singing

What do you do when a dream comes true?

Celebrate, of course, and thank your lucky stars that you were fortunate enough to accomplish something you wanted so badly.

But what comes next?

I’m facing this question at the moment and, rather poetically, it’s all because of a musical about dreams…

After every show, I write a Facebook status, proclaiming how thankful I was to have
been a part of it and what it meant to me, often throwing in a few anecdotes and a photo or five to illustrate the point.

This time, I wrote just one line: ‘May I return to the beginning…’

Every show is special, but sometimes you happen upon a production with an extra something. You can’t name it, but you know it’s there.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was one such show. Except it wasn’t. When the curtain fell on the final performance, I fell to pieces and it was up to the unfortunate Pharaoh (sorry, Brad!) to pick up those pieces, while the Choir, Chorus, Brothers and Joseph looked helplessly on, some certain they were just witnessing another attack of the normal post-show blues, others – rightly – not so sure.

Joseph went above and beyond everything I had ever imagined, and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that made it that way, because every time I thought about it, I’d find a way to convince myself the dream hadn’t ended: there was the after show party, the reviews, the feedback on social media, the DVD, the photographs…

It ended a couple of weeks ago, though, with the presentation of £6,275 to three charities. It was the last meeting of ‘Team Joseph’. And as I drove away from the presentation, towards a rehearsal for another show, I cried.

Because Joseph was not ‘just another show’.

For the eight-year-old, who performed in Joseph at primary school and gazed up at the Narrator, wishing to be them and willing herself to be worth that role, it meant a childhood dream come true.

For the eleven-year-old, who mimed the hymns in school assemblies because the other girls sniggered at her because singing in assembly wasn’t ‘cool’, it meant beating the bullies who stole her voice.

For the sixteen-year-old, who hated the way she looked, with her spots and her braces and her puppy fat and her frizzy hair, it was a boost in self-esteem that no money could ever have bought.

For the twenty-three-year-old, who auditioned time and again for musicals, who gave her all and was still overlooked every single time, who was left wondering if maybe she just wasn’t good enough, it was proof that she had the talent to hold a leading role…and the reviews proved she could nail it.

For the twenty-six-year-old, the jaded twenty-six-year-old, who was buckling under the pressure of other people’s problems without a word, it was a place to be happy.

I said to myself, several times during the rehearsal process, that I didn’t know what I’d do when Joseph ended, because I was pretty sure it was the only thing holding me together. And those I told laughed it off, or dismissed it as typical thespian drama, or just glossed over it with a worry of their own.

The problem is, I wasn’t joking.

I’m struggling now, and scared to say as much for fear of the reprimands I will face from people who perceive it to be ridiculous that something so commonplace as a musical could hold someone together.

Some people perform for a living, and some live to perform. I fall into the latter category, and there are always post-show tears and post-show blues, but this time it was – it is – different. So much of my heart and soul went into Joseph that, some days, I don’t think I even came out of character. It consumed my every spare moment, and some moments that were not so spare; I’ll confess that more than once I doodled the names of the colours and characters on notes taken during a conference call.

Joseph will have a place in my heart for as long as I live, and I’m not sure anything will ever match the whirlwind of emotions that I felt at every rehearsal, every performance. Frankly, the number of times I got home from a rehearsal and cried with happiness is just embarrassing.

And when the curtain went up on opening night, and Joseph – played, incidentally, by one of my dearest friends – came over to me during his first rendition of ‘Any Dream Will Do’, we grasped each other’s arms for a few bars longer than directed, willing each other not to cry because we’d done it. It was really happening, and neither of us could quite believe it.

Moments like that are ones that, if I call them to mind, make me feel like I’m there again. They’re moments I will never forget.

In January 2015, when I suggested to the committee that we tackle a musical, and I had to pitch for forty-five minutes to convince them we could do it, I never dreamed that I would wind up playing the Narrator, part of a cast and crew in excess of eighty impossibly talented people.

And now it’s over, I feel a sense of loss that I can’t quite place, and all the things that were so easy to deal with before are suddenly so much harder to handle.

I need to find a new dream, I suppose…but no matter how I try to fix on something I want as much as I wanted that, I come up blank. What comes next, I don’t know. Perhaps it will hit me one day, with as much force as this one did, but – at this moment – I am very much of the opinion that, truly, any dream will do…

–