You, like me, might be ever so slightly allergic to musicals. You might have to leave a room if someone starts singing songs from Cats. You might need to put the phone down on a friend when she asks if you fancy seeing a touring company perform 42nd Street in your local hall. You might need instantly to delete someone from your Sim card once you’ve noticed they own, and indeed use, a Chorus Line bookmark.
Your worst night out might be a ferociously expensive West End ticket to watch people sing, dance and twirl, followed by an overpriced reheated pizza. I get it. I’m with you. I don’t like the noise either, or the juxtaposition between a simple chat about waiting for a bus and then the full-throttle angry, heightened singing about it. It’s a shock, a nerve-racking moment. In Chicago, they’re in a courtroom and on death row, for God’s sake. Singing. In leotards.
Hello, Dolly? I don’t think so, love. Cheerio, bye-bye, night-night. I’m off next door to watch a theatre production that doesn’t involve being spat at, where the whole thing isn’t about the power of song and the amount of spittle that can be chucked willy-nilly onto the people in rows A, B and C. Maybe you once went on a date with a boy, and he quietly explained he’d seen Phantom of the Opera more than 30 times, and you quickly had to say you’d left the Breville on and should probably leave.
Maybe, hand on heart, you think that the hills aren’t alive with the sound of music, but that they’re just, you know, hills. Maybe you have left your dad on his own near the Tube station because he insisted on singing in the rain and twirling himself round the nearest lamppost, instead of grabbing a newspaper to put over his head when the shower hit.
So yes, I fully understand all the above. I’d argue that Matilda and Groundhog Day, composed by Tim Minchin, are masterpieces. I’d beg you to watch Cabaret again, and Les Mis makes me slightly wobbly — but I can also sympathise. Yet even if musical theatre would not be your chosen subject on Mastermind, there is a fashion item and a musical “moment”, if you will, that has happened to us all and makes these boots an immediate must-have purchase in preparation for autumn.
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That moment is Oom Pah Pah in Oliver! If you don’t remember it, let me fill in the details: boy is hungry, boy runs away, boy meets dodgy boy and then meets magical Nancy, who is soft-hearted and funny and so full of life, it makes your eyes water. She sings and dances with total gusto. She’s in a relationship with a horror and is in Fagin’s gang. She spends the movie clothed in a deep red dress (think Westwood) and almost these exact boots. She has a fringe (tick) and the greatest voice. Even if you didn’t want to watch Oliver! on your aunt’s sofa on Christmas Eve every year, even if you complained, “Not the one about the kid who’s in an orphanage but is actually really rich,” even if you didn’t like the other songs, then this would have still been a thing, a crystallisation. By the time she has managed to get the whole place roaring or crying (As Long as He Needs Me is outstanding), you’ll want her vim, her spirit, her love.
And also — let’s remember this is a fashion column here — her boots. Thankfully, the humans at Saint Laurent have the same idea. Buy this footwear, stick it in the cupboard until October, and know that you’re carrying a little bit of her punch, her vitality, her heart, through all of winter 2017. So hum, “There’s a little ditty they’re singing in the city,” and walk forth.
