EXPERIENCES - Phil Allcock

Well, it’s 2 days after we performed Before the Dawn “on stage” at the UK filk con and I still haven’t come down off the ‘high’. To finally – some 18 years after we kind of gave up on ever finishing the thing, let alone actually doing it - turn this “shared-world filk saga” into a practical show, and to perform it, costumed and staged, to audience acclaim is an achievement that just isn’t going to fade any time soon. Even those cast and crew members totally new to Before the Dawn were having an absolute blast during the performance and after, but to those of us who were there as it grew and developed, it just goes way beyond that to a deep and abiding feeling of joy and pride. We *did* it – and it was Good.

So I guess first off, praise has to go to Mike for having the vision to believe that we could actually do this thing, for thinking big and pushing us past the initial conservative scepticism that might have resulted in little more than a chain of songs sung into a fixed mic. No, Mike wanted costume and staging/acting and to make the thing into what would basically be a coherent stage musical. I think many of us initially doubted we could ever achieve this, but by aiming high we ended up achieving high and the joy is all the greater for it.

Fortunately, we had several things going for us, not least the mix of talents in the Before the Dawn “core team” – essentially Mike, myself, Valerie and Rhodri, with Zander as remote consultant. How it tended to work back then was that Valerie and Zander would head off, creating new characters or plot threads and that the rest of us would then follow behind trying to weave these together into a coherent whole, finding and identifying the ‘gaps’ or ‘opportunities’ where these created places for new songs or characters. That’s something of a oversimplification, but one with a big element of truth to it. And so it was now as we had to, fairly ruthlessly, prune down what had become an overburdened (60-odd songs and 15+ characters) yet still incomplete saga into a more manageable and coherent entity.

We agreed basic ground rules – that songs would be judged on a mixture of how essential they were to the plot, character illustration/ development or other songs; how popular/well-known they were; and to an extent just how good we felt they were as songs, helped balance style or performer load, or how much we’d enjoy performing them. Whilst all within the practical constraints of running time and how many performers we could reasonably use. Thus it was that large swathes of songs and characters end up “on the filking-room floor” so to speak – King Unto IV; the Vanessan Empire and their Ambassador; the Warlord’s daughter; the Warlord’s daughter’s Music Teacher; the barman at the Man in the Moon; the Knights of the Drunkard’s Moon and their leader, all ended up being quietly written out or reduced to narrative reference. As did a number of songs such as Deeds of War, I Cannot Understand, Magic Abroad, Thicker than Water, Shafts of Sunlight, Overcast and many more which just failed the tests of necessity or advocacy.

And it was that combination which tended to be key. Some relatively obscure songs such as Playing Soldiers or The Answer were “pushed” because they either provided an introduction to a key character or illustrated a key plot development. Whilst others – and Excuse Me is the classic example – were squeezed in, despite only actually having (immediately to hand) a set of words and a time signature, because without them another song wouldn’t make as much sense or wouldn’t carry as much meaning. And some just made it in because we liked them, or liked the insights they gave into the characters.

One worry I’ll confess I had was that this process would become partisan or heated. Songs are precious things to their creators, and obviously nobody much enjoys seeing their creative work discarded as being less-worthy or less-essential than another. Yet I can’t honestly recall an occasion on which we ever had this sort of strife develop, and, as I’ve said elsewhere, I particularly admired Valerie’s graciousness as she suffered far more than most in the pruning process (having written more than most!).

Not that this was without stresses of its own, amicability notwithstanding. Time, time, time was always the bugbear, and Mike in particular was worried whether we could really fit all the songs we really wanted into Act 2 and still stay within the running time – because we’d been Told that “No, you absolutely can’t have any more Time!”. The nub came down to what we thought of as the reflective section of Act 2 between War and Midnight at the Tower where there’s a whole string of reasonably quiet songs, all of which have lovely character illustration and development, but don’t actually advance the main plot terribly much. We really really didn’t want to lose any of them – indeed I even had an extra one in last-minute development for the Girl to fill an apparent obvious ‘hole’ – but equally, time just seemed to be against us, and various ideas were proposed such as cutting the number of verses, or taking individual verses from multiple songs to create a single composite song! Fortunately, a combination of shifting some songs back to Act 1, keeping the new ‘linking’ songs short, and (sadly) editing down any narration which duplicated that within a song meant that we were able to keep all of the old songs. But alas my new song just had to go – for now – being replaced by a single verse reprise of Dusk. (Then again, in the classic way of Before of Dawn, even at that late date we were still discovering new insights into the plot and characters, which meant if I had completed that song then I’d have had to then rewrite it again, so perhaps this was fated to be!)

Meanwhile, there was the whole much-put-off issue of the narration. Knowing that we needed a narration and that Hitch would be a Good Choice for doing it was the easy part. Actually getting around to somebody actually writing it was quite another! Until in a mixture of maybe-he’d-do-it, we-know-he’d-do-it-well and it’d-be-nice-to-get-him-more-involved we decided to ask Zander if he’d write it. What I don’t think any of us expected was that we’d get back, a matter of days later, a narration in blank verse which was practically a work of art in its own right, one which would not just link together the songs but provide an epic feel to the entire production. I don’t think I said as much to Zander at the time, but whilst we subsequently had many and heartfelt debates over individual phrases or even words, they were always just that – discussions on the margins and in the depths of the detail – not for one moment was there ever doubt that one of our greatest dilemmas had been solved and in such a way that this performance was now going to be Something Special.

Furious plot polishing, in-filling and editing continued. One of the most dramatic changes occurred at an early stage when Rhodri casually remarked that he’d always expected Dawn to be sung by the Captain. According to Rhodri, he’d been saying this to Mike ever since he wrote it, but somehow this idea had never been mentioned to me – I’d always thought that it was written for the Prince and so it’d always been noted. But if it it were the *Captain* singing it then That Changed Everything – the song goes from a reasonably upbeat one of “Cheer up, let me show that life is not all dark and can still go on” to a big romantic Happy Ending of forgiveness, hope and reconciliation. Plus I’d get to sing Dawn, a definite and quite unexpected bonus. Woot! *big beaming grin*

Except, I couldn’t quite see how we could make it seem plausible. Okay, so she’s an Empath [long story, but all the main characters have some degree of psychic ability, though usually manifesting only as "instinct" or "feelings" rather than a conscious power] and so knows that he really does love her and really does regret having killed her love; and it was war, and her love was a soldier too and the Captain had been honest and honourable about the whole thing, even down to personally digging a grave out of respect for the Watcher’s courage and honour. But whilst all that might perhaps (in the fullness of many more weeks or months than our storyline has available) have meant an eventual reconciliation, it seemed ludicrous to believe she could do it this quickly or completely just because the Sun’s now come up and he sings a rather pretty song! And in any case, much of that is Back Story and so would be no use at all in making it seem at all believable to the audience. And so, amidst all the other chaos, I started fretting and worrying at this issue in the hope of finding a practical fix.

First-off, and with Rhodri’s gracious tolerance, I needed to change some of the lyrics to Dawn. Yes, I know, that’s a bit like touching-up the Mona Lisa or stopping Han Solo from shooting first, but I just couldn’t see the Captain singing some of those lines as written. Some, like “make your fears melt away” seemed to trivialise her grief and his culpability; others like “I’m waiting here for you” would have felt to me like he was tapping his foot and saying “When you’ve *quite* finished moping there”! So I rewrote a few lines and changed the odd word here and there – which some might say is nothing new for me! – but the result was one I felt far happier with in reflecting what he might dare to say. But it still fixed only part of the problem – I felt that for it to seem reasonable for her to forgive him, he needed to have demonstrably Changed from the man he was when he came to this City.

And so, bit by bit over a few weeks he was indeed duly Changed. We let him choose to spare the Sergeant (rather than just stopping fighting) and indicate he was tired of making war. And in a sudden burst of insight I realised that there was no way that the Captain wouldn't repeatedly have offered the Watcher a chance to surrender; and though one might rationalise this simply as a matter of Just-Too-Damn-Honourable it'd be far more interesting if we made it so that the Watcher had foreseen this death (psychic power again!) and so *chose* this death instead of an honourable surrender. And maybe even said something to that effect to the Captain. All of which ties up neatly with the "promise me - you'll never forget" wayyyy back in Dusk, and leaves the Girl in even more misery because now she knows he chose death in preference to coming back to her, yet she has no idea why. Which is all good juicy angst (and why I would have needed to rewrite that new song!) but it also makes the Captain that much less "to blame" for his death because he'd tried, and repeatedly, to avoid killing him. So with this concept slipped into the narrative we were nearly there.

The final touch came in the last rehearsals where we figured out that a nice way to fill the instrumental before the last verse of Dawn would be for the Captain to remove his sword and sword-belt and place them on the Watcher's grave before once again reaching out to the Girl, this time to be accepted. And that, bar belatedly realising that my radio mic belt-pack was clipped to the sword belt I'd just removed (oops!) and changing the penultimate line from "sword no longer drawn" to "sword no longer *worn*" - was the ending that finally appeared on stage.

However, I seem to have digressed! But this does show how we were still tinkering and refining things up to (and quite possibly beyond!) the last minute. The order of some songs was changed; extra narration verses were squeezed in; and when we could, we squeezed in whatever rehearsals we arrange for band and cast. Terminally unhelped, it must be said, by the plague of colds and flu which struck down several cast members during January, which combined with busy lives meant that for some cast members the final rehearsal would be the only rehearsal! Not good, but fortunately these were the minor roles with only one or two tunes to actually learn and practice, even if they then appeared multiple times. Still it'd surely have been a better and more polished performance had some people had more healthy time available to work on it - but c'est la vie. It still rocked.

The last rehearsal weekend was … busy. It was Rhodri's first rehearsal (though he'd been in on the early planning), Paul's first rehearsal and likewise the first one where we'd had enough people there and a complete enough script to think about planning out actual stage movements and other acting-type stuff! And it wasn't until Sunday afternoon that we were ready for an end-to-end run-through, with whatever stage-stuff we could manage in the confines of the Mill House playroom and given we were running only off fixed mics and not the headsets we hoped to have on the day! Oh, and we'd meant this to be a dress rehearsal but most of us hadn't got our costumes sorted yet, or if we had, somebody else was bringing them to the Con!

However, much to our relief it went pretty well. As noted, time had been our biggest worry but Act I came in a 55 minutes and Act II at a couple of minutes over the hour, so all in all that seemed close enough given adrenalin "on the night". And most important of all, it had kept going and produced a coherent production, occasional mistakes notwithstanding. Which meant we were essentially good-to-go and I think for the first time we stopped worrying about whether it was going to work - it was - and started to actively enjoy looking forward to it and speculating on just how far it was going to exceed audience expectations. Because it had certainly exceeded ours!

And so came the Con, and we were right - people had no idea just what was coming. Mention of "costumes" or "armour" produced boggled looks and regrets at forgotten cameras! Discussions of headsets and projected backdrops furthered this, as I think did a slow spread of the sense of anticipation and eagerness in the cast, band and crew. We knew (or at least profoundly hoped!) that it was going to be something special, something well beyond anything previously staged - even for those of us who still remember Dan Who! And meantime we all hoped our voices would last until Sunday…!

Sunday morning - my voice is claggy. Lots of sub-bass but definitely scratchy and cough-y anywhere else. Can't cough with a headset mic - aaarghh! Need to get into costume; need to test radio mic and work out fitting; need to warm voice up and de-clag. Fortunately I didn't actually need to sing until almost the end of Act I which gave me a couple of walk-on appearances to get into the swing of things before I actually had to try and sing anything.

My first song was Not for Sale, very much a story song with lots of plot to explain as it tries to tie up threads from the previous several songs! Probably not one that many people remember as I haven't done it in circles much for years and years, but one that's kind of fundamental to the plot. I'd made an effort to get the lyrics into my brain, but know myself way too prone to getting distracted and forgetting where I am in the song. So I'd made up some ultra-miniature prompt cards for each song, Ariel 8pt and double-sided so that even the longest song fitted on a 4" x 2" card which, whilst still visible, would be less obvious and less restricting on gesture than carrying a script. And they seemed to work fine, though their use generally was more paranoia in case I forgot than because I already had. Though I was amused to find GK had been wondering whether I had an iPhone in my hand with my lyrics loaded on it…

It went well - or at least so I thought. Alas when Tim and Rika came on stage they were chatting nonchalantly rather than staring defiantly but sadly that's the not quite enough rehearsal striking again. We'd added this after the run-through but hadn't thought to rehearse it as they didn't have to do anything but stand there - memo to self for future that sometimes how you just stand there matters too! But overall it seemed to kick and snarl and generally go down really well. Later reports also suggested the plot twist here of the Captain's defection to the forces of Good had a certain "Whoa, I wasn't expecting that" quality to it. Whilst it was also apparent that the song was easier to understand once in context and staged than it had been before.

A whisk through backing Bright Copper and then for the first half closer. A deadly serious dramatic narrative promised a dark and menacing second Act. A brief pause. And then a loud common-accented voice bellowed from the back "Awwwwwwright, we may be mercenaries but damnit we're PROFESSIONALS!" and Simon's Sergeant character brassily walked up through the audience to the stage as the bouncy piano intro to the rather silly "Something's Going On" started up. We'd been aware of and indeed looked forward to this sudden contrast, but Simon's wonderful and appropriate total hamming-up just polished it to perfection and the audience simply loved it.

The interval was just a huge mutual high in Green Room. I think a lyric stutter in Rumour-Monger was the only significant error I'd noticed, and we ran pretty much to time too. Whilst the audience reaction looked to be everything we'd hoped for, Mike was beaming fit to bust, and I doubt any of the rest of us looked much different. The GKs had been doing a damn fine job on a massively complicated tech task, about the only glitch being an occasional lateness in fading up a new headsetted singer as they came on stage - and if offered that beforehand as the worst tech problem, we'd have more than settled for it! And we were raring to get stuck into Act II.

Again, I had nothing to do for a fair while (though not as bad as Rika who had had all of her main songs in Act I) so I could relax for a while and enjoy the show. Next up for me was War, originally and still occasionally referred to as The Omelette Song because it comes as the Prince has been driven back into moping depression by a savage tongue-lashing from the pacifist Sage (Excuse Me) over the civilian deaths in their riot. And so the original theme of the song was very much that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, that there will be casualties in this war and that he needs to get these bardish delusions that war is a glorious and chivalrous thing out of his head, recognise his responsibility to his city and, above-all, stop this bloody moping!

[Remember I said the Girl was an Empath? Or more precisely, an Empath and Projective Empath. She picks up emotions and re-radiates them (all quite unconsciously) and as such tends to act as an emotional amplifier on those around her, even more so when she’s at the Tower or it’s the night of a Drunkard’s Moon, both of which amplify people’s powers! Which effect may well have been a critical tipping factor in the Captain’s original defection, in the Sage’s violent betrayal of his principles in the Finale, in the speed with which the Captain and Girl fall in love, and indeed here in the strength of feelings and reactions in this pair of songs. Oh, all these things might all have happened anyway, but should any seem implausible then we have this handy Back-Story argument to justify them! *grin* But I digress – again.]

War is a lot of fun to sing – it’s an out and out rock song with a lot of feeling in the lyrics (and a lot of lyrics too, but that’s my fault for trying to fit so many ideas in!). It’s also quite a challenge to sing because its tone needs to vary so much – parts of it are savage personal attacks (more, I think, to try and spark a reaction from the moping Prince than because the Captain truly despises him that much), parts of it are earnest attempts to open his eyes to reality (as the Captain views it), and yet at the same time it’s upbeat, spirited and trying desperately to raise the Prince back up rather than beat him down. It’s also reasonably fundamental to Before the Dawn to recognise that the Captain is only part-right here – war is unpleasant, it is the Prince’s job to stop moping and take responsibility, and yes there will be more violence and killing before the City can be freed. But the Captain views the civilian casualties purely as an exercise in military loss ratios – he truly doesn’t see why losing 50 civilian rioters to kill a dozen or so reivers and save about that number of hostages should be any problem because, well, there are lots more civilians than there are reivers, aren’t there? (Note he sees no inconsistency here with his original defection over civilian deaths – those were murders of innocents; these rioters were taking up arms by their own choice and so to him are casualties of war.) This casual acceptance of death is his blind-spot and part of how he will have to change by story’s end.

To an extent we have a triangle with the Sage (“war is bad always”), Captain (“war is bad but necessary so deal with it” and Prince “war is a glorious and chivalrous thing”. And these songs form the crucible which help mature the Prince from that original naive view into a more mature one somewhere in the middle on the lines of “if war be needed, then there has to be a better way than killing lots of my own people”. Which he duly expresses and discovers in The Answer, shortly thereafter.

After the storm, the lull, as we enter a nice quiet period in which the lead characters more or less pair off, Magdalene seducing the Prince (again one can blame the Girl’s powers if needed!) and the Girl and Captain falling for each other as she nurses him after he gets badly wounded saving the Prince from his own chivalric stupidity in letting the Sergeant pick his sword up again (the Prince does mature, but he’s not quite there yet!).

I wish I could remember how this particular romantic twist came about. Originally we all thought it’d end with the Prince and the Girl together because, well, that’s how stories like this go, isn’t it? Besides, Mike was always singing the Prince then and Anne was always singing the Girl so that probably influenced our thinking too! My suspicion is that Valerie came up with the idea of Magdalene getting involved with the Prince which kind of left me thinking that this would tend to push the other two together, especially given he’s essentially confined to his sick bed for a week or more. At which point the cruel idea arose of making the Captain the one who actually killed the Watcher, now realising that he’d killed her love, knowing her finding out will destroy their new-found love, but being trapped by his honour into not being able to lie about doing so, even by omission. And knowing that this is inevitably going to happen and simply having to watch it coming – hence Anticipations.

I’m very fond and proud of this song and again have a total blast singing it – it packs a huge amount of story, emotion, character history and character development into its four verses and indeed I don’t know quite how much of it people manage to take in on one listen! Alas it’s also one I fluffed, I think because Rika was (playing her nursing role and trying to show the mutual affection the audience suddenly needed to learn about) trying to force another drink on me which hadn’t been there at the previous rehearsal and I was desperately trying to figure out how I was supposed to pretend to drink it (whilst singing) and hand it back to her as this needed to happen before the end of the verse as she needed to be offstage before I drop the revelation about killing the Watcher! And so my brain crashed, the wrong word came out and things got messy for half a line or so. Ah well, these things happen, and hopefully we can fix it with an overdub! (And you don’t need to apologise, Rika! *hug*)

I talked a little about the whole “why did the Watcher choose to die?” question last time. Discussing it on Sunday night at the con, Rob suggested the Watcher might have foreseen that his honourable fight to the death would be the key factor that gave the Captain respect for his foe and so enabled his defection. Which is a delightful idea, although I’m not entirely convinced. However, developing that idea, it is fairly trivial to identify several places where the Girl has (or at least may be having) absolutely critical effects on the plot. Without her the Prince would have been arrested in the Tavern or else shown up at the Tower absolutely sozzled in which case the Captain’s defection just wouldn’t have happened; without her influence he might not have defected anyway; without her influence the Sage might not have struck down the Reiver priests; without her amplifying the arguments with Sage and Captain, the Prince might not have been driven to come up with his key plan, and so on and so on. And yet, had the Watcher chosen to surrender with honour and come back to her, none of these would have happened and so the City might never have been freed. Did he truly see that far and deliberately sacrifice himself for his City? Or did he just choose to die because he thought it fated? The Girl doesn’t know, and none indeed can now “tell her why”.

Anyway, yes, the Prince’s Plan - or as we always knew it “The Starsent Scam”! This was kind of the result of Zander (in particular) being absolutely against any sort of story resolution that would involve citywide battle and large-scale casualties. So we needed a way to strike at the reivers that would avoid this. I’m not sure we exactly knew back then exactly how it was going to work – or even if! – but trying to sort things out for this performance to get from here to the Finale meeting at the Tower we pretty much had to assume it’d work in order to explain why there isn’t a company or more of reiver soldiers there or an army to deal with afterwards.

(You want more Back Story? The Starsent are now thought a myth, but did in fact once form the ruling class of these lands, human in appearance and mutually fertile, but ruling their normal human servants by way of their psychic powers. However their rule eventually fell and they disappeared into the population, never to be seen again. Except of course, that’s why almost everyone in the City States now has some trace of Starsent blood and so some vestige of psychic ability, even if only at an unconscious level; whilst some like the Sage and the Beggar-Woman have quite powerful gifts and are aware of them. And why phrases like “men of blood and power” (Midnight at the Tower) can have significant multiple meanings. But I digress again, interesting though I hope it is to see some of what lies behind the tale you see.)

I started to worry about this rather “we wave our arms and the reiver army vanishes” bit of the plot but decided it’d probably work dramatically regardless – especially as people will probably be distracted by laughing at the Sergeant’s panic and then caught up in the run-up to the Finale. But we can rationalise it to some extent too. First-off, I speculated that we’re not actually talking about that many reiver soldiers - think, for example, of Katherine Kerr’s world where a major noble might have a dozen soldiers in his warband. We’re used to a world of mass armies and levies but who says this world is like that? There was some dispute over the narrative here (and I didn’t get my way as far as I’d have preferred!) but I don’t believe the reivers had more than a couple of hundred troops and maybe the same again or a little more in mercenaries; indeed that the Prince’s army outnumbered them by 2:1 or better rather than the other way around, which was why the Warlord was able to persuade him to sortie forth and fight rather than hide behind those nice fortified city walls. Because when one force consists of seasoned, well-equipped and trained-up troops under a commander with a decade or more of battle experience, and the other is mostly hastily-pressed peasants and shopkeepers with inadequate equipment, no training, no morale and a leader whose knowledge of military tactics largely comes from his songbooks, raw odds really don’t mean that much until they get way higher than that!

So if one assumes that most of the mercenaries have now been paid off, that at least a reasonable number of reivers were killed in the battle (as the least disciplined, most aggressive and (frankly) least conserved of the Captain’s troops) then it’s possible that we’re maybe only talking about 100 or so reiver soldiers at the start of the occupation. Then assume the Prince and Captain manage a couple of dozen between them and we’re starting to make a sizeable dent in both reiver numbers and morale. Assume further that anyone with half a brain amongst the reivers goes into either the Priesthood or the Church bureaucracy which means their force doesn’t have officers or even NCOs as such (it basically runs under direct orders from the Priests which is why even our “somewhat pedestrian of intellect” Sergeant is still preferred to any leader from the reiver force!). And we’re basically then left with a superstitious, undisciplined thuggish rabble with no effective leadership (the Priests are distracted, remember), being beset by “mysterious woes” (think unpleasant practical jokes with no obvious source), were afraid of being in this town even before this, and believe this is all due to a magic which their Priests don’t seem to be able to counter. So perhaps it isn’t so surprising that morale collapses and the “army” dissipates in a surprisingly short time once it gets started. And given a whole city and 24 hours of Watches to cover, I’d have thought it’d only need to get down to 30 or so ‘shaken’ troops for the Sergeant to only be able to gather “half a dozen lads” on very short notice.

Anyway, we’re now almost at the Finale – which means Midnight at the Tower. Of all my BtD lyrics (the music was co-written with Mike) this was the song which was most consciously written from a staged/dramatic viewpoint rather than a narrative or character one. It was always meant to be the big spectacular lead up to the Finale, and I just can’t describe the sheer kick I got to see it finally appear in its proper place, doing just that. The narrator intones “And soon it will be midnight at the tower”; the drums and guitars kick in with the riff and we’re off and rockin’! And it’s a glorious thing to be on stage, fired-up, bouncing and just on top of the world. Woo-hoo! “Who will win tonight? We will win tonight!” Oh yeah!

And so into the Finale. And this was scary territory because how do you finish a multi-author song cycle except by having all characters on stage and singing a mixture of reprised extracts from various songs but with new words! It had been kicking around in more or less this form for a decade or more, but I’m not sure any of us really knew if it’d work like this or just seem messy and lame. Especially given that with the exception of the Sergeant, all of our “enemies” here would be virtual ones! But when we ran it through during final rehearsals the music at least seemed to hang together reasonably well, but how well the staging would work was really something of an unknown quantity because we simply hadn’t had chance to rehearse it in proper-sized stage-space, with the projector or with the headsets. Not to mention the even more scary prospect of trying to swordfight (safely) whilst singing and trying to hit an entrance cue for a song at the same time as hitting one to block an incoming sword! And indeed I was probably as nervous about this bit as about any other part of the show! But it worked, Simon indeed saying it was his most memorable moment as apparently my adrenalin was in overdrive and he felt he was fighting to stay on stage long enough for me to finish my verse! “This one’s mine…” indeed.

Now originally the fight between Captain and Sergeant was supposed to run from this moment through to after the death of the Warlord – at least 3 minutes, maybe more. We soon decided this was a non-starter as it’d be too tiring, too distracting and there just wasn’t room. So we thought about “freezing” the action to imply the fight was continuing but this just looked silly entirely apart from probably getting quite uncomfortable. So we decided to take the fight offstage, bringing it back on for its completion once all the other business was done. Which worked fine - except I don’t think we were expecting the huge audience laugh we got as we re-entered, apparently because we came on fighting almost exactly in reverse to how we went off thus making it look as if we had been time-stopped and only just resumed. Or something like that!

And so the bad guys perished (that screen wipe looked a nasty way to go), the Finale was successfully done and it was time for the closing number - Dawn. Which I must confess I’d been looking forward to in my imagination for weeks, albeit with some nerves as I’d have been absolutely mortified to screw this gorgeous song up and spoil this glorious happy ending. AND I SO NEARLY DID! The first four verses seemed to go fine, and I even thought I saw a gesture of particular approval from Rhodri after verse one which gave me a huge boost. However, as previously noted, we’d decided that at the end of verse four I’d hold out my hand to the Girl (“And come with me into another day”) only to be rejected. So during the instrumental I’d realise I had one final step to take, remove my sword and sword-belt and place them on the Watcher’s grave to show the Captain’s rejection of what he had been before. Except that 3 hours earlier when I’d clipped the belt-pack for my radio mic to the back of my sword-belt, I’d completely forgotten that I’d later need take this belt off and leave it on the ground! Doh! And I only realised this now as I undid the belt and suddenly my headset cable went taut… Noooooo! Fortunately, the headset stayed in place, and I was able to unclip it fairly easily, though I did feel somewhat silly holding my arms out for the big romantic embrace with a radio mic belt-pack clutched in one hand! Ah well, it will have been funny, and at least it didn’t interrupt the music!

And so into the last verse of the last song of Before the Dawn. Rika takes my hands and comes in with the affirmative counterpoint, the cast harmonise from around the stage, the back projection completes its cunning fade to dawn and we fall into each other’s arms as the final tableau whilst the closing chords play out. And I don’t know about “not a dry eye in the house”, but I know there were at least a few tears being shed at that moment. And a glorious moment it was, and a treasured special memory it will indeed be. And what can I say but thank you, both to everyone else involved in the creation and staging, and to those who gave us an audience to show it to.