MMd Cabaret

It's been boil-in-the-bag hot today. I almost melted on the tube. I went for osteopathy this morning and, for the first time, was treated by a female osteopath. It didn't go very well. She had two female students observing her, which instantly made me feel hugely self-conscious, and I'm afraid I left feeling like I'd simply been prodded and pushed around a bit, like a half-eaten plate of food. I think perhaps my size and robustness means that I am better treated by a man. I'm sure there are plenty of female osteopaths out there who are brilliantly psychotic and can give any man a run for his money in terms of deep tissue massage - and I'm furthermore sure that if I'd told her I couldn't feel what she was doing she would have upped the pressure - but I just don't feel like spending another £30 to give her the benefit of the doubt. I, of course, feel absolutely awful. She was a genuinely lovely lass, but I'm going to have to call the reception, book myself someone else and insist that it's a man. Does that make me sexist? Are scores of people rolling their eyes to heaven reading this, thinking what a small-minded misogynist I am?

I went into town this evening to the MMD new writers' cabaret where the wonderful Emma Fraser sang a song from Em which seemed to go down very well in the room. Emma performed it spectacularly well. I got a bit freaked out by the piano and at one point couldn't quite work out why my fingers didn't seem to be in the place that made the pretty noises I'd rehearsed!

This monthly cabaret is such a wonderful night which gives us all a chance to put faces to names and hear what British musical theatre writers are writing right now. There's an astounding amount of diversity. We had an old timer Tony-winner playing some of his old school tunes, a wonderful mini-choir from Laine Theatre Arts, and some absolutely brilliant performers doing sad stuff, happy stuff, funny stuff, jazzy stuff, theatrical stuff, folky stuff...

The only downer on the evening was - for the second time in as many weeks - one of the other writers going up to Nathan and telling him how awful Beyond The Fence was. It's all, of course, a combination of sour grapes, jealousy and the fact that the computer element in the project makes people feel like they can be more brutal about it without offending anyone, but it's really tiresome and predictable to think that relative strangers have the gall to say that crap, particularly about fellow writers. I try incredibly hard not to say anything rude about the work of any other British musical theatre writer because I know there are precious few of us out there and we're all swimming against the tide. The whole point about that writers' cabaret is that it ought to feel like a safe space where composers can experiment without being shot down in flames, but if fellow writers are wandering about in the background dissing other people's work, it's really not a lot of fun... For anyone!