Community Theatre; April 17 2024

If you think about it, I was doomed from the start. My parents met doing musical theatre. I had no chance of being anything but a Theatre Kid.

I’m missing performing, lately. Voice training is rough, but I used to be a decent singer, and my only lament about testosterone is that it altered my ability to find my range. I can’t belt the way I used to. I’d probably be able to with practice, but I have no venue to practice in.

I did my first musical at age 16 – Hello Dolly!, with my mom cast as Dolly and myself as… basically every bit part in the chorus, since people kept dropping out due to illness. I knew the script back to front. It’s still one of my most treasured memories of my teenage years. I started breaking into my school’s auditorium during my spare periods in order to sing on the stage. I think only the custodians knew, and they weren’t snitchin’ – we were on first name terms. They thought I was crazy, but I think in sort of an endearing way.

I think it was that year that I also started trying to write a musical of my own – The Wishing Maiden. I really wanted to create a fairy tale of my own, and with musicals being my new obsession, it seemed like the most appropriate medium. I eventually adapted into a novel when I couldn’t get the hang of writing music for the lyrics.

I also wrote a song for a fan musical, once, for ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’. I ran into the same problem, though. I only really know music by ear, can’t read it for the life of me. (It’s a shame, because even now, I really like that song…)

Obviously, I love watching musicals, too. One of the first things my ex and I did together, back when we were still teens, was bond over our love of Rent. We saw it together – Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal, who played Mark and Roger in the movie version, performed it in Toronto that year. Anthony Rapp signed my boot afterwards. It was awesome.

There was one Fringe Festival horror musical I saw that was all kinds of messed up, not long after that. They said the person who cheered the loudest at the end would get a free copy of their soundtrack. I still have the CD.

There’s just something about a musical that hits me harder than any other story platform. You can say and evoke so much more with music than novels. I love reading, and writing (obviously), but my heart does something when the music swells or the harmonies hit just right. When the upbeat tone of a song is directly contrary to lyrics that tell of trauma and pain (thinking specifically of ‘All You Wanna Do’ from the musical SIX, here). When you can contextualize the song, particularly when there’s a dark reprise…

Chills.

One performance in particular has stuck with me for years. It was ‘Come From Away’, before it hit Broadway – the actors were students at Seneca College, and when I say they nailed it, I cannot stress it enough. The technical aspects of their work was riveting, but it was so much more than the accents, the singing, the acting. I had never – and haven’t found it since – experienced such a sense of community as part of an audience, before. These characters, based on real people, led us by the hand into these anecdotes that hurt and healed and were funny and were poignant. By the end of the musical, the audience was stamping their feet to the rhythm, singing along to songs we were hearing for the first time, sobbing our eyes out with each other.

You just don’t get that in a movie theatre or from a book.