If there’s one thing that playing medleys of musicals for the Canada Day concert does for me, it’s reawaken my interest in musicals. On one hand the medleys are frustrating: they’re all arrangements and never exactly the same as the original song, which makes playing them somewhat counter-intuitive (there’s lots of but but but that’s NOT the rhythm of the song! when one begins playing a theme, and I have to try to not think about the original and play what’s in front of me). Plus they require several lightning-fast changes of key and time signatures, and challenge me to think fast.

On the other hand, they remind me of how much I love musicals. And as a result, over the past few years I’ve ended up replacing some of the musicals I only had on cassette tape so that I could listen to them again. This year, thanks to the efforts of Gmarc and his parents, I’ve acquired My Fair Lady (hurrah for Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison! — and this is actually the second My Fair Lady medley I’ve done with the orchestra; I believe the first (and substantially different) one was done for the first Canada Day concert I did with them), and South Pacific (which I have managed to not hear throughout my entire life). And with Sandman7 delivering an intense rendition of “On the Street Where You Live” at his recital last week, well, we’ve revisited the idea of organizing the occasional musical movie night at some point for the musical lovers of the group.

Now, astute readers will already know that we are also playing a Sound of Music medley this July. I know The Sound of Music; I watched the film several times as a child (despite the fact that for years I thought it ended with the wedding, thanks to bedtime and what I suspect was also my mother’s caring attempt to keep me blissfully ignorant about war and Nazis until I was mature enough to understand it), and heard selections in various school concerts over the years. I used to sing “Edelweiss” to the boy when he was very tiny and needed help falling asleep.

The thing about The Sound of Music is that its themes are particularly insidious. I have found myself singing them at odd times since we started rehearsing the medley. Normally to cure this I would throw the CD in the player and I’d be over it in a couple of days. However, The Sound of Music is not and has never been among my albums or soundtracks. (Well, there was a Julie Andrews compilation LP I had as a child, but that is long, long gone.)

So when the boy wakes up I’m going to take him out to the shops to pick up a copy of The Sound of Music soundtrack; it’s a $9.99 bargain CD now and I’ll be using a gift certificate I’ve been saving in my wallet. I think the boy will enjoy the songs too. Rodgers and Hammerstein aren’t exactly They Might Be Giants, but time supports the fact that they did turn out catchy tunes, so we’ll see what the boy makes of it.

Maybe someday we’ll do a medley of one of my favourite musicals, such as Kiss Me Kate or Showboat.