The New Revue

Greetings, my fine feathered friends.

Good news.

I’m bringing the blog back.

Some of the more astute and detective-like individuals among you may have noticed that I haven’t written a great deal over the past few months. Using your Holmesian logic, you presumably narrowed it down to a few possibilities:

 1) I’ve been making my posts invisible so that only I can see them.

2) The real me has been kidnapped, and the person you believe you have been socialising with and slavishly admiring for the past semester is in fact an IMPOSTER.

3)  I’ve been kinda like, you know, super busy and stuff.

My congratulations to you if you worked out that the third case is the correct one. I’ve been kinda like, you know, super busy and stuff.

This is not due to assessment, or extra-curricular, or even my bizarre and demanding double life. No, this is due to one thing: REVUE.

Every year at my school, all the Year 12s get together and put on a show. Someone writes an illogical and impractical script, a bunch of people choreograph musical movements and then about a third of the year group gets together to act it out for enthused parents. At the end of last year I naively volunteered to be one of the writers for this year’s performance.

I could write a very, very long account of what the other writer’s and I went through trying to get this thing up. First of all, everyone in the year group who turned up to the meetings decided on one plot. So we wrote some of Revue with that plot. Personally, I had a good 5000 words. Then – joy of joys! – we went back to school again in the beginning of the year, and had another couple of meetings. At that point people began to get slightly annoyed. ‘What do you mean, you’ve already decided the plot?’ they demanded. ‘I insist that I be involved. It matters not whether I bothered to turn up to the other meetings, whether I showed the remotest smidgen of interest in Revue until this point, I am part of this year group and my opinion needs to be listened to. This plot is dreadful. Well, no, I haven’t thought of anything to replace it, I just know that this plot is dreadful and the writers are wasting our time.’

Possibly that’s not EXACTLY what anyone said but that’s definitely what I heard.

After a while, they sorted out a new plot, then dropped it magnanimously upon us in a gesture equivalent to ‘There, there, you poor, incompetent little writers. Never mind that the script you already have sucks. We’ll give you this new idea. Now write it for us.’ And that is about the point I realised I wasn't going to do any more on the blog for a while. I was organised as all hell. ME. I wrote scenes, edited writing, stuck in dance numbers, removed jokes about Nazis , did whatever else until the whole freaking thing was finally done. It’s just that every spare moment I had for writing was sucked into writing this performance.

Our Revue is called ‘The Apocalist’, thought of by the Chairman in a fit of punning. Obviously I can’t tell you the actual plot because that would kind of defeat the purpose of you coming to watch it, which I’m sure you will, unless you’re actually in it, in which case you’re excused. However, the basic premise is as follows: it’s the 21^st of December 2012, and the world is ending in 24 hours. Several students decide to travel the world completing the goals on their end-of-the-world bucket list – or ‘apocalist’, if you will – while simultaneously trying to outrun the nightmares of the apocalyptic world, including hurricanes, fire rain, and a zombie plague like no other. Thrill, as our heroes try to escape from the clutches of the evil undead! Gasp, as they battle their way through indies, yodellers and One Directions fans! And cheer relentlessly as they try to make their way back to Australia  before the appointed hour of destruction comes!

Yeah, just come and see it if you can. It’s going to be fantastic. I can’t put the script up on the internet (for above reasons) but when the performance is over I might put up some of my favourite scenes as posts.

It was excellent, finally finishing the script, and my compliments go out to the other two writers who actually did any writing, although not to Aviator, who signed up for it and then conveniently forgot about it until the whole thing was finished. For anyone watching the Revue, there’s a point about a third of the way through where there should be a scene set in France. There’s a perfect opportunity for a scene set in France. There’s a scene in England, a space for this scene, and then a scene set in Germany. Geographically, we NEEDED a French scene. It’s just that there isn’t one. I had to cover up the absence by having one of the main characters go ‘Wow, I can’t believe we walked the entire length of France in like ten minutes.’

Anyway, after the script was written I started to have a lot of fun, especially by sitting in on auditions. There’s something glorious in watching your friends come in and nervously perform in front of you while you stare at them, gazing judgementally.

That was all over the course of a semester. Now we get the mid-year holidays to get the Revue ready to perform, which we’re doing in two to three weeks now. All the actors and dancers have to go in and rehearse. Lala, Phoenix and Aviator all have relatively significant parts. Peanut, Vyvyan and I all have relatively insignificant parts.

Lala and Phoenix are playing two air hostesses. Personally, they were my favourite characters, I wrote all of their dialogue unassisted by the other writers, and as such it is a complete coincidence that two of my closest friends have taken these roles. Aviator’s role involves him getting beaten up and yelled at by a girl. Coincidence. Peanut and Vyvyan are playing gangster girls, and I am a scientist . I have five or six lines – can’t remember which, I don’t know them very well yet – one of which involves the word ‘quasimicronanophotonaligner’. I made that word up while writing that scene (what? you thought it was a real word?). I recall thinking this exact thought: ‘Ha. Ha. I can’t wait until someone has to try and PRONOUNCE this.’

It’s kind of ironic, I suppose. Mostly annoying.

Anyway, rehearsals are going swimmingly, so far as I can tell. Let’s have a brief moment of appreciation for the directors. I worked pretty closely with Rodent, who’s one of them, while I was doing a final edit of the script, and she was putting in a prodigious amount of effort even then. I can only imagine how much they’re both doing now the performance has finally found its feet (metaphorically).

I’m loving sitting in for the rehearsals. I watched the mains rehearse a couple of weeks ago, and it was incredibly surreal. A kind of ‘You’re saying words – words I wrote – words I am basically MAKING YOU SAY – I CONTROL you,’-type feeling. Rodent wanted to make them do the opening and closing scenes, for which we needed a couch. So we walked down to the hall, picked up a couch (i.e. made Rick and Oscar pick up a couch while Lexi sat on it), and took it back up to the drama room.

That went pretty well for the first scene and a half. Unfortunately, while we were on holiday, the rest of the school wasn’t, and at that point some Year 8s arrived. So we decided to move to the Common Room instead. We picked up the couch – all of us, this time – and walked out.

It’s quite a long way, from the drama rooms to the Senior area. It somehow seems longer if you’re carrying a couch. We went down some stairs, up some more stairs to the stage in the amphitheatre, down some more steps from the stage in the amphitheatre, and up a ramp. It was only at the top of this ramp that someone stopped and went ‘Hey – guys? Guys? Don’t they have couches in the Common Room?’

By that point we were over halfway there, so we decided just to keep going. Except then we met our main obstacle. To get down to the Senior area, you need to go down a very steep flight of stairs. This is tricky enough on a normal day, but thanks to some building they’ve been doing around the school, there was fencing over part of the staircase. A person could get through. An enormous sofa could not.

So we gave up, and left the sofa on the grass at the top of the stairs, Rodent assuring us that she would send someone along later on to pick it up. I certainly hope she did. I didn’t see anyone do it.

That’s where we’re up to with Revue at the moment. In a matter of weeks, we’ll be all ready to perform, and I’m pretty psyched for it. This is completely different to writing ten-minute playlets for my friends and I to busk with. This is a full-scale performance that I – and many other people in my year – have had a large input to. It should all go wonderfully.

Assuming we’ve got the couch back by then, of course.