After scrolling through Camdram vacancies mindlessly during the New Year, hoping by some miracle I would stumble across an action-packed, semi-professional, but low-commitment opening, I managed to find The 24 Hour Musical, run by the Cambridge Musical Theatre Society (CUMTS). All the hard-work that would normally eat up months of time, squished effectively into a short 24 hours – right before term starts! It was a perfect opportunity to finally get involved with the theatre scene but still maintain plausible deniability that my work would get done. I quickly and eagerly sent off my self-tape to the creative team behind the show, including the smooth and calmly collected Theo Chen, who emulated High School Musical’s Ms. Darbus very consistently throughout the process.

Upon arriving at the ADC Theatre after being accepted to the cast very abruptly before term, I somehow managed to find my way to the bar after being horrifically lost on how to enter the building. I was quickly directed to my designated group for the project consisting of other performers, a director, composer, and writer. Suddenly I found myself, amongst crowds of unfamiliar, lively theatre kids raising their ‘ya ya yas’. Unlike how many may assume, the musical does not last the whole 24 hours (to my pleasant surprise). However, each group was tasked with writing and performing one musical number in accordance with a given theme – each of which would be ordered logically by the creative team towards the end of the project. This year’s theme was revealed dramatically after a hasty drumroll… airports!

“We frantically shouted every possible idea and concept that came to mind”

Immediately, my group buckled up… or down… and attacked this strategically. And by strategically, I mean we frantically shouted every possible idea and concept that came to mind – our poor lyricist and composer were scribbling in panic trying to note down anything of substance. In passing the time and attempting to have some semblance of a conversation, I mentioned my tendency to slip into accents, often terrible and possibly mildly offensive. This inspired, to my dismay, our main ideas. Somehow, we ended up with the concept of a group of travellers ending up in the wrong airport, in the wrong country – attempting to reach Austria, they find themselves in Australia. Due to my regretful demonstration of an Australian accent, definitely leaving something to be desired, my role was the outlier: an Australian superfan that had somehow tricked the group into arriving at the wrong destination for the purpose of tourism. Certainly not something you see everyday. Finally, the time came for the actors and directors to sleep, all while our composers and writers stayed up to hauntingly late hours of the night, attempting to mould our ridiculous ideas into somewhat plausible stories that were short enough, and entertaining enough, for one musical number.

“Beautiful harmonies and melodies seemed to magically appear in a google drive at 9 am”

The next day was unsurprisingly an absolute blur. I forgot that just because the workload of the musical had been significantly decreased, the anxiety and fear of forgetting lines and doing a step wrong is also horrifically condensed to a concerning magnitude. Not to mention, brand new content, elaborate and insane, was piling up, and needing to be learned. Our team did an amazing job with the production of the song though: beautiful harmonies and melodies seemed to magically appear in a google drive at 9 am. This, along with a written apology as for the malarkey we were about to endure while learning this kooky song.

This is not to mention the challenge of blocking. Our director, having heard the song at the same time as us, wracked her brain the best she could to really bring to life the chaos of the piece, all while we attempted to learn at least the basic tune of our solo lines. There was definitely an abundance going on at once, and I’m sure the theatre could have been described as a bee hive for the entirety of the day – the tunes of contrasting and varying numbers melded in the air and crowded corridors. Towards the end of the rehearsal period, as if we didn’t need more to remember, we gathered at the stage to learn the lines, as well as the melody and blocking of the opening and closing numbers. The essay was looking really good right about then.

Arriving for the real show, after a shocking tech run where everything that could have possibly gone wrong, went wrong, I dressed as Australian as I could possibly achieve – a beige cowboy hat. Backstage, huddled in one quaint dressing room, we performed pre-show warmups that definitely broke the sound barriers of something somewhere, and would send shivers down any introvert’s spine. This however did nothing for my nerves. My words, melodies, and choreography had disappeared completely from my mind with panic, and all I could seem to do was mumble to myself frantically in a terrible Australian accent back-stage. This definitely affected the number, as, for its entirety, we jumbled around each other while attempting to reach some clarity of where we were in the music and remember what we had been doing all day.

At least we remembered the absurd and slightly unsettling humanoid-plane choreography in the closing number. It was certainly a bumpy ride, but thank goodness we landed safely.

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