Thank You For The Music! Sometimes.

Did everyone watch The Choir last night?  Flyte-Tipping does hope so because we are still feeling blissfully uplifted by pixie-creature Mr Malone and The South Oxhey Community Choir.  Okay, their performance of Barber's Agnus Dei was a little ropey but — hello? — clue, Barber's AGNUS DEI.  We agree that singing anything more musically rigorous than...

... and we would have been out of our depth, but the residents of South Oxhey are an ambitious crowd and Gareth Malone tempered this ambition with touching reality by bussing in a dozen or so prepubescent kids to sketch in that tricksy top B-flat.  Genius.

All this leaves Flyte-Tipping in an unhappy situation.  You see we have been asked to advise on an am-dram group's musical choices for their 2010 show.  We are being asked to come down  from the vertiginous heights of South Oxhey's musical aspirations to grovel amongst the brutally bastardized songs that BY LAW have to be sung by a tone-deaf leading lady in a customized bed sheet  accompanied only by one keyboard and a half-pissed audience.

To be frank, it's depressing. 

The worst thing about any singing in am-dram performances is the lack of commitment.  If people must sing, if it is somehow ESSENTIAL to the plot (and Flyte-Tipping is never convinced of this), then sing.  Don't do the alternative which is to look sheepish, shuffle your feet and mumble the lyrics like an apology.  COMMIT! 

Then the audience will clap like... well, the clappers because they will have seen what you were up against and they would've had your back, like

DI Hunt.

Singing is all about acting the song  — stay in character and the audience will stay with you no matter how many duff notes are sung.  So much nicer than being glassed in the bar afterwards.

Here we are then.  Wading through a dozen or so songs that have been patchily rewritten to make them more 'amusing',  and trying tactfully to steer the group away from a cappella and power ballads because there's always one who wants to be Elaine Paige for the evening.  Ambition good, delusion bad.

Where's Gareth when you need him?   I think South Oxhey need to share the love...