A Musical Alphabet

CLOGS have been steadily increasing the size, complexity and probably unconsciously the standard of their Summer Charity fund-raising Concerts in recent years and ‘A Musical Alphabet’ was another excellent step along this journey. This summer, this was across two weekends and two venues in Chippenham – St Andrew’s Church and the Town Hall. I attended on the opening night at St Andrew’s Church.

The link for the concert this year was ‘A Musical Alphabet’, impressively compiled and set by Creative Director Debi Weaver. It started with a show beginning with the letter ‘A’ (‘Anything Goes’ in this case), before progressing through the alphabet and finishing with ‘Zombie Prom’ for ‘Z’ at the end. ‘X’ was from ‘Xanadu’ as a point of note! There is always the temptation with a fixed structure like this to try to cover too much and make the show over-long, but CLOGS did not fall into this trap. The show whipped along at an excellent pace, mixing well-known songs with plenty of new ones, covering 31 items and mixing full company numbers with solos, duets and some lively turns from the Society’s youth section – ‘The Clogettes’.

The standard of performance was very high from the whole group of 38 performers, showing the real depth of talent in the Society. We saw musical comedy in the ‘Stepsisters’ Lament’ from ‘Cinderella’ and a company rendition of ‘When the Foreman Bares His Steel’ from ‘The Pirates of Penzance’.  We had great performance energy from the Clogettes with ‘When Will My Life Begin’ from ‘Tangled’, followed by an impressive performance of ‘Les Jazz Hot’ from ‘Victor / Victoria’ from the adult group dancers. We also heard many great vocal solos from a huge range of Society members. It was the Company number singing harmonies were particularly impressive for me - ‘For Now’ from ‘Avenue Q’ and ‘One Voice’ as a Finale were most memorable, though the standard was so high across the board, I must apologise for not mentioning everyone.  Well done to Musical Director Peter French in getting this learnt so well and in a short period of time and for the impressive support given by the Musicians on the evening on Piano, Drums and Bass.

Thank you CLOGS for a wonderful evening’s entertainment and raising funds for those worthy causes. Well done too for the good audience turn-out, which was particularly impressive in the face of tough competition from a key match at Wimbledon on at the same time!

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