Things are buzzing.

I got buzzed by a loud bee hungry for sugar this week and then again by a fat mozzie hunting blood.

Such is the finespun chemistry of things that we are all a balance of one or the other, and spring is the time when blood pulses with the energy and sugar of life.

But it’s not all poetry and awe.

Around here there’s also plenty of pop, six, squish, uh uh, Cicero and Lipshitz.

That’s a slice of the lip-smacking lyrics from Chicago’s Cell Block Tango, now on its final fishnet-stockinged legs at WestSide Performing Arts Centre in Mooroopna.

Shepparton Theatre Arts Group’s production of the sassy razzle-dazzle musical needs no high falutin’ praise from me.

It has a cast of more than 40 of Shepparton’s finest singers, dancers and musicians who have already shaken the walls of WestSide four times since opening last week.

I’m not here to sell tickets either.

Remarkably, the show sold out two weeks before opening night.

What I am here to do is try to explain exactly what this nebulous thing called the magic of theatre is all about.

A director I once knew compared live theatre to a fragile bubble created with the breath of story and which exists for just a moment before vanishing into memory.

That’s nice, and quite theatrical.

But it doesn’t capture the nexus of energy and skill that’s required for a complex production like Chicago to appear on stage in a country community.

Where else but theatre do carpenters, electricians, costumers, accountants, designers, lawyers, lighting and sound technicians, musicians, make-up artists, painters and truckies come together to make something happen that disappears in a few short days — and nobody gets paid?

Oh, and there might be a few actors, singers and dancers involved too — but they don’t get paid either.

The magic of community theatre exists in the memories and connections made between everyday people striving for perfection in an imperfect world.

It becomes the blood and the sugar that flows through the town from one generation to the next.

The only money involved comes from tickets bought by audiences who want to see people they know do something extraordinary.

So, it becomes self-sustaining.

My introduction to theatre began as a 17-year-old in a school production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible — a play about the Salem witch trials set in 17th-century America.

The best memory I have of it is the comment from audience members that the boys’ wigs were fantastic, when in fact our hair was real because we all wanted to be Robert Plant.

I didn’t appear on a dramatic stage again for 30 years when I played John Lennon seated at a fake piano singing Imagine.

When my loose microphone began to sink, I was faced with the dilemma of following its trajectory towards the keyboard or moving it back into position, thus destroying the illusion that I was actually playing the piano.

I chose the former option and sang half the song with my face planted on the keys, pretending I was Lennon during his heroin phase.

The next STAG memory I have is of walking off stage after again playing Lennon during his long-haired Revolution phase.

Instead of turning left, I turned right and walked into a black void behind an endless curtain and couldn’t find my way out.

For the next 10 minutes I was Orpheus trapped in the underworld.

Life was happening somewhere else, but I could never take part.

I was eventually rescued by two kind ladies who opened a door somewhere and allowed a crack of light into my darkness.

If not for them, I might have lived my life trapped for ever as John Lennon in his granny’s fox fur jacket and white satin pants.

These are memories from the grapevine of blood and sugar you just can’t buy.

They just keep on growing.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News

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Sunday, 22nd June 2025

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