100 Years of Musicals: How the show came to be

“100 years of musicals was born from a need for speech and memory therapy. In January 2020 while back in Shetland for a holiday, I had a very sudden onset of a brain condition which at the time presented as if I had a stroke. In the space of an hour, I had suddenly lost the ability to walk and talk properly, my memory was shot and I was sitting in a hospital bed in the Gilbert Bain waiting to hear what went wrong.

And I waited. I was told to quit my job, quit university and go home to my parents and wait for a diagnosis and treatment plan. It was a few months before I could get an MRI and while it ended up being something very benign, called Functional Neurological Disorder, it was very frustrating to do nothing for so long, especially for a very impatient 23-year-old.

I finally had a diagnosis and a treatment plan and as soon as I got that, the world went into lockdown. So, things maybe didn’t work out on that treatment plan as they were meant to. Physio switched to being over the phone, but I was still left with speech and memory problems.

It was during one of those allotted 30 minutes of outside time you were allowed in the first Covid lockdown that I ran into Deirdre. Deirdre had been my singing teacher in school, and she had heard what had happened and said to me: “As soon as all this nonsense is over with, you will come and restart singing lessons. Music has a great power to heal, and this is just what you need!”

At the end of 2021 when covid rules relaxed, I took her up on that offer, and it has been the best thing I ever did for my recovery. Words now flow far easier, they don’t stick in my throat and choke me as much as they did. Having to remember lyrics has been a great exercise to try rebuilding my short-term memory and going to Dierdre for lessons is the highlight of my week. It turns out that music does in fact, have a great power to heal.

We eventually built up quite a repertoire of songs, and I realised that we had a selection that spanned nearly every era of musical theatre. So, we decided to do a little concert in Hymhus, covering 125 years of musical theatre, noting on how the staging, lighting, microphones, writing styles, even theatre snacks, all changed over time.

Then we saw the opportunity to apply to do a Soup and a Show performance with Shetland Arts. We were so excited to get the opportunity in the first round and then a series of unfortunate events ensued – starting with a slip on the ice and an injured wrist for Deirdre and a dose of the flu from hell for me –  which lead to us having to cancel our show in December. But we are so grateful for the opportunity to try again!

This Soup and Show is a bit of a stripped back version of our first concert at Hymhus, knocking off 25 years to bring it down to the much snappier 100 Years of Musicals which will fit into a lunch break. We hope to take the audience on a journey through time, stopping in each era in musical theatre. There are six stops on our adventure and before each song we will talk a little bit about how it was relevant to the time it was created, the staging, and key themes that run through the piece. This version of the show will also focus on pieces from musicals which also appeared on screen as we wanted to acknowledge our venue being a cinema.

We are really looking forward to sharing this piece with you… also maybe a little bit nervous about it! Please do not wish us luck by saying “break a leg” – we don’t need to tempt fate!”