The dawn of November sees performers everywhere hunkering down like Santa’s elves, putting the finishing touches on our work. Here at our Musical Theatre Chorus, we’ve got two gigs to prepare for, both of which will see us teaming up with the wider KTB Music family of choirs.
Please spare a thought this month for our friends, family members, pets, co-workers, and neighbours (particularly if there are adjoining walls involved). Please also spare thoughts for those of us who signed up for semi-chorus and so have just been given more pieces to learn independently. We’ve just realised how many – no, how few(!!!) – rehearsals are left until those performances.
Still, here at MTC, we willingly buckle in for these wild rides because we love it. (No doubt I will hear a loud, disbelieving snorting sound from the direction of the KTB studio as this blog post is received… I didn’t say that we don’t ever complain about it, Katy…)
We opened the singing tonight by having our primary school choir muscle memories thoroughly shattered. There’s two notes in “Starry Night” (you know the one – “It was on a staaarry niiiight…”) that are not actually what everyone thinks they are. Apologies to our school choir leaders! Onwards to Latin practice with “Gaudete!”, and then “Ding Dong Merrily On High”, which sounded so good that we did it twice.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a semi-chorus arrangement from our last festive performance that has been promoted to full choir. I nicknamed this ‘The Twelve Days of Chaos’ the last time I did it, and it is chaotic to learn, but it also sounds fantastic when it all clicks together. Quack-quack. Moo.
Closing out the tinsel-strewn section of our rehearsal, we revisited timeless bops “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (Brenda Lee) and Shakin’ Stevens’ “Merry Christmas Everyone”, and Ed Sheeran & Elton John collab “Merry Christmas”.
We needed a brain break from all the festivities, so we also refreshed the first section of “Without Love” from Hairspray, and started work on the absolute classic that is the title song from “Singin’ in the Rain”.
After a packed session that still had us crying with laughter, we decided we had to finish with something with which we all felt pretty confident. So, we Ding Donged for a third time. I highly recommend it for moments of panic caused by counting the weeks until December.
We’ve got this.
Written by Aeryn Isherwood