Jeevan's Brexit Blog
WARNING: This blog has been identified to potentially trigger cringe and confusion for any and all readers. Reader discretion is advised.
(there also may be a lot of grammatical mistakes because I can’t be bothered to proof read)
Even that sentence was cringe! Anyway, let’s begin the cringing on the 24th March (let’s also have a count on the number of times I’ve said the word ‘cringe’):
After Black Company, I told Sarah that I was thinking about joining the Brexit cast, and she wanted to know what would make my decision more certain. I would’ve liked to read the script beforehand, but sadly couldn’t, so I checked the rehearsal dates and made my decision. Did I later regret my decision? Yes. But we’ll get onto that later. At Lamda the next week, Sarah explained how she was grateful I was joining the cast because my musical knowledge would really help, but little did she know… Before the auditions, Sarah asked me if I could take a look the song ‘We Want the Same as You’ so I can help teach it on the piano, however when we got to the auditions there wasn’t a piano in sight (literally – we couldn’t see the piano, but there was a piano there!). Luckily, I’d separated out all the files on Musescore, however, none of them were stored on my iCloud, so pretty much useless. This should’ve been Sarah’s first inkling that my musical knowledge would be no use.
I auditioned for Joe (who sort of narrates the play along with Anna – sorry Sarah, that’s the best way I know how to describe them) and they begin with a very hostile friendship because one is for Brexit, and the other not so much. After practising at home for a while with my sisters help, it all went to pot when it was all out of time and out of tune, but I still got the part anyway, along with Alice as Anna. Initially when we started rehearsals, the reason I regretted doing Brexit was simply because I wasn’t confident with singing in front of others, but after getting over myself (not a hard challenge cos I’m fairly small – if I ever committed a crime and evaded the police, all the breaking news headlines would read ‘reasonably small male still at large’. I’ll stop now with the bad jokes and crack on with the blog, but still, big up the small males!!), I genuinely started to really enjoy rehearsals. That was mostly down to the cast and crew; working with Ellie, John, Olli and Ash has been one of the highlights of my 11 years at Yew Tree.
As the weeks went by, we made progress through the play with a lot of the scenes and group songs being done. For Joe and Anna, they sit at the front of the stage as though they are in their house and occasionally have a conversation over Twitter, so for a lot of the time when Sarah was working with the rest of the cast, me and Alice would be in another room running our songs. However, there was just one issue with that. Sarah often gave us all half an hour to run songs separately, and for the first 15 minutes of that, me and Alice just chatted, and then did songs. Later in rehearsals though, when we realised that we had to actually get a move on, we swapped it round – songs first, then wasting time. Perhaps Sarah has learnt this year that putting me and Alice together is not the greatest of ideas – even in Hunt, I remember a chair squeaked and it had me and Alice in tears because it sounded like a fart! One thing about WYTDC is that there are a lot of spiders. And I mean A LOT. During Episode 38 of me and Alice wasting time, she attempted a bottle flip (which she never actually landed after continuously saying she is so good at them), my bottle of water (or Bo’Oh’O’Wa’er) fell down the back of the table and when Alice went to pick it up, a dead spider had managed to stick itself onto it. As you do, me and Alice swiftly left the room and got Sam in the other room to take it. Literally everyone in that room ran to see this massive spider (I may’ve overexaggerated it slightly) other than Ellie who also has a phobia of spiders, but Sam picked it up with her bare hands!! This isn’t a one-time occurrence either. I went back to help/volunteer/sit, chill and talk with Ellie over summer, and as she was taking one of the classes, we both spotted a spider and instantly jumped off our seats. Obviously, being the type of person I am, I played it cool and sat back down as if nothing had happened. However, on the inside, I was having a tiny panic attack, and I always had one eye on the spider to make sure it didn’t move. Luckily, they’ve hoovered all the spiders up now.
One of the best things about this play is the variety of styles of music, and by far, my two favourites were Theresa May’s (Ellie’s) Fields of Wheat, and Boris Johnson’s (John’s) Deal or No Deal – I would very quickly add them to my Spotify playlist if they were recorded. Putin (Olli’s) song was a controversial one, and initially Sarah had considered cutting that entire section, but later decided we could perform it, and Olli’s camp version of Putin definitely got some laughs. Within that song, you have a group that dance with feather ribbons (Ellie had this “fantastic” idea to wave them around my head at the corner of the stage), whilst doing some leg kicks (and I was deadly terrified that John’s kicks would take my head off). With both of these dangerous pieces of choreography, it was decided that both Joe and Anna wouldn’t be on stage for that scene, a decision that Ellie didn’t agree with! It goes without saying that this play is utterly ridiculous, and daft, and that’s why I think this play really works. If this was a play with a very serious tone the entire way through, I don’t think it would’ve worked as well, especially with a younger cast like we do have. So big congrats to both Sarah and Jamie for putting this play together!
Sarah spent some time with me and Alice just going over our characters, and we decided that Joe was a wannabe journalist, whereas Anna was a Zara manager – apparently Anna is much more stylish than Joe but personally I beg to differ (“Nah bruv, I actually have no drip”). This definitely helped with our characterisation showing them go from a very hostile relationship to an awkward but not-so-hostile one at the end of the play. Since both Anna and Joe sit continuously on stage (Sarah said we had the hardest job out of everyone in the cast – apologies, but I disagree), we chose certain things to do to pass the time. For example, Anna spent time reading through a holiday catalogue, and Joe making notes for his news articles and reading some books.
For our third song ‘Common Ground’, both Joe and Anna confess their love for each other. Bit weird, isn’t it? You see, in the play, this is technically the first time they’re actually meeting up in real life and they’re already in love. We were told to make Common Ground like Love is an Open Door from Frozen (personally, I think that Frozen 2 > Frozen 1), and honestly if it meant I ended up dead at the end of the musical, that’s fine by me. Evidently, the song didn’t end up like that and the main problem is that I’m very socially awkward, but it’s not my fault. Just like Lady Gaga, I was born this way (not me using a recycled joke and running it into the ground). Alice is also a little bit socially awkward too if I’m honest. I remember Sarah kept telling us to sort out a session together with Alice’s singing teacher, but as many times as I asked we never got it sorted. On the performance day, I told Alice that Joe and Anna should hold hands and she made her opinion clear that she thinks my idea was absolute trash, so I snitched to Sarah who then told us to hold hands during Common Grounds. Honestly the only common ground between me and Alice was our Youtube taste (Sidemen and Daz Black), our fear of spiders and our inability to do bottle flips.
Arwen came in twice to take photos for us, once in rehearsal (where I wore the most nerdy Star Wars T-Shirt I own and a scruffy little – it wasn’t little, it was very much oversized – grey cardigan), and once on the day of our first performance. There are honestly some amazing photos within them, with my favourite being a straight-faced John holding up a pink feather ribbon above his head! There were also a lot of Ellie, and frankly, she doesn’t seem to have a natural resting face – she’s always making a different expression (which to be fair is a compliment on her acting skill), she could literally create a whole set of emojis out of them.
During the two weeks that Sarah went on holiday, we had Paul (one of Sarah’s old friends who is very good at singing) running the session. He was there helping us add harmonies into our group songs (queue the joke about thickening which I’ve been told by 4 people is too offensive to include in this blog). For each song Paul went through, he split us into groups, and each would take a different harmony. Me and Ellie were in the same group despite us having two very different vocal ranges (as Big Mike would say, my “singing voice is a vocal felony”), and honestly, we could never get it right! Paul would sing something to us, and we would most definitely sing it back differently; I remember he kept saying “and you guys have just sung this” and I’m there like “no Paul, no we have not”. A couple months back I wrote a blog for Gold Company’s Merlin and Morgana, and I said that I’d explain the ‘audibly sighs’ joke. Basically, I thought we had finished doing harmonies with Paul but it turned out we actually hadn’t so as soon as he said we’re doing more, I let out the longest and most frustrated sigh to all of mankind (honestly, for an asthmatic, I’m pretty proud of it) – it seems this is now engrained in both mine and Ellie’s brains. However, Ellie kept laughing at me in these sessions to the extent where she ended up just having to turn her chair in the opposite direction to me… I think the funniest thing that happened was when we were singing Your Move Now, Paul kept singing ‘move your feet’ in the chorus instead of ‘move your queen’, and no one corrected him for ages, so we were all just laughing until Ellie told him the actual lyrics (but even then, he still continued to say ‘move your feet’).
Again, another sidebar: every week I came to rehearsals with a pen. I never left that same rehearsal with the pen in my possession, so when I rocked up the next week and had to write something down or Joe had to make journalistic notes, I never could. However, as Shawn Spencer would say, “I don’t lose things. I place things in locations which later elude me.” It’s not my fault though; just like Lady Ga— nope, already made that joke in this blog. Apologies.
Before our performance of Merlin and Morgana, I decided to make (what was a very quick job if you’ve seen it) a poster for the show, and after Sarah asked if I’d be interested in making a poster for Brexit. I was hoping she would ask because I had so many ideas! Right from the start, I knew I wanted it to have a comic book style with Boris Johnson on his zip line going across the top of the poster. After making it (which took a very long time), Sarah then asked me to create it into a brochure which I was absolutely fine with – it initially started as a four page booklet (a front page poster, cast list, a photo page, and a back page which has the design of a blue passport). However, later during one of our rehearsals at the working men’s club, Sarah said she’ll send me a few messages from herself and Jamie to add into the programme (or brochure as I always call it). It’s important to note that at this point, the programme was pretty much finished. However, being a people pleaser, I said that I can easily add these messages in – Sarah could tell that there’s no space for it and at that point she said I can add more pages. So the programme went from 4 to 8 pages!!
I’ll go through what each page had:
1. Page 1 – This was the poster for the play and it was done in a comic book style. You had a large bold double outlined title (it a sort of varsity style), with a comically ugly Boris Johnson stuck on his zip line. Beneath that there were four boxes with different images in it: the first one with a London bus; another with Theresa May in fields of wheat (with a Parental Advisory Explicit Content label); the third was a take on a La La Land poster but with Theresa May and Donald Trump dancing; and the last was a take on the famous guitar scene from Back to the Future but with David Cameron singing I Shall Disappear whilst his body faded away. I did have other ideas for some of these – for example, Putin as Emperor Palpatine in a Star Wars Revenge of the Sith poster, however this idea was ditched for obvious reasons. I also made the mistake of adding a message at the bottom of the poster saying ‘complimentary cheese and wine’ and I’ll explain why later.
2. The second page has the blurb. The top half of the page was a Star Wars style scrolling text intro to Brexit the Musical whereas the bottom half of the page was a more serious blurb in a comic book style. In fact, I’ll add the Star Wars blurb here:
- Star Wars blurb: Turmoil has engulfed England. The battles between the Leave and Remain Campaign have begun and are dividing the country in two. Little do Britons know, Prime Minister David Cameron is soon to step down, leaving the ‘Dancing Queen’ Sith Lord, Darth Maybot, in charge. Hoping to spread awareness of the issue, political journalist Laura Kuenssburg follows the stories of those involved, putting herself in grave danger…
3. The third page was the cast and crew list, which was a little complicated considering everyone played so many characters and not even themselves knew who so it took a good two weeks to get this accurate. I even posted the final version of it in the group on Facebook asking if it’s correct to which I got no response. Luckily by posting this, I realised I wrote Nat’s name as ‘Natasha Lust’ rather than ‘Natasha Lunt’! I also tried to get a cast photo for this page but literally we never had a full cast until it was too late so I simply gave up on this. In the end, Lucy had to drop out for her own personal reasons, and so that was the only mistake but honestly at that point, I really had lost all care in the world about the cast list.
4. The next page was the photos taken by Arwen, and this was fun – looking through 70 odd photos to find the right ones. My favourite photo in there was the one with John and the pink fluffy ribbon!
5. The 5th and 6th page were the messages so there’s not really much to say about them.
6. The 7th page was something I was struggling with. It was sort of a spare page and I didn’t know what to do with it. So after a conversation with Ellie she suggested doing a timeline of the events of Brexit in real life, which we then thought it’d be cool to have the scenes in the musical converted to the real life events. So I designed it as an old style news article which went through the majority of songs from the musical and added dates and a little blurb for each of them. A sorta bad crash course on Brexit. I also added three extra headlines underneath which are just little hints towards the play: 1. One about Joe and Anna being ‘the Brexit couple’; 2. Brexit the Musical making the headlines and 3. One which was a little reference to a Brexit meme Ellie sent me about Boris being fed up of having fake friends and Donald, Theresa and Farage come to his rescue in a very inappropriate manner.
7. The back page had the design of the new blue(or ‘bloo’ as Boris would say) passports.
Me and Ellie were out at Supper Club, and we decided to create a little group (which was later named ‘Let’s See Who Can Sing’) that would go to Hogarths for karaoke every Wednesday – me, Ellie, John, Alise, Cait, Ash and Olli usually always come along (it’s ironic because on the week I’m writing this, I’m not actually going) but others also come too like Chloe, Arwen and Connor. After the Brexit show, Charlie Johnson also came along! As you can probably guess, I never really go there and engage in the activities, although there was one time, but we don’t talk about that – I usually just go there to…. “vibe”.
24th and 25th of July 2022
Now if you didn’t know, July 25th is a special day in 2022 for several reasons: 1) Ironically it’s National Cheese and Wine Day, 2) it’s the day after Jennifer Lopez’s birthday, and 3) most importantly, Brexit the Musical was performed for the last time. Sadly, Lopez couldn’t make it because of whatever shenanigans happened on her birthday - we can let her off though cos I’m sure she wasn’t ‘Feelin So Good’ (that’s a Big Pun from the guy that played Fat Joe). To note, that’s not me being offensive, it’s a play on words on one of her songs, of which Big Pun and Fat Joe featured! ‘Ain’t it Funny’!!
Let’s start with the 24th. If I’m correct (which I’m usually not), we were told to initially meet at the mens working club at 10am, but with Ellie working till late the night before, Sarah said she can turn up later – which I just decided I will also do for the same reason without telling Sarah; it’s called strolling up fashionably late. However, it was then changed to meet at 1pm – I was still late. Arwen was also taking photos during the rehearsal, and she said she’ll meet me outside, but for some reason I completely didn’t see her and assumed she’d made her way inside. Turns out she was waiting outside still for me in the rain – not a good look for me, felt very bad. We did a full stop/start run which we were meant to do at 50%, however instead, I did that in 25% which I then upped to 66% for the final performance – always giving my all (in the words of a Brooke Wilkinson “It’s not an acting run”)! Sadly, I could barely give my anything because a few days before I screamed at the top of my voice (or purposefully sung badly) during Black’s performance of Much Ado About Nothing. For the Friday and Saturday before the Brexit performances, I was definitely taking an overdose of Sudafed, Strepsils, and Paracetamol. By the time of the first performance my voice was having any of it to the point where I had to make taking my inhaler a part of Joe’s character; in You’ve Been Fed Lies, my voice wasn’t to bad (still had the local police looking for the god awful noise), but for Common Grounds, my voice even had Jamie wondering why I was cast in a musical. My voice literally sounded like someone attempting to sing on the London Underground: shaky with background pterodactyl noises! I also did mess up You’ve Been Fed Lies on both nights (in particular the ‘I don’t understand’ line and it sounded a complete mess) – if I could I would spend another 5-7 business days wallowing in self pity but unfortunately I have things to do, and by that I mean finish this blog – I promised Sarah it about 5 weeks ago.
After the first run through, Sarah gave us an hour break. Initially, Ellie was gonna order a coffee from Uber Eats (yes, just a coffee), but that was until the bright idea of walking a few minutes up the road was suggested. Uber Eat-sing is a regular occurrence for Ellie. A group of us went out, only to find that it was raining and this café was much more than 2 minutes away; Uber Eats began to seem like the better idea at this point. For some silly reason I thought having a hot chocolate was a good idea but it absolutely did clog up my voice, so afterwards I had about two bottles of water! During the rest of that hour break, I had an idea that Joe and Anna should hold hands in their final song to at least give the false pretence that they liked each other; however, Alice was completely and utterly against this idea, so I reluctantly had to “snitch” to Sarah who then gave the order. On the second day I forgot my bottle so I bought one from the bar there which turned out to be sparkling water (not very helpful) so I was continuously going back and forth for a glass of tap water – that is until Becca offered me a bottle. Onto the actual performance…
As usual, the actual performances are gonna get the smallest paragraph. As usual, my mum turned up about 45 minutes early, and asked for front and centre seats (for a very valid reason I would like to add), but nice having my biggest supporter there! Arwen said that me and my sister look exactly alike and that if she didn’t know me, we could be twins – evidently, she gets her looks from me (whether my looks are good or not, that’s not up to me, but I can tell you, there is a reason I don’t own a mirror)! They went really well – there weren’t many, or if any, mistakes! Saying that, I did forget one of my lines, but thanks to Alice she managed to cover me. Between the You’ve Been Fed Lies Reprise and Common Grounds, there is barely anytime for Joe to get out of his ridiculous journalist jumper and into more appropriate attire for a “date”, so I literally got into backstage and chucked my jumper off onto the floor, and then ran onto stage to sit on the cold hard grass. Yep that’s right. It was staged so that neither Joe or Anna were actually sat on the blanket but on the grass – but it was for our (or my) safety because in rehearsal I almost slipped on the blanket whilst trying to stand up. Continuing the topic of costume, I remember looking around online for a green sweatshirt, but literally couldn’t find any until my mum looked for less than 5 minutes and found one – but when I tried everything on, I realised that I didn’t like it (I think it’s because it’s pretty much the same as my uniform for Dane Royd Primary School urg), but Sarah said it was perfect so I just got over myself. During Common Ground, me and Alice had to make eye contact, however I found it much easier to look lovingly into John Broadhead’s eyes who was sat in the same direction. At the end of the first performance, both Joe and Anna have to clink glasses at the same time as Theresa and Cameron (which we always never timed right) but I made the grave mistake of drinking whatever blasted thing was in that champagne glass. I ended up choking on it and then basically crying in front of everyone and not singing the song; I bet everyone thought I just didn’t know the lyrics to History in the End (I didn’t but not the point). At the start of Common Grounds, I’m meant to offer Anna a Pringle before Joe strongly confessed his love for her in an out of tune song, but on the first night I forgot, so that meant we hadn’t actually practised handing each other a Pringle. On the second night, I handed her one, but Alice completely blanked me so it made for a slight awkward moment as we shuffled our way to the edge of the stage to show how much we “fit together like hand in gloveeeee”. Throughout the course of Brexit, me and my pringles always felt like an Ice Age Scrat and his acorn moment! Sarah told me and Alice to find ways to keep ourselves busy so we didn’t zone out, so I did – as a journalist, Joe had to take notes and these were very interesting notes that also included professional diagrams of Bendy Bananas (and the occasional Minion) and Theresa in her Fields of Wheat! At the end of the show, after John’s Boris goodbye speech, the play was over and there just a very much awkward pause where no one knew what to do, but this wasn’t as awkward as the group photo we took (I personally looked like I had just sung in public and made a mockery of myself)! I also made things even more awkward when I asked Jamie and their group if they had been into Establishment the day before because they looked very familiar – turned out they hadn’t and it was just my mind playing tricks on me (typical, always making me look like a fool!).
It was genuinely really good to see some people come to watch us, including Arwen, Connor, Eliana, Brooke, Brodie and the unnamed person who kept using their phone “discretely” underneath the table (it’s as if they just don’t like theatre in general - who knows?).
I’m sure (if you’re actually reading) you are absolutely distraught that this blog is ending, but we still have to get through some messages to some of the cast:
1. To Sarah and Jamie – Brexit What a Song and Dance is an absolute delight which takes a very serious matter and turns it into a ridiculously daft play without losing the underlying message. I really do hope it gets shared much further out than Wakefield’s Horbury Working Mens Club!
2. To Ellie – working alongside you is always a joy, and I’m so glad we’ve got to know each properly again – from Ceasefire Babies to this, it’s always a highlight! Genuinely, you’re so talented, whether it’s with singing, acting, drawing (digitally from what I’ve seen – Mr Wiggles wasn’t your best work), dad dancing, or getting more tattoos, and you can do anything you want; Ellie, if you want to be a firetruck, you do that!! I very much look forward to performing with you again!
3. To John – I’ve said it before, your ability to give encouragement is unmatched, and so is your ability to get drunk quickly! I can’t even count the number of times you’ve made us laugh in rehearsal.
4. To Alice – in every play, there’s usually always that one person you work most with, and in Brexit, that’s you. I can’t even count the number of ridiculous and awkward moments, and it’s been such a laugh to work with you. Genuinely though, I do wanna say that you really do have an amazing singing voice! Look forward to being in Gold company this year!
So, that’s all for my Brexit blog, so thank you to all those who decided to stay and read, and do forgive me for rehearsals various overused jokes that I’ve completely run into the ground!
See you in the next blog,
Jeev : )
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