Carrying The Flame

A week last Thursday I went to see “Heathers The Musical” at The Other Palace

To be honest, I still can’t decide if it is brilliantly shocking or shockingly brilliant, but I can say that I have not seen an audience so engaged since the First Night of Hamilton

More importantly, this is the audience that musical theatre must nurture and cherish, the 16 to 25 year-olds, without whose engagement we will be staring into a demographic abyss 30 years from now

And the abyss will stare back at us, in the shape of dark theatres and dismal takings, and say: “We told you we weren’t coming”

And Musical Theatre will become the same endangered species as Opera is now; average age 60+ and requiring wheelbarrows full of public and corporate subsidies to keep a feint pulse flickering

The next day, Friday, I attended the public dress rehearsal of The Jungle at The Playhouse which had been completely transformed into the infamous Calais Refugee Camp

Here I found myself sitting next to a young woman who had worked as a volunteer at the actual Jungle, and to see her reliving the experience, with tears rolling down her cheeks, was one of the most moving experiences of my theatre career

A work of art makes us see the world differently

The Jungle is a work of art that reminds us of the humanity that connects us at a time when compassion itself is so often a camp under siege

So what is it that connects a musical based on a 1988 American black comedy and a piece of semi-immersive theatre built on the real life experiences of the citizens of the Calais Jungle?

Well, I hold the somewhat iconoclastic view that when you remove the mystical alchemy behind how a commercial production may or may not be received,  and irrespective of whether it  is a Musical or a Play, the long term success of a show depends on sustaining the prospect of a perceived pay-off, at a level of sufficiently alluring to overcome potential barriers to purchasing, to a sufficiently broad enough spectrum of prospective audiences, and sufficiently long enough to permit the development of renewable markets

In other words, the intensity of the initial engagement is like a precious spark that you hold tenderly in your hands, shielding from the cold winds that would snuff it out, as you build up the brushwood of potentially responsive audiences until that spark has become a beacon burning bright drawing visitors from afar

A spark handed down from our earliest ancestors, performing in the flickering flames of the campfire against a hand-painted backdrop of Bison and Antelopes, that we hand on to the generations of theatre-goers over the millennia to come