Everything goes

When I first began rehearsing a musical, I discovered to my genuine surprise that I was breaking an unwritten rule…that directors of serious ‘legitimate’ theatre should not dirty their hands by contact with such a lower form of entertainment! Since that time, it’s become almost impossible to name a leading play director who has not been successful and influential with musicals.

It’s just possible that, back in 1986, our Royal Shakespeare Company show Les Misérables, which survived a universal critical drubbing in this country, was a vital step forward in proving that a musical could actually be about something — poverty, injustice, revolution, religious fundamentalism, that sort of thing. But it’s more likely that the change came about through the gradual recognition of the genius of Stephen Sondheim, a composer/lyricist of Shakespearean dexterity, felicity and originality. A thaw has slowly set in, a climate change, still at times as difficult to prove as the melting of the ice caps.

I confess I have no idea from where this frigid antipathy arose. Perhaps I was lucky, growing up in a place and at a time when the staple entertainment in the local touring theatre was music hall. My first-ever experience of the interior of a theatre — with tickets won by my sister in a ‘colouring in’ competition — was listening to a pit orchestra tuning up. I was eight, and it was by far the most exciting sound I had heard in my life. But this was also the great age of the movie musical.

When I was 13, I went to see a film called Kiss Me, Kate. I emerged from the local Ritz Cinema that evening, intoxicated with the certainty that the life of the theatre, on stage and off, was the only life I wanted to lead.

The film starred the vocally and physically magnificent Howard Keel, a fitting object of hero worship, and in one scene he sang a Petruchio soliloquy from a runway promontory that jutted far out into the midst of his audience.