Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  When I collected Dora from the rehearsal that afternoon, she was full of excitement about the photo shoot, the most thrilling aspect of it being the free bar, where she had been allowed as much lemonade as she wanted. I heard her out and agreed that it was all fantastic, before saying, ‘You do realise, don’t you, that in a few months this will all stop, and things will be back to normal?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she replied, instantly. ‘I need to keep my life going like this.’

  I was slightly taken aback by her conviction. ‘I think not,’ I said. ‘I’ll need a holiday.’

  Dora was equally clear about her needs: ‘I won’t.’

  That night I headed off to York to run a training course for librarians, leaving Laurie and Dora at home. Dora had a day off rehearsals while I was away, and on the Friday we had a photocall with the Mittens team, as I’d written a newspaper article about accidentally becoming a stage mother, and they wanted some photos of me failing to get into rehearsals. This translated into the photographer standing me on a box, and making me pull faces through an outside window, holding my breath so as not to mist it up, while the kids inside performed ‘So Long, Farewell’ dressed in their black trousers and Sound of Music t-shirts. Then they came and did it again outside – so I got a privileged preview of one of the routines, which made the whole mortifying process almost worthwhile. In the end, the paper used an innocuous picture of me brushing Dora’s hair together with one they took of the kids in full costume a couple of weeks later.

  During my journey back from York, I had picked up an email from Jo Hawes. It was headed ‘23 October Week’ and was all about the first week of technical rehearsals. The children would have to be at the Palladium Tuesday to Saturday 1.30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Please, Jo asked, could we all take advantage of the fact that they were on half-term to make sure they got plenty of rest. We were to ensure they were well fed before turning up, and told that they would be taken out for a meal in the evening.

  From previous experience, at some point next week at least one parent will telephone me to complain loudly that their child was called all day and spent the entire time in the auditorium! I can tell you right now that there will be times when your children will not appear to be doing much, but we have a very short time to tech the show and we have to tech in all three sets of children and four Gretls. We must have the children available and it is wearing and tiring for everybody. I have sat in the Palladium in the past watching it take two days to tech the first 10 minutes of a show. It is a process that has to be endured and it is at times frustrating but also the most amazing and exciting part of the procedure! Please stick with us and know that we are all doing our very best! The tech week will be the most difficult week of all for everyone with sudden changes of schedule and I promise it will drive you to distraction. Look past it to the time when the show is in previews and settling down – not long now!

  Thanks for everything up to now – it has been lovely so far and all the kids are fabulous!

  I am hoping to get a schedule for next week tomorrow.

  And then, in red, the details

  Week commencing October 23

  13.30

  Company into costume/wigs/mics (except Tuesday when children should come at 1 p.m. please)

  14.00

  Company on stage

  17.45

  Company out of costumes, etc.

  18.00

  Company break

  19.00

  Company back into costume/wigs/mics

  19.30

  Company on stage

  21.45

  Company out of mics

  22.00

  Company break

  I emailed back

  Thanks Jo.

  Aaarrggh.

  Any tips for extra stuff I should send in with Dora that week – e.g. books, comics, colouring accoutrements, espresso?

  On the up side, I was hoping that this might initiate Dora into the joy of lie-ins. These hadn’t been a feature of her life to date. In fact, on the one occasion before then that she’d slept beyond 8.15 a.m., I’d found myself checking that she was still breathing …

  While Dora and two of the other Gretls were each attached to one team throughout the whole rehearsal period, Adrianna’s schedule was now changing weekly. She’d done the first couple of weeks with Geese and Alicia, the next one with Kettles and Lauren and was now about to join Mittens and Dora for the next week. Dora was pleased. As far as she was concerned, the more the merrier. Shana, however, was a bit worried. Did it mean, she wondered, that Adrianna was the spare Gretl? Number four of four? I thought it unlikely. It was more probable, I felt, that they were making sure that she could work with all the teams and preparing her to do the opening night. It made sense. She was the oldest of the four Gretls, with the most experience of live theatre, and I was certain – especially as she skipped out of rehearsals looking as gorgeously pristine as when she arrived – she was the least fidgety and, consequently, the most likely to be where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there.

  With one more week to go at the Jerwood Space, I was starting to wonder where I’d set up my temporary office near the Palladium. I would, I knew, miss Café Arlington, where I was happily ensconced for much of the time that Dora was rehearsing, even though I knew there would be much more to do around Oxford Circus and many more opportunities to spend money. And then I started wondering whether I would be setting up a temporary office near the Palladium. I’d be taking Dora in on the Bakerloo line, but couldn’t imagine doing the return journey with an overtired, over-excited six-year-old after ten o’clock at night. I would, I realised, be dropping her off, hopping back on the tube, and driving back into town again to pick her up. Oh well, once performances started, it would only be twice a week at most, and then only for a few months. It didn’t seem like too onerous a commitment if I thought about it quickly. And I was sure that Laurie, my dad and my Auntie Ruth would help out from time to time.

  The final week of rehearsals at the Jerwood opened, with me and Dora dashing in after school so that she could have a costume fitting, as they had been arranged on the one day that week that she and Mittens weren’t rehearsing. It didn’t take long and we headed back home in time for dinner and an early night. The rest of the week went past in a blur of packed lunches. On the Tuesday, Jo emailed round to ask if we would be willing to let our children stay on for an extra month, so instead of finishing at the end of February or beginning of March, they would finish at the end of March or beginning of April. I checked with Laurie – as this would only bring Dora up to the beginning of the Easter holidays, there was no problem: even he wasn’t planning a break before then. Everyone emailed back to say yes. So we had to fill out more forms, and get another letter from Dora’s school, and one from her doctor.

  On 18 October, Jo emailed with details of which teams would be performing when from Monday, 20 November. So, with the exception of the preview period and the first few nights, parents could now start booking tickets. Unless, that was, like me, they were the parents of a Gretl. The show would open officially on Wednesday, 15 November, with previews starting on Friday 3rd. As yet, the creative team hadn’t decided what to do with the Gretls: ‘Because of their age/their various strengths and weaknesses, etc. etc. minds keep changing!’ So we still didn’t know whether they’d each do one show in every four, or whether they’d follow a different pattern, let alone which among them would be performing on opening night. And frankly, despite Russ’s contention that ‘that’s when the true colours come out’ – in other words, that was when we parents would all stop being best buddies and morph into bitchingly jealous rivals – none of us were particularly bothered about that. Whilst we all felt that in some ways it would be nice for our kids (and us) to bathe in the glory of attention, there were caveats. What if the show bombed? If the press hated it? After all, The Sound of Music has, in the past, garnered some terrible reviews. Or what if it was all fabulous – with the exception of my child
, who said, sang or danced the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time in front of all those watching critics and celebrities, then burst into tears and developed sudden, unprecedented stage fright at the worst possible moment?

  And to be honest, who got to do press night paled into insignificance in the face of our concern that we might not be able to watch them whichever night they started on. I wondered whether the four Gretls’ families should get together and each book two tickets for one of four consecutive performances. But this wouldn’t work for Jackie and Scott, who had two daughters in the show who might – or might not – be performing on the same night, and who would want to take Olivia to watch Alicia if they weren’t. So in the end, we just had to wait.

  There was, that week, an extra buzz of excitement. The proofs of the children’s entries in the programme had arrived. I checked ours to ensure that the meagre details were correct. They were. Dora’s entry read:

  Dora Gee

  Gretl

  Dora is six and lives in Harlesden, northwest London. She attends Leopold Primary School and learns ballet at Adele’s School of Dance.

  This is Dora’s first acting job.

  To the left of the text was a photo that my father had taken of Dora in his garden. She was wearing an enormous gappy grin, and an even bigger silk flower in her hair, and appeared against a leafy background. Everyone else’s photos were devoid of both hair decorations and foliage. It looked as though they had all had professional portfolio pictures taken – although I later found out that Jackie had simply whisked Olivia and Alicia off to the local passport photo studio.

  Dora was off school from that Wednesday – half-term was extra long as the staff were doing their training days then. This gave her the opportunity for slightly more rest than she would otherwise have had, although, being her, she didn’t really take advantage of it. She had been to stay with Molly-May a week earlier and had a fabulous time, so I organised a return visit for the Saturday after the final rehearsal at the Jerwood. Molly would go home on the Sunday, and I’d make sure Dora had a quiet day on Monday before starting at the Palladium on Tuesday. I picked them both up from the last rehearsal that afternoon. They sang on the train all the way home, rehearsing numbers from the show. ‘They’re really good,’ said a man sitting near me. ‘They could really do something when they’re a bit older.’ My inner stage mother took over. Instead of just smiling and saying ‘thank you’ quietly, I told him exactly what they were doing right now.

  There is, I’m sure, a knack to knowing when it’s okay to talk about what your child is doing, when they’re appearing in a major West End show, and who it’s okay to tell, but I never managed to get the hang of it. I knew that it shouldn’t be the first thing she or I told everyone we met, but there were some friends I never got round to telling, who wished I had told them, and several strangers whom I told inappropriately. On the other hand, talking about what Dora was up to led to other people telling me about their – sometimes surprising – showbiz connections. After I’d been describing the extent of the child-ferrying involved, one colleague said, ‘Yes, but imagine doing all that for a dog.’ Turned out her friend’s pet was playing Snowy in Tintin. Meanwhile, Boyd Tonkin, the super-erudite literary editor of The Independent, told me about the years of Sunday afternoons – ‘for some reason I always associate those rehearsals with winter twilight. I don’t know why …’ – he spent singing with the Finchley Children’s Music Group. ‘It was, and is, one of the leading secular, as opposed to church-based, children’s choirs in London. There are a couple of others, but in north London, the Finchley Massif is the one that rules.’ He was taken there by his parents when he was six or seven. ‘At that age you don’t really take decisions for yourself. My parents decided that I would go along to do an audition. To join, I just had to not make a sound horrible enough to spoil the entire effect.’

  Whilst a member of the choir – which he was until his voice broke – Boyd sang at the Royal Albert Hall in what is regarded as the seminal performance of Mahler’s 8th Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and on records made at Abbey Road studios. Although the Sunday afternoon rehearsals could feel penitential, the big events were thrilling. ‘Those hours of boredom purchased the ability to do the exciting things. We were aware, from a very early stage, that this was leading up to the buzz of performance. And that was exciting. Everyone around you is hyped up, and it’s contagious’

  Boyd feels that he gained a sense of discipline – ‘it was a very well-run choir, they were pretty good at making sure that everyone knew that everyone had a role to play, that everyone was important. And therefore, you couldn’t chat at the back. Of course, if you tried chatting at the back at the EMI Abbey Road studios, the ferocious studio engineers would descend on you.’ He also believes it gave him an early grasp of the concrete relationship between effort and reward.

  ‘Most of the time when you’re a kid and adults say do this very boring thing for a long time then something great will happen, it’s all to do with passing exams. And unless you have parents who give you enormous presents when you pass exams, even doing well is slightly abstract. It’s very easy to feel “what was all that about?” But when you go on stage and there is the instant feedback of audience appreciation, you do sense that there is a point to this long period of sustained effort.’

  Something else I never got a proper handle on was how to manage an extremely tired and tetchy six-year-old. Dora is not, and has never been, a difficult child. Like any other small person, she has her moments – sometimes at impressive volume – but because she’s bright, communicative and straightforward, dealing with them is, usually, comparatively simple.

  During this intensive rehearsal period she was claiming more of my attention than usual. This, in a way, seemed fair. Not only had she been doing a paid job at an age when most children don’t even get pocket money, she’d also, as per legal requirements, been going to school whenever she wasn’t rehearsing, as well as doing extra homework to ensure that she didn’t fall behind and, when she could, attending her two dance lessons and keeping up with friends and family. She was managing to keep up with all her work, but in her down time she was knackered. I had to tread carefully, trying to ensure she was okay to do her job, but also avoiding becoming over-solicitous and over-attentive. It was hard, but the only thing worse than being told what to do by a small child is, as I discovered, finding yourself doing it. Again.

  Tuesday, 22 October. The first technical rehearsal. We stuffed Dora’s backpack with colouring things, a book to read and a pad to draw on. As usual, I read Harry Potter to her on the train – we were now on to … and the Chamber of Secrets. When we arrived at Oxford Circus, we took the first of many walks down Argyll Street, past the front of the theatre – which now, as well as the massive Sound of Music sign, was also displaying larger-than-lifesize photos of Connie Fisher, Simon Shepherd and Lesley Garrett – turned left past Café Uno on to Marlborough Street, where, between the newsstand and Café Libre, we found the Palladium stage door. The gates were open, revealing a couple of gigantic wheelie bins, some steps and a slope down to the stage door itself. Kids and parents were milling around, chatting excitedly. Dora clung to my hand, temporarily shy and uncertain. I looked around and thought about how I’d be spending a lot of time standing here over the next few months. It wasn’t so bad at that point, just before one o’clock on an October afternoon, but I could imagine that the wheelie bins would provide meagre shelter on a wet and freezing winter’s night.

  As I was a ‘new mum’, Wendy, whose daughter Christine had previously worked there in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and was now the Louisa in Mittens, had helpfully emailed me a warning of exactly how not-nice the experience could be:

  The Palladium drop-offs and pick-ups are even less parent-friendly than the Jerwood. We have to stand outside the stage door (by the lovely wheelie bins) and not set foot inside. There is an outside loo, which is usually okay for an emergency! If you’re collecting
Dora by car, beware the wardens, who magically appear at the end of the show and do slap a ticket on any car parked on yellow or zigzag lines.

  Meanwhile, as many of us parents who could manage to – in other words, those of us without full-time jobs or lots of other children – arranged to get together on the Wednesday afternoon for a treat. We all felt that we’d been working hard to support our kids and deserved a bit of fun. We hadn’t booked anything in advance, because there was a good chance that the rehearsal times would, at the last minute, be changed and we’d have ended up forking out for tickets which we couldn’t use as we suddenly had to pick our kids up halfway through the show we’d paid to watch. After much discussion – Avenue Q? No matinee on Wednesdays. Mary Poppins? No, those of us who hadn’t yet seen it wanted to watch it with the kids – a herd of us, eight mums, plus Caroline Riley’s teenage brother, sat in a long row to watch Cabaret. It was darkly gripping, beautifully designed, choreographed and performed, shocking, sexy and included a lot more nudity than The Sound of Music. I felt embarrassed for Caroline’s brother watching it from the middle of eight mothers.

  Dora found the technical rehearsals actually rather fun. She was especially excited about the ‘Lonely Goatherd’ routine, which involved the Gretls being pushed on to the stage in a wheelbarrow: this was particularly enjoyable when there were two Gretls being rehearsed simultaneously. ‘It was so funny mummy. Alicia was in the wheelbarrow and Frank [Thompson, the children’s director] carried me in next to her. I think we should do it like that all the time!’ In fact, in Dora’s opinion, the whole performance would be massively improved if there were twin Gretls on stage throughout the show – or, ideally, all four of them performing at once. She also enjoyed bounding across the sofa during ‘Do-Re-Mi’: ‘Sophie [Bould – Liesl] and Connie were supposed to carry me, but that was too hard, so Sophie puts me on one side of the sofa and Connie picks me up and puts me down at the other end’, and being given a piggyback by Sophie when they’re playing cowboys and Indians, wearing play clothes made of curtains in the scene where their father meets them for the first time on his return from Vienna with the baroness.