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Prom In The Park

Performing in a Marquee

 Broadway 

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Con

Con is our producer. She is good at every single thing that she turns her hand to and it makes the rest of us absolutely sick! She is brilliant with costumes and at hats in particular – give her the inner cardboard tube from an old toilet roll and half a yard of sticky back plastic and I reckon she could knock you up a hat which you’d be proud to wear to Royal Ascot. (In fact having seen some of the hats at Royal Ascot I reckon Con’s would be a darn sight better.) She also looks good in anything she wears – she could wear an old sack and still look neat and tidy. The only time I’ve ever seen her look less than perfect was when she dressed as a tramp for one of our sketches and even then I reckon it was only the two black teeth that did it. Her role as producer was self appointed – she was so frustrated at seeing us floundering along that she took us in hand and I have to say she has got us as near to a silk purse as our collective talents (or lack of) are ever likely to get.

 Win

Win was born to be a clown. That just about says it all really. She has loved dressing up ever since she was a girl and both on and off stage she can make us all laugh. She has a heart of gold and the cheek of the devil. She is also our treasurer so it is her job to go and seek out our payment after our performances. Yes, people actually pay us to do what we do and it’s  not often she has to beat them up to get it!

Jacques

  Jacques, one of only two men in the group, is French. Surprise surprise. Our ‘little frog’ as he calls himself. He has been in this country for fourteen years now and one of these days he’s going to try to get to grips with the English language. He tries very hard and I have to say that he speaks English a lot better than any of us speaks French but since the collective number of years since the rest of us learned French is 432 (give or take a year or two due to our bad memories) that’s not really saying too much. We have to make quite sure that Jacques knows what’s going on as he has a habit, when asked a question, of answering ‘yes’. You can tell by the somewhat glazed look in his eye that he hasn’t actually got a clue what you asked but thinks if he answers yes he will find out soon enough what he’s said yes to. One of these days he could find himself in big trouble! After about ten years with the group he still calls Win ‘Wim’ and we don’t bother putting him right. Maybe that’s why he still calls her ‘Wim’.  He has particular trouble with times so if we ask him to pick us up at ‘quarter to one’ we have to translate this into ‘fifteen minutes before one o’clock’ which he can usually understand. It’s always a big relief when we can say one o’clock or even half past one. He has great difficulty with song lyrics too and has to write them down phonetically. Obviously this makes them very difficult for him to learn but somehow he seems to manage pretty well. Our audiences love him and all the women want to take him home with them afterwards. Judging by the average age of the members of our audiences I suspect many of them wouldn’t know what to do with him when they got him there but they’d like to take him all the same!

Val

 Val just loves to be on stage. She would recite the telephone directory if she could do it on stage with an audience to listen to her. Strangely she also loves playing a whore! On stage I mean  (at least I assume it’s only on stage). I have lost count of the number of times she’s donned the blond wig, fish-net tights and mini-skirts and strutted around the stage like a natural. (Not a pretty sight.) She also sings ‘I’m just a gal who can’t say no’ which may or may not be significant.

Doreen

Doreen is a relatively recent addition to Showtimers – at least, she joined after I did so I always think of her as recent. She probably has the worst memory of all of us (and that’s no mean feat) so is constantly being told off for not being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes she can be in the right place at the wrong time and sometimes even manages to be in the wrong place at the right time. She’s very versatile. She does seem to be able to remember lyrics though, which is more than most of them can do. She’s also an excellent needlewoman and can make just about anything fit just about anybody.

Richard

Richard loves opera and tries very hard to bring a touch of class to Showtimers. He does try. You know the next line so I won’t bother writing it! Not to be outdone by Jacques, who sings a lot of his songs in French, Richard sings most of his in Italian. He’s obviously learned that if the audience don’t know what you’re singing about they can’t tell when you go wrong. He was a captain in the something-or-other-Hussars as he tells the audience quite regularly and wears his old uniform for some songs. However, it seems to have shrunk a bit and he warns the audience to beware of high-speed, low-flying buttons which may just pop off from time to time. He is also a relatively recent addition to Showtimers and at a time when we were particularly desperate for men. But then our ladies are always desperate for men. Did I mention that he is partially deaf?  

Vera

Vera is our choreographer.  She comes up with the wonderful movements which the girls do along with their singing. The men rarely get involved with these and if you’d ever seen them dance you’d know why. Richard reckons he can sing (!) or he can dance (!!!!!) but he can’t do both at once. A man’s got to know his limitations. So it’s usually girls only for the dance routines. Whenever Vera shows them a new routine it is always greeted by cries of ‘we’ll never be able to do that’ but somehow, after hundreds of hours of practice, they’ll manage to get a close approximation. They won’t be able to remember it the following week but give them credit where it’s due, they will do it once perfectly. And only once! Given the ages of the Showtimers the routines have to be a little economic in the movements but they have been known to do some quite respectable tap routines. 

Janet

Janet has the best memory of the lot of them. In fact Janet’s memory is probably as good as the rest of them put together. She can remember lyrics and, if anyone can remember where everyone was standing for a particular routine, it’s Janet. Her biggest fear is that someone, someday, will actually hear her sing. Janet has never done a solo, only duets.  

Pat

Pat has an impish smile and keeps pinching Jacques bottom. At least we think it’s her though it may just be that she looks guilty because of her impish smile.

Joyce

Joyce is the newest singing member of the group, starting her stage career at the tender age of 75. When she first joined Showtimers I thought her voice bore a marked resemblance to Ethel Merman but in the few years Joyce has been with us she has learned something which Ethel Merman never did in the whole of her career – how to sing! Joyce soon became a valued member of the group, adding some much needed volume to the singing and if we want to do anything risqué ( not that a sober minded group such as ours would of course, but if we did) Joyce has the wonderfully expressive face and personality to do it. And if we have all been surprised at how much Joyce has improved that’s nothing to her own amazement – I don’t think her feet were touching the ground after she fought off the competition to win the right to sing her first solo.

Alison

 For years we had been trying to find a second pianist for the group, firstly as a backup in case I was ill but also in order to take on more shows than I was able to do with so many demands on my time, not the least of which was the need to work to earn at least a modicum towards our household income. We had really given up all hope of finding anyone when Alison answered an advert which Con had put up in a local hall. Alison arranged to come along one evening so that we could all eye one another up to see how we felt. She stood listening from the corridor outside to start with but she didn’t make a hasty enough exit and Richard spotted her and dragged her in, kicking and screaming. To our amazement and delight she stayed and we still can’t believe our luck – a phenomenal sight-reader (you can go off people you know!), a very generous personality – when one of the singers asked her to give them a note she offered them three, all played simultaneously, thus proving that she had the sense of humour required to put up with us. Of course no two pianists will play the same piece in exactly the same way and this could have been a problem for the singers but I reckon we play about as similarly as they are likely to get. My only problem was that where I’d learned a piece wrongly I now had to teach Alison how to play it wrongly too so as not to confuse the singers. They are confused enough as it is. And so Alison has fitted in, seemingly instantly, such that she and I have now been describe as like a pair of bookends. I am still trying to work out whether this is a compliment or an insult and to which of us! 

Chris

And then of course there’s me. How would I describe myself?……….Glamorous, witty, intelligent, incredibly talented, modest…….OK so maybe I’m not the best person to ask. As a pianist I’ve never been particularly accurate, preferring to get the essence of the piece rather than playing all the correct notes. Or in the words of Eric Morecombe I play ‘all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order’.   It would be nice to play all the right notes, get them in the right order and get the essence of the piece but for me that would take more hours’ practice than I’ve been allotted on this earth. However, what else are the singers for other than to cover up the mistakes of the accompanist? The only trouble is they think I’m there to cover up their mistakes so we just try not to make mistakes at the same time and between us we cover a multitude of wrong notes and words. When I first joined the group I said my sight reading wasn’t very good and I would always want the scores to look at beforehand so I could do some practice on them before they tried singing along. However, they kept thrusting new scores under my nose and gradually my sight reading has improved. Even so I try to ask them to let me at least play things through before they join in but it seems to be a characteristic of singers that they abhor a vacant accompaniment and they just have to sing along. What I lack in accuracy I make up for in my sense of rhythm. For the most part this makes a big difference as it keeps our songs moving and lively but Richard always sings ballads and likes to do a lot of pulling around with the timing, usually to breaking point and beyond, so it takes me a while to find out what the hell he wants to do with his songs. However, we seem to get it together and keep it there for the most part.