2011 in musicals starts tomorrow, with Christchurch Theatre Club's production of Copacabana. Let's look back at 2010 and see what we know now that we might not have known a year ago.
I saw 29 amateur productions of musicals last year, including one that I was in. They were produced by 25 different companies and featured 955 different performers a total of 1125 times, 19 of them at least three times. That's quite a lot of musicals and performances and it's hard to boil it down into one blog post. But here are the two main things I think we've learnt in the last year.
First, the best amateur performers are really really good. The best performances of those 1125 were Nick Hallam and Liz Brookes in The King and I, Jessica Nicklin in The Wizard of Oz, Keith Reynolds and Laura Orton in My Fair Lady, Stephen Godward in A Man Of No Importance, Jessica Nicklin again in The Last 5 Years, and Simon Theobald in Fiddler on the Roof. At least, those are the ones that leap out when I just read down the list. That's eight performances in roles that with one exception I've seen before, and all of which I expect to see again, which I think might be the best ones I'll ever see. There are literally dozens that could be added to that list in smaller roles which you'd be pleased to see on a professional stage for thirty quid a time. If you can fill all your principal roles with performances at that level, which Andrew Nicklin can apparently do twice in a week, then you can match anyone. There was also some dancing as good as you're going to find anywhere, in Christchurch's Crazy For You and Belper's King and I.
While we're here, there is the interesting point of the quality of the bands. The great majority of musicians, including MDs, are being paid to be here so you might think there's not a lot of room to contrast them with professional productions, but you'd be at least partly wrong. If you were to go and see a professional West Side Story you wouldn't hear anything like as good a sound as we got from Stephen Williams at Nottingham Operatic Society Youth Group's production, because they wouldn't have afforded that many musicians, and similarly with Derby G & S's Fiddler on the Roof under Andrew Nicklin. These are wonderfully orchestrated shows and typical professional productions are making do with a synthesiser instead of a string section.
The second thing we've learnt is that you get best results by picking a good musical and then doing it as written. The further you go from what the people who wrote the thing actually wrote, the worse you look. Almost all modern Gilbert and Sullivan productions, for example, introduce some sort of staging or business that Gilbert himself never thought of, but if you do it well, put in the business that Gilbert would put in if he were in 2010 with your cast and your theatre and your audience, you end up with a good show, like Derby G & S's HMS Pinafore or Three Counties's Mikado, and if you just chuck in some stuff you thought of you end up with an unconvincing one, like West Bridgford's Pirates. I enjoyed that show at the time, and I'm still glad I went, but it doesn't hold up next to the very strong Gilbert and Sullivan you can see elsewhere. The best productions of modern musicals were the ones like musicworks's A Man Of No Importance and Little Theatre's Titanic, where people took a good piece and did the best job they could with it, not the ones like the Lace Market's Sweeney Todd, where they sometimes seemed to be deliberately doing a good musical badly, or Greasepaint's Fame, where they picked a terrible musical and then evidently weren't that bothered how well they did it.
These don't seem very profound insights as a return on 29 theatre trips, actually 36 when you consider that we did King and I seven times and I saw HMS Pinafore twice, but I've looked down the list and thought about it and hey, they're what I have.
