By Douglas Kruger
HAVE you seen inside the refurbished Opera House? It’s magnificent!
You can just about smell the polished wood, new leather, and airborne flop-sweat from anxious thespians through the photos.
Well done, Jersey. We may be a small island, but a good theatre venue is a window on as many worlds as casts will cast before us.
When it opens, please consider taking your kids. Immersing them in music and spectacle can be transformative. Plus, something about our moral obligation to collectively transmit cultural heritage so we don’t bring about another dark age, blah, blah, blah.
I’d live at theatre shows if I could. And it’s all because my folks started taking me to them when I was too young to stay awake until the closing curtain. There’s an outside chance it had more to do with an aversion to paying for babysitters, but I’m banking the win and chalking it up to love.
The first one I remember was a live production of Fiddler. Even as a kid, I got a lump in my throat when the choreographers pulled a clever staging trick for the Sabbath Prayer number.
The scene began in perfect darkness. Cue emotive music, and the first illumination was the match lit at the family table, bathing Tevye and his family in softest amber. The audience didn’t know it, but the rest of the stage was divided into tiers, with several Sabbath tables concealed in the dark. After the first verse, they lit their candles one by one, emerging in pools of light. The effect was breathtaking.
Since then, I’ve seen Phantom on three continents, Les Mis on two, and even managed to act in a couple of am-dram productions myself (I still dream of being Professor Higgins, and getting to correct Elisa’s caterwauling).
I was telling my seven-year-old about the reopening, and he had a suggestion: “They should show Gremlins.”
He may actually be on to something.
OK, so it’s not a musical. But what it lacks in spotlighting opportunities for the vocal stylings of Andrea Bocelli or Sarah Brightman, it more than makes up for in pure entertainment value, and delightful opportunities for interactive staging.
Take any of the iconic moments. Say, the part where Gizmo gets squirted with water and begins shooting off a new generation of mogwai-like furry missiles, in what must surely be nature’s most disturbing life cycle. How would you do that live on a stage?
Well, easy. You use a tennis-ball cannon. Disguise it in fur, and blast away. Take a cue from the delightfully interactive shows at the London Dungeons, and shoot them directly into the audience for maximum squealing delight.
Then there are the cocoons, as the mogwai transform into gremlins. You do it with balloons. Paint them in eerie greens with ribbing, then blow them up slowly from beneath the stage. As they reach full size, drop the lights, and cue creaking, breaking, snapping sounds. Maybe the menacing laugh of a new-born monster.
Finally, make sure that you have a scene or two in which all hell can break loose in the audience. Gremlins operated by actors posing as audience members, suddenly facing attack right there in the rows. Others popping out of something like a hotdog cart, heading down the aisle. Some up in the rafters.
For the final death-scene, you could truly go to town. The demise of several hundred Gremlins is typically accompanied by melting, hissing, steam and sticky mess. Tell me you couldn’t have fun choreographing that? I’d splatter a good deal of it over my paying customers in the first few rows.
There are a hundreds of ways you could do it, a thousand sneaky tricks to illicit screams galore, and isn’t that what we go to the theatre for, after all? That, and something about high culture.
It’s not the silliest idea ever. I’d pay to see it.
But if that’s not on the cards, my demands are humble. All I’d like to see mounted at the new opera house is Carmen, Oliver, Fiddler on the Roof, The Sound of Music, Cabaret, West Side Story, Grease, Chicago, My Fair Lady, Paint Your Wagon, the Prince of Egypt, the Lion King, Man of La Mancha, Beauty and the Beast, Joseph and His Technicolor Dream Coat, The Sound of Music, and a full London cast production of the Phantom of the Opera, including gigantic falling chandelier and cavernous underground waterway.
…and then, next month…
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Douglas Kruger is an author and speaker living in St Helier. His books are all available via Audible and Amazon.
