady joy and a dizzying sense of wonder. This could, I realised, not only be addictive, but also distort my sense of reality. Theatre is, of course, a work of illusion: you buy into that illusion when you pay for your ticket. But when you’re watching your child doing it, the boundary between reality and illusion feels, somehow, muddied, and your gut-level response is different. And it’s hard to remember that what you’re feeling isn’t only because it’s your child up there on stage, but is also, to a great extent, down to the power of the words and music and the performances and creative skills of the actors, musicians, directors and the rest of the team around them.
It is extraordinarily easy to lose that perspective when your child is on the stage, very easy to lose all sense of proportion. Not only does your attention – at least the first time you watch her in the show – home in on your child, but everything outside the glorious technicolour of performance fades to grey. Nothing is as interesting as the show your child is in: no one else is as interesting as your child. Consequently, you become incredibly narrow and boring. I’m sure it’s not only stage mothers who are tempted in this way. It must be the same for parents whose kids excel at sports. Or when they take to anything in a living, breathing, eating and sleeping kind of way – providing you can get as excited about it as they can. Your view of the world shrinks and skews, your child – and everything brilliant about him – looms ever larger in your field of vision. Interesting, isn’t it, how the activities and situations that bring out the best in your child can bring out the worst in you? It matters not a whit if your child makes it through the auditions and fetches up in The Sound of Music at the London Palladium. It’s nice, it’s fun, and it means that you don’t have to give them pocket money while they’re doing it, but that’s it. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if they don’t turn out to be particularly brilliant once they’re up there. It doesn’t matter if they never go to another audition again. But it really, really feels like it does. When your child is doing something like this, you feel like you’re that close to the centre of the universe and that this is where you want to stay for ever and ever and ever. Especially as that’s how your child is probably feeling too.
‘Sometimes,’ Paul Petersen told me, ‘you just get caught up in the life. We’ve all witnessed it, particularly with beauty pageant mums, sitting there and doing their children’s routines and grimacing and mouthing the words to the music, as if they’re up there. And,’ he continued, ‘it amazes me to see auditions these days, where five hundred children will show up for a one-line role in a marginal television show. Five hundred! And there are five hundred parents or more in the immediate environment too. All of this time, all of these resources, which might be better spent on something else, concentrated on one line of dialogue, which might have had a union rate of $750. You spread that $750 out between those five hundred adults who weren’t at work at that particular moment and we’re talking pennies. And the icky part is that the employers know very well that there will be no lack of hopefuls. That outer office in the auditioning process will be full.’
If you’re that way inclined, being up on the stage is addictive. It’s possibly even more addictive watching your child up there. And even if you’re not the addictive type, it’s unlikely that much else in your life will match up to the buzz of a West End musical. Certainly not going to Birmingham the morning after and running a training course. Unfortunately, for the duration of the course, my mind was more on getting back to London that evening in time to catch Dora’s second night than it was on the job in hand. The day was not a success and it was, consequently, the last one I was asked to run. On the up side, I made it back to the Palladium in plenty of time.
Still smiling, Laurie and I filed out of our seats. As we were leaving, Lynette, who I’d met when she measured Dora for her costumes and who had been sitting near us, caught my eye and smiled. I said ‘hello’. She said ‘You made me laugh. I was watching you mouthing along with the show. You know all the words, don’t you!’ I hadn’t realised I’d been doing it.
Still smiling, we went to collect Dora from the stage door after her first ever professional show. There was a small crowd there – which wasn’t only made up of parents. Those of us who did have kids to pick up, and had watched the show (most but not all of the parents had been in to catch their child’s first performance) shrieked, jumped up and down, hugged and told each other how much we’d enjoyed the show and how brilliant each other’s kids had been. About twenty minutes later, to applause from all assembled – most of whom were waiting for Connie Fisher an
d Lesley Garrett – Russ led the children out. A few people asked them to sign autographs. Some of the older children added ‘with best wishes’, or ‘love from’, or ‘x’ by their photos. Dora carefully wrote ‘Dora’.
‘Mummy,’ she asked me once she was safely strapped into her car seat, ‘why did those people want me to write my name when they’ve already got it in their programmes?’
I didn’t have a good answer. Once I’d finished being a teenager, I’d started feeling slightly bemused by the tradition of meeting famous people and asking them to write their name on a piece of paper. Why do we do it? What does it mean? Especially the part where they ask you for your name, so they can address it personally. How personal can a dedication be when it’s written by someone who has to ask you what your name is before they can write it? Fair enough if you were lucky or prescient enough to garner all four of the Beatles’ autographs on the front cover of Please, Please Me – or to inherit a precious copy from an older, cooler relative: you could now sell it and take a few months off work to go traveling, or update your kitchen. I did, it’s true, queue up to get Julie Andrews’s autograph. But that was so Dora and I could meet her, not so we could have her name written down in the space under where it was printed. I do also generally get books signed by authors when I meet them, because a long time ago a writer told me that they like being asked to do it.
Some time after the children had finished their stint in The Sound of Music, three of the mums took theirs into town to shop together for school uniform (two – Yasmin and Grace – were just about to start at Sylvia Young’s; John had already been there for several years). After a trip to John Lewis, they decided to take them to say hello at the Palladium. Outside, they bumped into Connie Fisher, who was pleased to see the kids and hugged them all and chatted. An elderly couple asked the three mums who the children were. ‘They were in the original cast,’ they explained.