Musicals To My Ears

In his show The Road I Took, which he is currently touring around Australia, Phillip Quast recalls his father playing songs from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma on the record player when he was a boy growing up in Tamworth in northern New South Wales. His father’s taste in musical theatre and the proximity to Australia’s premiere annual country music festival shaped his early taste in music. Since then, via an impressive television, film and theatre career, Quast’s taste has continued to grow. Throughout the years he’s turned his hand and vocal chords to Stephen Sondheim, Marsha Norman, Frank Loesser and The Wiggles among others - numbers by all of whom are featured in The Road I Took. And apart from his assumption that we would all know the lyrics to and willingly collude in a performance of Wiggly Woo, Quast provided a very pleasurable evening for this audience member.

Screen shot of poster for the Albury show 27 November 2025 (source: https://allevents.in/albury)

Musical theatre did not feature prominently in my English childhood and country music not at all.  As I’ve mentioned before, my parents had LPs of Sammy Davis Jr and Frank Sinatra. Dad would sometimes emulate the latter – the image of him crooning in the kitchen comes to mind. Mum also had the Rex Harrison - Julie Andrews recording of My Fair Lady with a wonderful cover design featuring GB Shaw and those two performers in a cascading string puppet design.  She would sometimes wistfully join in with The Street Where You Live often while ironing I recall. I don’t remember them having any other records.   Our main listening was the pirate radio station Radio Luxembourg, on a worn blue vinyl covered transistor radio that Dad would carry from workshop to house with him.

The LP with the clever cover that Mum had

My exposure to musical theatre was negligible as if ever a musical came on television our father would deride the male cast members as ‘dancing poons’ and point out that in real life people did not burst into song at the drop of a hat. A little more tolerant, Mum nevertheless favoured naturalism in her musicals so anything featuring Ethel Merman or Eddie Cantor would have been right out. Our grandmother taking us to see Mary Poppins and enjoying it despite its major departure from the P L Travers books (see Saving Mr Banks). I was particularly moved by Feed the Birds not realising until much later on a visit to London that the romanticized pigeons roosting around St Paul’s were deemed public nuisances though a sign we saw instructing the public not to feed them had been modified thus:

Feeding the  birds/Tories discouraged despite Disney's urging

The first musical I fully embraced was Lerner and Loewe's Camelot, the Joshua Logan 1967 film version. I saw it with my mother and her delight was contagious. We were both genuinely swept away by the charisma of the leads: Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero - all photographed most aesthetically in a movie that has been criticized for the anachronistic beauty if of its settings. I have seen it several times over the years and admit to excusing all its exaggerations and cosmetic flourishes. My companion at Quast’s show was talented Wagga actor, Diana Lovett who was joining him for a workshop on the following two days  and for which she had had to prepare two songs. We are of an age and she chuckled mischievously when telling me that one of the songs she’d selected was The Simple Joys of Maidenhood from Camelot. When I mentioned my affection for the film she poo-pooed it comparing it unfavorably to Broadway and West End productions she’d seen with Richard Harris but with other Guineveres and Lancelots. Divergent as our views were on Ms Redgrave’s casting we were united in our non-compliance with the Wiggly Woo gambit.

Movie poster for Camelot (1967) - full lush art nouveau revival style

My tastes differs too from those of my much missed dear friend Monica. Not knowing she couldn’t stand Sondheim I once included her in group booking to see Sweeney Todd.  Her good manners prevented her from declining. On the other side of the ledger I have her to thank for seeing Man of La Mancha and Les Mis because her twin nephews were in productions. That is genuine appreciation. I don’t know that I would have seen and enjoyed them otherwise.

I escaped from the childhood restrictions on my movie musical enjoyment when I moved in with my boyfriend and his actor friend in the 1970s. It was an era when Hollywood classics were screened into the small hours and we enjoyed countless black and white Busby Berkeley and Astaire and Rogers movies as well as less revered films like the 1952 vehicle for Virginia Mayo and Ronald Reagan She’s Working Her Way Through College  - a simple tale of a burlesque dancer who enrolls in tertiary study. The lyrics of the title song have entered the family canon:

She’s working her way through college

To get a lot of knowledge

That she’ll probably never ever use again…

Just a sample of the useful gender theories the film airs.

Films like this are undoubtedly the reason why some people abhor musicals

While I can’t say I’ve  become a die-hard devotee of the genre I’ve seen a few musicals  over the years and even feel that my father tolerated me watching The Pyjama Game while I was staying with him, but that might be a false memory spawned by wishful thinking. Initially sharing my mother’s preference for more naturalistic forms, (Cabaret was an early and enduring favourite) I now embrace most styles. I recently saw and was entranced by  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - no wonder it is considered a landmark film. I do draw the line at Andrew Lloyd Webber and specifically will not forgive what he did to TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. I wasn’t overwhelmed with joy at Tim Minchin’s Matilda when I saw it on stage at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre but do like the movie version.  Locally And Juliet left me bored and annoyed but Mama Mia and Wicked I liked very much. As those who know me will attest, I am picky, picky, picky.

Cuddly bear era - Philip Quast in Play School (source: The Quast Quality blog https://gebo-tqq.blogspot.com/)

Anyway back to Phillip Quast. He is certainly versatile and I suppose I forgive him for peppering his show with nursery favourites as for many he is as identified with Play School as he is with stage musicals. His Javert of course was definitive and oh, that he’d been cast in the film, but then the casting of the movie version of Les Miserables is just that, miserable! Monica’s nephews’ version was infinitely preferable. See, picky, picky, picky…