It seemed such a simple question...

Someone asked me the other day what my favourite musical was.

This is a ridiculous question.

There is no way I could, would or will ever be able to chose just one. This is something I am damn sure of. But this question did get me thinking. I let it sit with me for a little while and my mind wondered to a selection of musicals, plays and even an opera that are not, perhaps, my favourites but are so very important to me, that hold truly special places in my heart and more often than not pinpoint turning points or moments of growth in my life… Now, the list I am about to propose to you, are not shows that I have necessarily been in – hell, most of them aren’t. That is not what this is about. It’s about how theatre has and will always shape my life. Consciously and un-consciously.

I think the best way to do this would be in chronological order… so travel with me, if you will, dear readers… back to the early 1980’s.

A young girl of 7(ish) is sitting on a bank of seats in a rehearsal hall, watching her father direct a show. At this stage in her life, she simply assumed that this is what everyone’s fathers did on a Sunday afternoon. There is cast of young people scattered around a stage running the opening number. They all seemed so wonderful, so talented and alive. They were singing about magic – about making it… To be exact they were singing: “We’ve got magic to do, just for you…” Yup. Pippin.

I fell in love with that show as a little girl and to this day adore it. The story of a young man finding himself… although back then I just liked the fact I got to play with the duck and the puppy when they weren’t on stage. I watched the Ben Vareen video over and over again and listened to my John Farnham recording until I knew every word. Other shows had come before this one… Iolanthe, Sound of Music, Oh what lovely war…but there was something about Pippin that captured my seven year old imagination. It was my first experience of truly falling in love with a story.

Next up… The first play to win my heart was also a family induced affair. My mother and brother were aptly cast playing mother and son in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs”

This is, quite simply, the first part of a BRILLIANT trilogy. If you have not read these plays or seen these movies… I urge you to do so. They are the most endearing tales of family life you can ever come across. These plays are like home to me. I can still see my brother throwing a baseball against a piece of corrugated iron as Eugene replying to my mother’s line as Blanche of “What would you tell your father if I was lying dead on the kitchen floor” with “I’d say don’t go in the kitchen Pa!” There was a part of a younger sister in this show and it broke my heart at the auditions when the director explained to me that, although yes I was tall, I was still 8 years too young to play the role. I so desperately wanted to be a part of this. I still to this day use the line “You can’t love your cousin… you’ll have babies with nine heads.” (Admittedly… I don’t get to use it very much)

This then leads us to the one and only “Little Shop of Horrors.” Watching my Dad bring this show to life was quite simply spectacular to a now 10 year old. Now you must understand that I considered myself quite the veteran of the theatre by this stage… but nothing could prepare me for a man eating plant that so controversially shouted “No shit Sherlock” Not only could it talk… but it swore! This was the greatest thing ever put on stage! Three women sang fantastic motown harmonies; Audrey and Seymour fell in love only to be eaten by a giant alien hybrid of a Venus flytrap. I felt so privileged to know the secrets of this amazing plant… of how it all worked. It was like I was had been admitted to the magic circle. I had stepped through the looking glass to see how it was made – it was this process of creation that I had fallen in love with. The ability to bring something to life that had lain on page. Yes I loved music, yes I loved to sing, but it was the running lines with mum in our 1980’s pink kitchen, watching her highlight page after page in orange in green, scribbling notes all over the text – bringing the piece to life. It was watching my Dad pour over set designs, working out how to take words on a page and turn them into something three-dimensional. Taking a group of people and turning them into soldiers, magicians, clowns… it all seemed to natural to me and it was a very rude awakening when I realised not everybody lived like this.

This brings me to the next show that rates a hearty mention… “Barnum”

I’ve actually been involved in this production twice – once watching my Dad and brother put it together, another playing woodwind in the pit. I adore the life story of PT Barnum, his love affair with “humbug and magic” and of course, his relationship with his wife Charity. This show had it all – tightropes, web work, juggling, magic, humour, heartbreak… two times over this incredible piece stole my heart - and I gave it willingly. It was always the highlight of my week to be able to go with Dad to rehearsals and sit in the back quietly watching this show come to life. The second time round, was an equally enjoyable experience.

NB: For anyone who is about to embark on the wood wind track of this show… get your chops ready for the piccolo line in “come follow the band” it will blow your gums off.

It was during my first production of this that I must have been about twelve years old. I distinctly remember asking the cute boy in my class if he was coming to see the show and if he was going to the other musical that happened to be in town. There was a crack in my world when he turned around and said “Amy… I just don’t like theatre. And no one I know does”

UM…. Sorry?

It was as if he were speaking a foreign language. This was not an idea I had even considered. I had spent 12 years assuming everyone lived in the same world I did; sitting in my parents rehearsals, running lines, building sets, learning songs… apparently not. Why anyone would want to do anything else with his or her childhood is still beyond me.

This brings us to adolescence. With my childhood shaped by working class Jewish Americans, man eating plants and tightrope walkers – it seems to make complete sense that my teenage rebellion took its artistic form in something a little darker. These years weren’t so much about seeing something brought to life – but about see how far this art could push it’s voyeurs.

I will never forget a certain afternoon I spent with my Dad. The set was going up for a show - I couldn’t even tell you which one it was… that isn’t the point of this moment. I was “helping” Dad by painting a prop of some kind and my mind had wandered off listening to the new CD that was being played.

I swear to god the lyrics that floated through the air changed my life…

“Hey Pal - Feeling blue? Don’t know what to do? Hey Pal, I mean you. Yeah. You wanna kill a president?”

What the? Hold the phone! These people are singing about assassinating Lincoln. This ain’t no “Paint Your Wagon.” I turned the volume up….

“All you have to do is squeeze your little finger… ease your little finger and – you can change the world”

This was something different… this was something special… this was something that captured this awkward teenager’s imagination. This was “Assassins.”

And so my love affair with all things Sondheim was born.

It would be another eight years until I was involved in a production of “Assassins” (Playing by-stander three with my one spoken line of dialogue being a profound “BEEF”)
This show hi-jacked my imagination. I read the script over and over again, dissecting every line of dialogue, studying every lyric. The repeated analysis of “Another National Anthem” and perpetual reading of the final scene between Booth and Oswald led to a teenage Amy’s discover that musical theatre could be something more than happy endings. Not wanting to sound too melodramatic – but this show shook my theatrical soul! Not that I knew it then, but this was a piece that was truly ahead of its time and I salute it’s creators for their bravery and foresight in bringing it to the stage.

It was literally a week or so after my Dad played me the Assassins soundtrack, on a random Sunday evening that Mother told me there was something on T.V that she wanted to watch. This pissed me off because no doubt I would have been looking forward to the latest episode of Beverly Hills 90210. But – never the less Mum put her foot down because she wanted to tape some show that was going to be on the ABC (the artsy channel in Australia.) After much whining and complaining I was told to stop complaining and give it a go because I might just like it.

The “it” that I might “just like” was a little something called “Into the Woods.”

“Just might like it…” was an understatement. I became completely obsessed with it and the work of Stephen Sondheim. (The true lengths of which you can read in my blog “We could be heroes, just for one day”) Some teenagers obsess about rock stars or movie heroes… I obsessed over the guy who wrote “Send in the Clowns.” I’m surprised I didn’t grow up to be a gay man.

But as we are speaking of particular shows I should flag certain shows that were the highlights of Amy’s “Sondheim’s Years.”

Assassins lead to Into the Woods which took me to Company (again see previous Sondheim blog for the details on that one) and then…

Oh then…

“Mapping out a sky… what you feel like, planning a sky…”

“You are complete... You all alone… I am unfinished… I am diminished… with or without you…”

Yes.

Sunday in the Park with George.

As I type this “Sunday” has opened on Broadway and if every single person who reads this blog does not go and see it, I will personally drag each and every one of you to the box office to buy your damn ticket. The first time I ever heard this show I fell truly and deeply in love with it…. And at the time I didn’t have the slightest inkling as to how connected to it I would become on so many… many…different levels. This is my “Onion” show… meaning it’s got so many damn layers and always… always makes me cry when I crack it open. Actually – cry is an understatement. Sunday in the Park with George rips my heart open with the first five notes of its score – by the time we get to “move on” I might as well be in a coma. Lets just say that George and Dot don’t just cut close to my bone – it’s basically a marrow transplant.

I could write 10 pages alone on this piece – so I will have to cut it short here and wait until I get over to New York in june to truly sing it’s never ending praises.

But I digress. If I was artistically “married” to Mr. Sondheim – then as I headed to my senior years of high school I had an affair. I took a lover. Yes… I had several artistic dirty weekends with Sam Shepard.

“Savage/Love” and its non-linear, song cycle style of formation nestled it’s self into my imagination and was my introduction to the poetic sweeping American writing of Sam. The first incarnation of this show I had seen was performed by a class of actors at the college I would one day attend. They were my heroes. They probably could have performed “Trial by Jury” and I would have loved it.

Wait… no… that’s not true. Gilbert and Sullivan does my head in. I could never love it.

But I digress – My obsession with Shepard ran parallel with Sondheim and had a similar journey.

Savage/Love lead to Cowboy Mouth, which took me to Fool For Love

If you have not read any of his work… DO IT! Do it and I dare you not to love it!

This then leads us to our final destination – the University Years.

Now – again a show was brought to my attention that would make my head spin. The idea that musicals could be written with a truly contemporary sound track that didn’t sound cheesy or dated. Again something non-linear, almost as a song cycle… written by some young American guy…

I was standing on the steps of my college entrance and my mate John ran past me, grabbing my wrist and dragging me into the closest dance studio with a working CD player.

“Shut up and listen to this”

He pressed played. Much like the opening notes of Sunday made the hairs on my neck stand on end… so too did Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World”

I looked up at John – he was smiling at me.

“Don’t even tell me – I know how much you love it.”

And so my never-ending love of contemporary musical theatre was born. This still exists to this day – and is what fuels my life and work.

It pretty much goes without saying that loving “Songs for a New World” led me to “Parade” and in turn “The Last Five Years.” Three shows that bookend a major transitional and progressive section of my life. Again – there are dimensions of these shows (and the subsequent productions thereof) that make my affinity with them insanely multi layered – but to be honest, its late, my fingers ache from all the typing, my tired eyes can hardly see the screen and this blog is already long enough! Any one of my BAPA alumni can vouch that I literally lived and breathed the songs of Jason Robert Brown 24/7 for several years.

So… I guess that brings me to the end… The soundtrack of my young life I guess. This is no indication of what I am listening to today (although if you have not heard Jeff Blumenkrantz’s pod casts – you haven’t lived) but merely a salute to the shows that have lead me to where and who I am.

There are shows that do rate honourable mentions in this journey – Rags, My Favourite Year, Proof, Cloudstreet, Summer Rain, Foreigners From Home, Baz Luhrmann’s La Boheme, The Good Bye Girl, Much Ado About Nothing, Freedom of the City, Porsche Coughlin, Love! Valour! And Compassion! And I urge all of you to discover at east one of these fantastic pieces. They’ll change your life if you let them.

See! Asking me my favourite show is a silly silly question. I’ll never be able to give you just one.

To end this all off – and it’s high time I did – I quote Peter Gallagher –

“No matter what - I always go back to theatre. It's probably where I'll draw my last breath.”