Hunky, chunky firemen’s song is my show’s hot hit

3:15pm Monday 25th January 2010

By Mike Pryce

Well, actually we don’t, but what we do have is a music teacher called Melanie Gunn, who has written a primary school musical called The Smoke.

It’s Mel G’s first production and while it might not quite emulate the High School Musical series from Walt Disney studios, it’s not half bad.

In fact it’s so not half bad there is a possibility a publishing firm might take it on and you never know The Smoke could find itself being performed on stages across the land.

Mel, who lives in Bewdley with her husband and two daughters, studied music at Birmingham University and after her degree promptly got a job as an estate agent. About 15 years ago, she gave up up selling houses to teach music full time.

She said: “Although I had written a Christmas carol and other bits and pieces over the years I had never undertaken anything this long. I consider myself very fortunate to have tolerant and supportive colleagues who were willing to let me try.”

It was a couple of years ago, as she was coming down the stairs at the Knoll School in Kidderminster that Mel had her Andrew Lloyd Webber moment.

She said: “At the bottom of the staircase was a new display of children’s artwork and mounted on a black background were chalk pictures depicting the Great Fire of London, in vivid reds, oranges and yellows, with flames leaping into the sky and reflected in the river Thames.”

The dramatic images gave her the idea of using the event as the basis of a school play but scanning the internet found little available.

She added: “This gave me the perfect excuse to have a go myself. I have always fancied trying my hand at writing a musical.”

Mel decided to use a narrator as the thread that tied the famous tale together. She chose the character of a modern day schoolchild, seated at a desk in front of the stage and a little below the action, wondering out loud what the fire was really like. Cue entrance stage right Samuel Pepys, eye-witness and keeper of the records, who appears to answer the questions. The musical then evolves as a conversation between the two with the cast acting out the scenes behind them.

The story begins with the residents of Pudding Lane dancing away to celebrate a long, hot summer without an outbreak of plague.

Mel said: “The dancing proved more challenging than learning songs, words, stage directions or anything else in fact, but it really worked. I also came to appreciate that a stately minuet in three-time with children holding hands in lines is not always intuitive. But eventually the linked hands of the front line all went up at the same time and the dancers all appeared in the gaps at the same time. It got a round of applause at every performance.”

Unlike the Busby Berkeleys of this world, Mel was working with reduced resources. One musical number she scored for the unlikely combination of rain-stick, djembe, xylophones, chime bars and wind-chimes, “because that is all we have. Every time it was different but it always sounded urgent and only occasionally slightly panicked.”

She also latched on to a school favourite. She said: “It is a highlight of our children’s year in reception when the fire engine comes to school with accompanying burly operatives. So here was an opportunity to dress the cast in yellow helmets and uniforms and march around with a cardboard fire engine.”

Her resulting composition Hunky, Chunky Fire-fighters proves to be the most popular song of the night.

And Charles II makes a regal entrance with sweeping gestures and astride a hobby horse.

Mel said: “It occurred to me in a wild moment to have him distribute alms – in this case chocolate coins – to the populace but there was enough mayhem on stage with the hobby horse at that point and his song is fairly boisterous, so the staff were unanimous about leaving the chocolates out.”

It all finishes with a song called This Is Not The End as the schoolchild tells Samuel Pepys about the monument to the Great Fire in today’s London and goes back to her homework.

She said: “Rehearsing and performing something that I had created was tremendously exciting, and worked astonishingly well.

“The children rose to the occasion and learned everything beautifully and I am assured that they enjoyed it. I’ve got the bug now and there will definitely be another one. In the meantime I am trying to interest publishers and would be delighted if any other school would like to see the score with a view to staging it.”