Baby! - The Musical

Everyone is missing the seagulls. Especially Baby …

In their honour I have penned a musical:

Baby! – The Musical

By Gigi Lloyd-Webber.

So far I have only penned that. Those words  (see above). A musical is a very complex project and the main reason I have not been able to proceed further.

Also the cast has fled. Literally. The seagulls have flown away and Baby with them.

I was going to cast Baby as the star. And both Baby’s parents had lead roles even though I do not think any of the three could hold a note between them. So I was going to make theirs all speaking roles – which would have made it more like a play. Not much of a musical.

Over the weekend Baby was walking. Toddling. Such a sensitive bird; the minute he heard us rustling in the bushes with our camera for a portrait shot, he would disappear into them, into the ones at the other side of the garden. One of the portraits we were able to capture features him doing just that.

In another portrait he stretches a wing. One wing at a time although I did see him stretch both when he caught me coming out of the bushes once. Then he ran into them again.

By Monday all was quiet in the garden as well as in our flat and the whole neighbourhood. It is still. It is very still.

it is like the show is over, a show that we came to love and even have small bit parts in. I actually had walk-on roles outlined for Pete and I, that although tiny, were essential to the narrative. And I really love to sing so I had even given myself a solo verse, a tiny aria, that I was hoping I would be able to pull off well enough that people would not want to accuse me of nepotism.

The biggest roles of course were reserved for the taxi driver – the taxi driver and our neighbour, the lady upstairs, who alerted me to the fact of Baby. In Baby! The Musical these two characters play off each other, like in a sing-off – although I am sure there is a more musical term for it – building to a crescendo until the taxi driver sings in mighty baritone “Golden Eagle!” at the same time as our neighbour, in Madame Butterfly soprano, sings: “Baby! Baby!”

And then they both collapse onto the floor.

Then baby waddles out, with his brown and white feathers – not yet the pristine white of his parents – and dark beak – which will transform in adulthood to sun-bright, seagull yellow – and gurgles a bit, which is as much a squawk I ever heard from him, excluding his very early whistling days.

Pete says in retrospect he was aware of a whistling … and imagined a baby bird or something somewhere  …

As it is, we were the last to know, having no birds-eye-view of the garden like our neighbour upstairs. Just a lower-ground level one.

But now Baby has gone … flapped his wings gone. Just like that …

Baby! – The Musical is an unfinished work. Which sounds dramatic but also adds mystery. After all, there is only a title. And a composers name.

I am no Lloyd-Webber really. It’s a pseudonym for musicals.

Nights are so quiet now …

And days so empty …

 

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