As more tickets than ever before are being snapped up by parents eager to take their little – and slightly bigger – ones to the theatre, so too are the exciting activities and workshops available during Kids Week, our annual initiative offering one free child’s ticket for every full price ticket purchased.
Aimed at children aged around 16 years old, the workshop held by Rock Of Ages offered a rare and exciting privilege for young wannabe musical thespians. After all, it’s not everyday you get to perform on stage in the West End. But for one night only, or in our case, afternoon, that was exactly what myself and the 30 others taking part in the Don’t Stop Believin’ workshop were about to do.
Before donning our dancing shoes and preparing to belt out anthems as if we were in Journey or, not surprisingly given the average age of the participants, Glee, a tour around the theatre took us into the backstage rock world of 1980s Los Angeles, where the musical’s cast prepares to burst on stage each night and rock out to hit ballads including We Built This City, The Final Countdown and Don’t Stop Believin’.
Far from a legendary rock star’s spacious pad, going behind the scenes at Rock Of Ages was more like entering the dark diminutive world of Alice In Wonderland’s rabbit hole, but with less weird and wonderful creatures… well, apart from the strange looking dog sitting amongst the props.
Judging by the stage manager’s descriptions of the show’s backstage antics, there’s also enough madness behind the scenes at each performance to be worthy of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. With wigs to don and entire outfits to switch, the performers have to be Superman – in speed and with telephone booth-sized changing rooms to match – in order to perfect the necessary costume changes, one of which has to be completed in less time than it takes Usain Bolt to run the 200m.
From the nooks and crannies of the wings to the vast expanse of the stage, the workshop, with the help of the show’s Resident Choreographer and Musical Director, was about to take an interesting and, for me, humiliating turn.
As we prepared to take on the show’s headline hit, my confidence was getting ready for a significant bashing. With the backing of a keyboard, we all gave our best shot at singing the well-known lines, but it didn’t take me long to realise that I wanted to “hid[e], somewhere in the niiiiiight,” or in the stalls, or the bar, or anywhere my less than dulcet tones couldn’t be heard.
Following the first run-through, we were split into two groups, one singing the normal, high harmony and the other singing the lower harmony. After struggling to hit the high notes first time around, I volunteered to lend myself to the low harmony, before realising that the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t sing high enough, it was that I couldn’t sing.
While bum notes could be concealed by a sneaky bout of miming, there was nowhere on the daunting Shaftesbury stage to hide the dance moves of someone whose feet are less coordinated than those of two drunk centipedes trying to run a 150-legged race.
But while I was making rocky progress, striving even to master the slow hand clap, the multitude of others around me were doing a much better job, which is just as well seeing as their family members were about to descend on the stalls in order to witness the rocking progress they had made.
As we said goodbye to the keyboard that had helped (some of) us on our way, in its place came glaring strobe lights, billows of smoke and the intensity of music you’d expect from a hit West End show.
It was time to showcase the results of our last three hours’ work. But that’s not before a very special guest popped in Justin time to witness the impending all-singing all-dancing rock extravaganza.
Waiting in the wings for our cue, we were all feeling the pressure, especially with one of the cast sitting in the audience, but once we sprang on to the stage, there was no stopping any of us, and we didn’t stop believin’ for one second during those few minutes that we weren’t West End stars playing to a real – albeit small – audience.