Me and My Drama

On Monday, we took ourselves down to Chichester to watch our very close friend, Matt playing the lead in Me and My Girl.

It’s a great production and Matt feels like he was born to play the role. I was particularly thrilled to see how well he was dancing. When we did Taboo together, he was a little remedial, shall we say, in that department. I’m tempted to say that if you’d told him walking was a dance step, he’d not have been able to do that! And yet there he was, in a pair or tap shoes, tripping the light fantastic on the stage. I was very proud. Matt actually did a month of daily one-on-one dance training to to get himself ready for the show. Now that’s commitment!

It’s not a show I particularly like. I was seeing it for the first time, so my knowledge of the piece is based entirely on what I was presented with. It’s quite light-weight, and the songs feel a little pointless and, in many cases, crow-barred in, but Gareth Valentine’s new orchestrations were sensational, and, much as they felt entirely irrelevant to the plot, it was wonderful to hear The Sun Has Got His Hat On and the Lambeth Walk. Particularly with all the bells and whistles.

Was everyone well-cast in the piece? Absolutely not. Some felt like they were in the wrong show stylistically. Others sounded like they had the wrong range for the role and had therefore popped their vocals clogs doing eight shows a week. One of the cast, who’s known in the industry as a singing legend, didn’t get to sing a note in the show. She barely got to say anything.

As it happened, the drama, for us, was also off the stage. As we were traveling down, Nathan used the button to open our electric windows. There was a large clatter and a bang, and the entire window dropped, like a stone, into the door casement. And that was that. We had to drive to Chichester without a passenger side window, the wind roaring, the rain spattering. Hopeless.

Upon reaching Chi, we called the AA (for the second time in a week) but all they could do was tape the gaping hole up with sticky polythene and suggest we book the car into a garage as quickly as possible.

After the show, we went back to Matt’s digs for half an hour, but as we left, Nathan realised he didn’t have his phone.

We hot-footed it back to the theatre and found the security man locking the building. We begged him to take pity on us and let us into the building. Nathan knew he’d left the phone under his seat, and pointed out that he was going to New Zealand at the end of the week, and obviously couldn’t be without his phone. The security guard told us that the ushers had done a sweep of the building and that nothing had been handed in, point blank refusing to let us look for ourselves, and then, actually walking away as we were talking to him, with a face which said, “we’re done here.” It was both humiliating and upsetting because we could only assume that the phone had been stolen.

We drove home in silence, but for the deafening sound of wind buffeting the plastic sheeting on the passenger side window!