Millie: and its done

[bookzombie]

At the after-show drinks last night, one of our members gave us all little key fobs with the text 'I survived Thoroughly Modern Millie'. It's amazing how appropriate that was!

Overall I am actually extremely pleased with how it went. My voice did not let me down too much and in fact several of the performances of 'Falling in Love with Someone' contained some of the best singing I've ever done in public (and I don't say that lightly - I really don't have a very high opinion of my voice much of the time). I think I gave a good performance - not too many fluffs of dialogue (I think I only got one minor line of dialogue actually wrong in a performance, but had a few hesitations across the week).

Despite on paper seeming like a one-woman show, it is actually quite a big ensemble piece. Louise was excellent as Millie, giving a good combination of sass and vulnerability. I felt very, very sorry for her in the last couple of days because she also went down with a cold and was not able to sing as well as she can, but she continued to perform with gusto. James also made a likeable Jimmy (the male romantic lead). That role is a difficult balancing act because Jimmy can come across as an unlikeable, self-centred piece of work if you are not careful. It's worth noting also that this was the first lead role for both Louise and James.

I'll admit I wasn't so bothered about Maria's Miss Dorothy, but that's as much because Maria is one of those dreadfully serious amateur actors (she brought her own wig, you know...) that I find difficult to take seriously.

Kathy was also excellent as Mrs Meers (the failed actress disguising herself as the chinese owner of a hotel for young actresses so that she can sell them in the White Slave trade. Welcome to the plot...), a real nice character part. At the curtain calls she consistently got a mixture of boos and cheers!

My patter song may have been fast, but the hardest jobs were really Seb and Jeremy, playing Mrs Meers two chinese assistants, whose dialogue is almost entirely in Mandarin. They didn't always get it entirely right (and I'm sure any Mandarin speakers in the audience would have been wincing) but they made a good stab at it. It is particularly important that they are played fairly straight (as straight as they can be in a comic show anyway) as they are supposed to make it obvious to the audience how fake Mrs Meers is. And yes, of course in an ideal world they should be played by chinese actors but we're a bit short of those in Andover! We're pretty short of Americans as well, but that isn't such a sensitive issue (a discussion for another time perhaps!)

A side comment on this: we hit one of those cultural divides when pennski's parents came to see the show. I was telling them afterwards about the tough job Seb and Jeremy had with the dialogue and P.'s mum said 'Oh, I just assumed they're dialogue was all made up nonsense words.'  Very calmly (for me anyway) I pointed out that no, it would not be acceptible these days to have Chinese characters spouting off made up dialogue and quite rightly so. We don't think she really got what we were talking about. Sigh.

All the other small roles were also done extremely well, with lots of nice little turns from people (including P's turn as Ethel Peas, the first person we see kidnapped).

The down side of it for me was that I was quite ill throughout the run so most of the time when I should have been anticipating the enjoyment I ended up just trying to marshall my strength and desperately hoping that I would make it through. Even today I am not over the cold, with blocked-up ears and a bit of a cough.

We went out for a meal after the show last night and didn't get to bed until 2ish (way past our normal bed time!), slept through to about 10, had some breakfast and then we both fell asleep again!

Hey ho, time to start getting stuff ready for flying to WisCon on Wednesday then...!