•✦—✦•
February 7th, Greater London, UK
I, along with my mum, had arrived in London after five hours in the car. Because we had left early in the morning, it was just around 11 when we pulled into an office in Camden. London was a place that seemed so far away, yet so close on the screen of my CRT TV. Even at what was technically outside the most populous parts of the city, I experienced so many cars and people that I felt dizzy. I had arrived here to do the intermediate test in front of UKMT staff. The reason for my coming here had almost nothing to do with the UKMT, but it was true that I had studied and practiced for the intermediate version of the challenge the most rather than the junior version I had taken in January. Oh, I had won a medal at the junior challenge, and it had been sent over to King's School because that's where I took it. My dad should have grabbed it by now, but we had taken his car to drive all the way to London.
First reason: if we did the test in the UKMT head office, they would ask us where to send the medals to if we would get it. I could mark it for my school then, but the biggest reason I was here was because the day just seemed to land on the same day as an audition that was taking place in the West End.
WEST END! I had heard this scoop of news from when Mr. Ross was at my school, and he had chattered on with Mrs. Moss about the theatre world. Namely, there was a really big-name production of Dr. Dolittle happening in London. It was a play about a veterinary doctor who could communicate with animals. Then later on I saw on TV that the casting call was out, and pundit versions of entertainment TV debated who would play whom. Julie Andrews was rumored to play someone, and people were confused about which role she would be doing. Pundits then talked about other minor roles, at which time I found out that there was a small ten-year-old boy they were looking for. The news had motivated me to a point where I pestered my mum for weeks on end. The original Mary Poppins was in this play! and I had a role that I could audition for.
I had marked down the details and wore down my mum until she accepted. She had changed her tune when she found out that the UKMT date coincided with the audition.
"It's fate, I'm telling ya, Mum."
I didn't think it was fate, but my mum was weirdly superstitious, and I would be a poor son if I didn't use it to my advantage at times.
The UKMT head office was in a rough spot with packed-up tables and desks. When Mum asked if they were in the right place, the lady at the front told us that the office was moving to Leeds. UKMT, as it turns out, is a charity, and the cost of operating in London's had only increased with time. The intermediate test was considerably harder than the junior version due to the concepts of algebra and geometry featuring more. But it was easier in some ways for me because there were no more stupid questions like how many lines of symmetry were in a given word. I understood the reason because those sorts of problems promoted creativity and imagining a three-dimensional object in your brain. The hardest thing in the test were the brute-force questions that made you try every number until it fit the logical puzzle. These were seemingly only meant to take up time because we only had 60 minutes.
I briefly wondered if my past version had been a genius or if it was just a side effect of the memory thing. Who's to say that if my mum was transported back in time, she wouldn't be able to do the same things I did simply because she was older in a child's body and had already learned all the things and had the patience to train them more? I almost wanted to test if I was actually smart or not by doing the senior challenge test, but it would be tough to convince my teacher that I could do trigonometry, imaginary maths, advanced Euclid geometry, combinatorics, and number theory without being taught it if I ended up doing well on that paper. It sometimes felt like I was cheating when I used theorems that would only be taught in the final years of my education to solve these quicker at a lower level.
People at UKMT were nice and seemed to like me because I was much too small to be taking the intermediate test, but they were professionals through and through. Once I handed the paper out and filled in the address for my school, I left to find my mum, who was reading my copy of the Harry Potter book.
"Mum, I'm finished," I called out to her, and she reluctantly tore her eyes away from the book. She seemed to have freshened up after driving for too long.
"Good, next stop, West End," she said excitedly. I also showed my excitement by doing a little jig and hugging my loving mother who had sacrificed a Saturday for her son.
•✦—✦•
February 7th, West Croydon Baptist Church, South London, England
Mum and I parked our car on the street and looked around the hillside street. West End, it was not. Turns out that rehearsals actually happened at a studio space to save down on costs. It made sense because many theatres in West End were currently showing plays, and none of them were called Doctor Dolittle. So instead, we were in South London near a gorgeous church in storied brick and limestone. The two-story building was the location of my very first audition, as I refused to count Mrs. Moss choosing us — that was more her wanting to cast someone than me wanting to be cast.
I had asked Henry to join me in the audition, but he had reluctantly refused and wouldn't elaborate on it. I briefly wondered what it was as I looked at the church, wishing he was here.
"How do we even get in there?" Mum asked.
She had a point; the parking space was right there on a lower ground than the uphill we were driving, and from our side, there was no entrance to it.
"From the rear?" I asked in answer.
She drove around the block until we found a road that went between buildings and into the parking lot.
The church looked like how I imagined Gringotts Bank in Harry Potter, but the back expanded into an "L" shape that enveloped the parking space. Mum and I exited and walked up the stairs to join the front of the building. There were already dozens of people that haunted the place while they practised their lines.
"That's a lot of people," I muttered as I looked at rows upon rows of people.
"It's a big deal to be in a West End play." Mum stroked my hair and gently pulled me along to the church.
The blue double doors of the church opened to chaos; spiral staircases hugged the wall immediately to my sides. There were two tables set against the wall that separated the main hall from the entrance. A lady with curly hair and head-to-toe denim was seated next to a man in a bright orange crewneck jumper, and both were sweating, which I doubted had anything to do with the temperature outside.
"Hello!" The denim lady shifted from sagging to nimrod straight, and a bubbly smile that looked unnatural. "What are your names and who's auditioning?" she asked with a bit of a baby voice added in the end, just for me. I hated being a child.
"Wilfred Price, here to audition for Tommy."
"Great! How old are you?"
"Eight and a half."
"Sorry, I mean to say — date of birth?"
"26th of June, 1989."
"Have you performed in any shows for more than three days in a row?"
I looked at Mum, then shook my head. Mum cut in quickly to explain:
"He's been in a school play of Oliver! as Oliver. But it was only one day of show with a month of rehearsals."
"Brilliant," she said as she wrote a number on a piece of paper. "You're 329. Come up when your number gets called. Don't worry, lady," she said at my mum's expression, "children will jump the queue — don't want them all tired for their big moment."
"Oh, thank you." Mum smiled at her.
"Go prepare your song, alright?" Denim lady finished before sagging on her seat again.
"That was something," I told my mum as we exited the church.
"There's a ton of people here, bless her soul."
We joined the loose crowd outside, and I did some vocal exercises but didn't really practice with so many people around. I had a choice of a song from a list, but the casting notice had said that the director would ask for their own songs or exercises as part of the auditioning process.
Being completely honest, I was not worried at all for the audition and instead was stoked about the whole thing. That all started to change as I stood waiting with the crowd of nervous people. If I looked left, I saw a young woman in cheap and gaudy clothes with bright eyes, and when I looked right, I saw a man who was chewing on his nails nervously. The play had six main roles open for consideration because Doctor Dolittle himself was already cast, and the animals on stage would be chosen from people auditioning for other roles. The result of all this was that I was looking at largely the same group of people. Women were all in their early twenties and pretty because they wanted to play Emma Fairfax, the love interest, so they all looked similar. Only the men were in any kind of varying age and shape, as Tommy could be played by children between eight and twelve, while adults could audition for the showman if they were chubby, the fisherman if they were handsome or youthful, and the General if they were old.
I was the 329th person to want to audition on just this day alone. There would be hundreds of people whose dreams would be shattered soon. When I watched football on Boxing Day, the announcer had said that "it's the hope that kills you" when referring to a Rod Thomas goal in the dying minutes. I had come to London like Hull City had come to Chester, and so close to the finish line I started to worry. My father had told me a line that I wouldn't forget in my life, and it cheered me up as I saw the hopeful eyes of the crowd around me.
"It's the Englishman's duty to suffer. Me Granda' called it the stiff upper lip. Remember that, boy, that's all you can show to all," Father had said.
I noticed my lips had pursed tight as I studied the crowd.
•✦—✦•
It took only two hours of waiting out in the sun for us to be let in along with a dozen other children, mostly a year or two older than me. By this time I was a nervous wreck, as were the kids by my side. We were brought up into the main hall of the church, where two men and a woman were seated at a table while a grand piano was near a corner.
"Welcome to the audition for Tommy Stubbins. I'm Anne Vosser, casting director. He is Leslie Bricusse, writer, and Mike Dixon is the musical director, along with Michael England over there on the piano," Anne introduced everyone in a tone that didn't expect an answer from us children nor her fellow adults.
"Please join Michael next to the piano on those marks you see on the floor. Make a nice circle. Just like that," Anne directed us.
Michael was a balding man with a goatee in his thirties, but as he smiled at the children, he looked like a man in his early twenties.
"Okay! Let's do some vocal practices — sing along with me," Michael said as he played his piano in solfege scale, a simple exercise that everyone would know as the "Do-Re-Mi."
Mum was at the entrance of the main hall along with other nervous parents. When our eyes met she gave me an encouraging smile. I nodded at her before singing the exercise by following the root note. Michael nodded and smiled while encouraging us and changing his scales until he stopped giving notations by singing first, which made the kids use their ears to see where they were.
When the root note, which in this case was an E minor, came, we had to sing it back on the second repetition with the correct musical syllable. Three kids dropped out by singing wrong notes, and I knew they had lost their chance; you may not need to be able to sing in musical theatre, but you certainly needed to have an ear that could differentiate tones.
"Awesome, okay, now let's move on to hitting some notes. Sing after me, la," Michael sang while playing a note. On another beat, he repeated it.
We sang the notes as Michael had done in the same register. "Okay, la's and le's only. Go!"
He then played note after note that we did our best to match. My musical revelation had given me memories of musical notations, and I had trained my ear well in all my musical lessons with Mrs. Moss. Despite all that, there were many notes I just couldn't hit, but I still gave it my best shot. Vocal ranges were still a limitation, even if I had knowledge from the past.
"Great job, everyone, give yourselves applause!" Michael smiled at us and clapped along as we did.
"Let's read a few lines for a monologue. Just some quick stuff," Anne said.
"Alright, let's start with you, John. Read me this line right there," she handed a script to the John kid. "Your character is reluctant — he really doesn't want to hurt the animal. You will grow angry by the end of the exchange and scream this final line, okay?"
John kid nodded in reply, and when Anne started her line, the boy actually clammed up completely, his tongue tied.
Anne ruffled the boy's hair. "Calm down, I know it's scary, but we are just trying to have a good time — fun for everyone, right? You can't mess up; you got this!" Anne encouraged the boy until John nodded and cleared his throat.
"How about we all take a seat? Join me on the floor, everyone," Anne gestured until we sat down on the ground.
"Okay, let's start, John."
The next few minutes went by in a blur, every single line delivered by the boys until it finally came to me.
"This part, I want you to be upbeat. Your dream for the longest time was to sail the blue seas by ship. You are looking from the prow of the ship as you depart the land. Here are your lines." Anne handed me a sheet.
I read the lines and nodded, standing up to start my scene.
"I've always wanted to sail to China," I said in an excited tone. I had my eyes wide and my body wide and limbs loose while I tried to stand on my toes to look around. "I've heard there are whales and sharks, seals and fish. Will we really find the snail?" I finished with some awkwardness and doubt.
"Good job. Since you were the last, we'll go round again. Let me get that," Anne said as she took my sheet, handing in another. "This one: you have a duck who's had its wing injured. You don't know the Doctor, so you are surprised, but you've heard that he can heal animals."
Anne handed me a football from a basket that was nearby; she had handed in a few props before to other kids. This one I took carefully, acting as if I really had a duck in my hands. I held the ball from its middle while making my arm close on my chest so I could use the most surface area. My other hand held it from the top, and I walked slowly to my mark.
"Hello, Stubbins," Anne said.
"How do you do, sir," I added an extra line.
"He's brought a patient for you," one of the casting guys said; I thought his name was Leslie.
"It's a drake," Anne said curiously.
"It's a duck, sir," I said while jerking away my ball from Anne in a protective gesture.
"You're sopping wet, too."
I shifted my leg before looking away briefly, then held my gaze with some bravery at Anne.
"Yes, sir. It's raining," I said a bit more sharply.
I then acted shocked when my ball suddenly shook from me secretly flexing. Which applied pressure on it, making it pop out briefly before landing back again in my arms. I said, almost too softly, "He's hurt his wing."
"Yeah, so he's been telling me," Anne said with a knowing smile.
I tried to flush red, but I was completely sure I failed and instead just looked consternated.
"Oh," I said, looking down.
"Great! Good job, Will. Now let's try this one for you, Dean," Anne continued as if nothing had happened.
For a moment, I felt like I had tapped into the well of acting that I didn't have before and really transformed that small scene, but it didn't seem like the casting people had any reaction. The kids were all impressive, but I really felt like I had done the best out of them — until the dance audition started. Mike Dixon, a choreographer, brought us next to a wide mirror and did some dance moves that we had to copy. My hope had died by the end of it; I had bombed out of the dance part. When I did Oliver, none of the dances were as complicated as what Mike Dixon was doing in front of me. There were parts in which I stumbled, and even one time I fell completely. The only thing I could do was not give up and try harder, which resulted in me looking dumb. For some reason, I started to blame Mike Dixon because it would make a lot more sense if he put on music or did some counts. Music was sort of my thing, and I could keep a beat — that element would've helped me! But before I could get more frustrated with my poor dancing, it all ended.
"Thank you all for coming, please leave the area for the next audition. We'll contact you if you are selected. See that hall? follow it to the back of the building; we have refreshments out." Annie said with a bright smile. Her smile seemed to me be mocking me, laughing at me.
Mum joined me by my side, as did the other parents who had clapped, but my ears were ringing.
"Mum, let's go," I told my mum, tears welling up in my eyes.