Thanks to Funny Girl I revisited the era of my grandmother’s youth. Suddenly all the actresses had victory rolls and enormous grins.’ It improved once World War II came around. In the twenties, we girls were expected to look like kewpie dolls. ‘But big smiles are considered attractive,’ I’d told her.

‘Too broad,’ she’d said, shaking her blue-rinsed head. My 1890s-born grandmother had despaired of her own mouth when young. Who would have thought the small mouth I resented would ever become an asset! As for a ‘reasonable voice’, well, let’s just say I have the angels to thank for the tunelessness of my ‘Happy Birthday’ rendition being politely overlooked. They’d been looking for dancers with reasonable voices whose ‘physical presence conjured the 1920s’. How, you may be wondering, did I ever get into a musical if I couldn’t even sing? The audition panel gave me a dance solo because of my jazz-ballet and belly dance background and suggested I double up as a showgirl/chorus singer. It would be two more years before that dastardly duo would descend into infamy. True, they at least mimed their own voices, but at that point in time, pretend-singing hadn’t done Milli Vanilli any harm. In every rehearsal and show, I’d gone silent once the orchestra started up, reminding myself that even pop stars lip-synched. Flicking further through the programme, I recalled the sixties-composed tunes. On the programme’s fourth page was a black-and-white picture of me amongst the other Ziegfeld Showgirls, a shy nineteen-year-old peering out from glittering plumage, wearing the sort of expression that’s typically worn by chorus singers of zero vocal ability, an expression that spells ‘undetected stowaway’.

We’d belonged to an exclusive club that focused on footwork, camaraderie, costume alterations, gruelling rehearsals and after-show cocktail events that brought out the show-off in all who showed up. The difference was that the singers prompted a pang of familiarity, not because they were household names – the 1990 production of Funny Girl had been an amateur one held at The Canberra Theatre – but because many of them had become friends. The programme my recent clutter clearing unearthed was quite similar to the others: pages crammed with photos of performers, smiling or open-mouthed, gesticulating flamboyantly against backdrops of faux-marble staircases or painted cities. The file is ragged now and plump with mementos dating back to 1988.

Late last year, I happened across an old theatre programme in a rarely sorted-through cupboard, and immediately designated the booklet to a file labelled ‘Shows’. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

The Golding by Sonya Deanna Terry