To Love Another Person....

In 1985 the musical Les Miserables rather tentatively transferred from the RSC to The Palace Theatre.

My friend Frances Ruffelle and I excitedly went out and bought matching dressing room towels and headed towards the theatre where we met our new crew. 

Les Mis is the first musical to never have a blackout and so the crew became part of us, coming on in costume to whisk off barrels, tables and props.

There was one young man with lots of floppy blonde Duran Duran hair and beautiful blue eyes. 

An incorrigible flirt,  he charmed us all. 

Alex Bremer was only 18 and I had a boyfriend but I loved his easy charm and public school manners.

 

When you share an defining experience like opening Les Mis, it somehow connects you for life. 

Alex remained on the crew for many years. He met his beautiful and elegant wife Miriam,  a dancer,  when she was working front of house.

  I saw him over the years at various gigs. He and his brother Jack, who had also joined the Les Mis crew (advised by Alex that theatre was a great place to meet women) had set up 3B, a web design company. 

They ran and host my website. Alex and Mim adopted a kitten off me.  We Facebooked and tweeted, staying connected.

When Les Mis celebrated its 25th anniversary with a big concert at the O2, I asked Alex to have my plus one ticket. I couldn't think of anyone I wanted to share the evening with more.

 I'd pore over their perfect family photos on Facebook. Two beautiful children, a perfect blonde family, so full of life and energy with an appetite for fun I envied and loved to see. 

I "liked" photos of George and Lizzy,  writing words like "bunny", "edible" and "angel" under them.

It looked like the Bremer's had everything.

Then in February, I got an email from Alex. 

Lizzy had been diagnosed with Neuroblastoma.  A rare aggressive cancer.

I was singing up near the Arctic circle.  Everything was covered with ice, glittering and beautiful. At night I saw the Northern Lights.  I ran out to a shop in -45 degrees, wanting to do something. I bought a little toy seal, sent it off. 

10 days ago Alex and Mim brought Lizzy  home from hospital.  

She died two days after her second birthday.

Showing huge bravery and staying strong for George, a few days later they accompanied Frances and I to the Hyde Park Festival to see Frances' daughter, pop star Eliza Doolittle singing.

George had been primed for the occasion, watching YouTube clips of Eliza doing her thing. 

After the show we took him backstage to see her. He hid behind his mother, overwhelmed by his first crush. He kept saying he wanted to see her and when Frances duly got her,  he struck this pose... 

Pretty much what his dad did when he met Frances and I back in 1985...

 It made us all roar with laughter and we had a brilliant day out.

Today with great dignity, courage and grace, the Bremer's laid Lizzy to rest.

Frances had visited Alex and Lizzy in hospital on Lizzy's birthday 

and he'd said to her "you know, when you go through something like this, you realise nothing really matters"

 

And he's right.

In the end, all we have, is love.

I think whether you believe in a God or not, that's what Victor Hugo meant.

"To love another person is to see the face of God" 

Miriam Bremer is running marathons for the fight against Neuroblastoma.

https://www.justgiving.com/miriam-bremer1/

This year the Les Mis V Phantom charity football match is in Lizzy's honour and funds are being raised for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. 

http://www.lesmisvphantom.co.uk/

@rebeccacaine  16 July, 2013 

The blog what I wrote...

Phantom faces at the window, phantom faces at the door. 

And on sides of buses, in newspapers, on Social media, everywhere I look. 

It's an extraordinary feeling. I'm haunted by a job I did a lifetime ago. A job that for years I forgot about. The poster which featured the younger version of my character that became as I walked by it in the street, just another advertisement. 

I'd grown up wanting to be an opera singer but having been chucked out of the Guildhall for reasons i now forget, I was lucky enough to enough to land on my feet and almost immediately find work in musicals. 

I'd already played Laurey in Oklahoma! and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady for a young producer named Cameron Mackintosh but I'd been told I must take opera seriously so now I was knuckling down to my chorus/understudy year at Glyndebourne Opera.

I found myself during a chorus improvisation on all fours pretending to be a dog for the man who was directing Mozart's opera Idomeneo, I thought it was just another day at the office, not a day that would change my life forever. 

Something about my moving portrayal of Tintin's dog Snowy must have struck a chord because that afternoon during a stage rehearsal when the chorus was broken for lunch an arm snaked round my shoulder. 

I had been Trevved. 

I'm doing a new musical, said Mr Nunn. I stuttered something about being an opera singer now but the next thing I knew I was walking into a rehearsal room at the Barbican.

And so the experience began. Les Miserables was born.

We watched initially as we were cloned around the world. As people wore wigs of our hair colour, did the moves and notes we had improvised and brought their own gifts to our roles and built on our foundations. 

Then it faded into the backgrounds as we got on with our lives, the only reminder apart from posters on the tube, was my friendship with my fellow ingenue, Frances Ruffelle as we lived through the arrival of children, of divorce, death, of all that life threw at us.

Meanwhile back at the theatre, other Cosettes and Eponines bonded for life, repeating our patterns yet again. 

I'd pass the theatre occasionally and think of the revolve spinning around and around and the actors, like ghosts of us frozen in time, still young. 

25 years after we opened, the original cast walked together onto the stage of the O2 for the anniversary concert. As we stepped up to mikes to sing, the expression on the faces of the audience were something none of us will ever forget. 

And now? Now The Glums have become the Glams. The movie is here. 

The excitement and the love for Les Miserables is extraordinary to watch. The sense of ownership and passion for the show is astounding. 

I'm so proud of the original company. 

What we did can never be taken from us. 

To make something that means so much to so many is a gift that few are given and I for one, am very grateful and humbled by it all. 

Back to the land of my birth

Back to the land of my birth.
I'm flying to Canada today for the third time since last May.
Last time was for recitals with my accompanist, Robert Kortgaard, this time I'm singing with Michael Burgess whom among other things, originated the role of Jean Valjean in Canada.

I always feel reflective on planes. As if the very act of being off the planet takes you out of your own life and landing is a fresh start.

I've lost count off the times I've crossed the Atlantic.
I was born in Toronto to an Australian academic father and a British mother from an academic family, who had left Britain for Sri Lanka and India as a young teen after the war.
Later when I was three we moved down to the US, first Baltimore and then Princeton, where my parents stayed.

I kept my Canadian passport and at the age of 17 I went to the Guildhall School of Music and shortly after began to sing professionally in the UK.
I always had a slight accent from somewhere else, wherever I was, although I feel as if I come from England, The US and Canada - not just one place. People always want to pin down what you are.
"Where were you raised?" -they say.

My father's grandmother had in fact emigrated from the Maritime province of New Brunswick all the way around the planet to Australia and so my roots in Canada go back nearly 270 years.
One ancestor arrived in Boston as an indentured servant in 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London. There are court records of him because he ran away from his master. Interestingly, he was able to sign court documents while his owner was illiterate.


Later, as family took different sides in the War of Independence and fought against each other, the Empire Loyalists moved up to New Brunswick.
An ancestor was charged with murdering someone in a runaway cart incident and another was kidnapped by Indians and scalped.

The family became a fierce dynasty of lumberjacks.
One, "Main John"Glasier, even led a militia of woodsmen armed with axes down into the US to "dissuade"the Americans from damming the river.
He became a senator and there is a song written for him, Glasier's Men.


Last autumn, when touring with Robert, a distant cousin came to a concert and presented me with a
family tree and a map, on which was marked the old family house.
It's dated from 1800. The previous one had been burnt down by Indians.
The family graveyard, the cousin said, was difficult to find, being in a wood.
We had found the house easily enough, utterly unchanged from the photos of it 100 years ago that I'd found.
I stood staring at it as the river rushed past, imagining my forefather's building it and living their tough hardscrabble lives. Peering in the windows it reminded me a bit of Cold Comfort Farm.
It seemed unchanged inside. The yard was full of mad looking barn cats and the locals told us the place had recently been in the news for producing heifer triplets. A long way from my London life.

Looking up, I saw a beautiful raptor, a bald eagle carrying a huge branch.
I was determined to find the family graveyard and standing in a field facing the forest I took a deep breath, hoping somehow the ancestors would make sure I found it, having come so far and suddenly through the pines, I glimpsed an old moss covered gravestone.
I wandered from stone to stone stopping in front of my great, great, great, great, great grandfather Benjamin's grave.
What would he have thought of me being there hundred of years later?
Probably appalled that I was a theatrical singing loose woman of the stage who was slightly worried about being late for her concert that night!
I wish I could have stayed longer but time and the half wait for no soprano.

Apart from holidays in Muskoka, the first time I really went back to Canada was with a touring production of My Fair Lady in the early 80's.
I then returned to live there for nearly three years from 1989 when I sang Christine Daae in the Canadian premiere of The Phantom of the Opera.

It was an extraordinary time. I'd had a very unhappy time in Phantom in London and had left before the end of my contract so I rather felt I was riding the horse that threw me.
In many ways it was a good experience, mostly because I was able during the run, to make my North American operatic debut in the title role of Lulu at the Canadian Opera Company. Lulu took me a year to learn and kept my mind sharp while upping my vocal chops.

Canada has always been immensely kind and generous to me.
I did feel I was brought back as a faux Canadian to star in Phantom and that there must have been many Canadian women who could have done as good a job or better than me in the role.
Likewise when I moved to the opera company and though while there must of been some bitching, it never once got back to me.
Which speaks volumes particularly as then and even more now, Canadians have very little opportunity to take leads in big musical productions.
Canadian and American producers were loathe to cast Canadians straight out for some reason and there was always an assumption that anything that came from outside the country would automatically be better despite the country's long and rich theatrical history.

I owe Canada a great deal and am grateful for the kindness, help and generosity I receive there.
So I'm on my way back (I nearly wrote home) for three weeks to sing in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the North West Territories and I'm really looking forward it.
Michael is a big name in Canada and interest in Les Miserables in which I created the role of Cosette in London, is at an all time high because of the new film so people love to hear us sing from it and Phantom.
I'll have to up my form singing I Dreamed a Dream after seeing Anne Hathaway 's excoriating interpretation.
Perhaps letting an audience member extract a tooth after each rendition as a delightful take home keepsake will help.