Taylorian

Drama

FAME

the dome of St Paul’s was completed. So the story goes, he had a fast horse ready to take him to the coast and from there to the continent if everything ended in disaster. As we know, and so too here, it turned out to be a triumph. Right there and then I thanked Ms Clarke, as I am doing now, for putting on a marvellous show and with a musical like FAME providing the antidote to pandemic. All the hours and hours of rehearsal, the logistical effort, the transformation of the Great Hall, the sleepless nights and the worry, the suspension of one’s normal life, were all worth it and I could see in the brightness of her eyes she knew it too. Congratulations to everyone involved in a superb production. Fame is fickle, best not sought for its own sake and will not last; but for those who were a part of this show the memories will stay with them for the rest of their days. Mr M. G. Hilton-Dennis

the students. A flicker of solidarity may have lit up my chest to the tune of ‘The Privilege to Teach’ and you only needed to look around the auditorium to see what a teacher-student collaboration this show was. There, nestled beneath the stage, was the orchestra, led by our very own rock star Director of Music, Mr Couldridge, who made the difficult task of conducting while playing the bass guitar look effortlessly cool. So too Mrs Stubbs, always composed, alongside Mr Tonks, Mr Lawrance, Mr Martin, Mr R Couldridge (no coincidence there I’m sure), Mr Feltham and, from the boys, the accomplished Max Witt on trombone and Damon Robb on reeds. Hats off to them all. What a treat to be listening to live music and watching a show of this magnitude after those preceding years in the Covid wilderness. As the whole cast assembled on stage for the ensemble finale, it was a joy to see them all dancing and singing with full hearted abandon, and by all I mean all: Lachlan Sergeant, Jos Witt, Yuvraj Juttla, Yuvraj Bansal, Arjun Oberoi, Owen Skinner, Matthew Duggleby, Diya Shah, Jamie Morris, Imanuela Olayinka, Maahi Dodhia, Sarah Harrison, Georgia Breckner, Anabelle Craft, Olivia Gough, Eshani Rewatkar, Eve Moir, Sadie Moir, Zarah Shah and Shnour Lakhani. And by all, I mean the audience as well, some of whom had turned back the clock to the 80s and were merrily belting out the title track as they shimmied in the aisles. At the back of the Great Hall, the production team, bespectacled in neon-ribbed glasses and under the expert supervision of Mr Gimmi, were flinging out their voices. Even the normally inscrutable stage management team of Mr Talboys, Mr Richardson and Mr Hoyle were said to have raised an eyebrow. And where in all of this, you may ask, was the director? Where was the lady of the moment? As both fire-warden on the night and theatre critic, at the end I managed to sneak out of one of the fire exits and onto the external balcony of the Great Hall. And there, standing in the cool of a November night, was Ms Clarke. For a moment I was reminded of the story of Christopher Wren, who reportedly stood on top of a hill outside of London and watched as

about the diet pills, more about the seafood diet – “I see food, and I eat it” – Isaac’s Mabel would have resonated with an MTS audience. No one was going home hungry after this production, certainly not the romantics among the audience. They got their fill in the slow-burning relationship between actors Nick Piazza and Serena Katz, played respectively by Midun Odunaiya and Lucy Graham. Their relationship moved from unhealthy idolising to something much more real; it was their very well-sung duet, ‘A Love Song of Our Own’, which saw them reconciled and a few hearts, both young and not so young, melting in the audience. We were treated to some proper New York drawl and swagger by Alex Elliott’s Grace ‘Lambchops’ Lamb and Ralph Suggett’s Goodman ‘Goody’ King. It was their comic melodrama that became a neat foil for the unshowy devotion of Schlomo Metzenbaum, both to his music and to the fiercest burning star of them all, Carmen Diaz. Joshua Odegbami as Schlomo, mixing ponderous speech with delicate composition, convinced us of his understated talent and of his deep care for Carmen. If only, we wondered, she had made the sensible decision and stuck with the quiet man who truly loved her. But FAME has other ideas and only one couple in a show like this gets the happy ever after. We want to see stars beyond our ken burn brightly and then fall. And so it is with Carmen, who first intoxicates us with the idea of fame and immortality – ‘I want to live forever!’ we join in with her iconic song – but from whom we have distanced ourselves by the end. Helen Szostak as Carmen achieved remarkable depth of emotion, offering a mature rendering of the sorrow of broken dreams in her virtuoso singing of ‘LA Dreams Come True’ – one of those moments when the entire audience holds its breath. It was an added touch of poignancy that the day after the last night of the show, the news broke of the death of Irene Cara, who shot to fame as the original actress in the 1980 film and singer of the title track. FAME is one for the teachers in the audience, almost as much as it is for

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Taylorian 2023