A souvenir of the first song and dance
View(s):These are the things Rehan Almeida will remember best: walking into auditions for ‘Evita’ knowing two songs but convinced he couldn’t sing or dance; being told he would play Che because he could in fact sing and dance, the pause at the end of the ‘Money Kept Rolling In’ and the rush of returning music that ended it, waltzing with Evita in his arms, having a line rewarded by an appreciative ripple of laughter in a packed hall.
Add to the list a standing ovation or two and a whole coterie of wonderful new friends, and you know why Rehan is glad to have starred in ‘Evita’. “It’s something I never, ever, ever thought I could do,” he confesses.
A ‘limited edition souvenir’ from the show, created especially by a dear friend for Rehan is going to help keep the memories alive. It’s the same souvenir that Rehan had his friends on the cast and crew sign – with a few small additions.
“It was craftily taken out of my room. The binding taken out and fresh binding done with quite a few pages added on,” says Rehan. Most of these pages are dedicated to photographs – they cover the time from rehearsals through to the final production, but stray outside that to include pictures of the cast trip to Koggala and the WASPS.
The latter, which the Workshop Players like to dub their response to the Oscars, is a black-tie event where the group honour their own. Rehan, who walked away with the Best Actor award that night, says he’ll remember it for the hilarity of the spoof awards and the various performances – one of which was an extract from Godspell, likely to be the Workshop Players’ next big production.
Also part of his new souvenir is a currency note from the scene ‘Money Kept Rolling In’, a piece of sheet music with lyrics, and the newspaper Che reads during the Rainbow Tour – dated 1945, it features an article about Pope John Paul II.
Further along are the pages that Rehan knows by heart – notes from his friends and family, with a few strangers thrown in for good measure. His parents share their pride in him and his grandmother says she knows his seeya would have been proud of him; his mentors at the Workshop Players – people like Jerome L. de Silva, Surein De S. Wijeyratne and Shanuki de Alwis – say encouraging things about his performance. Friends, and friends of friends, chime in. “It’s very touching and it’s very humbling, to think that people who cared, cared enough to write down this,” he says. Modest, almost to a fault, all this acclaim is more than Rehan ever dreamed off.
For the young actor, the Workshop Players’ production has been his biggest role to date. (He has previously appeared in plays for his school St. Joseph’s College and in productions by Jehan Aloysius and Jith Peiris.) “I can say that though this is the hardest role I’ve ever played, it’s also the most relaxed I’ve been on stage,” says Rehan, citing a lack of pressure and freedom to interpret his character how he chose to.
There was one time he would always feel a flutter of trepidation though – warming up with the cast before the show, Rehan says he never stopped being nervous about singing ‘Oh, What a Circus’ – the song demanded that he be in perfect form from the word go, but night after night, he pulled it off.
He found it easy to “live the role” and says that all the hours in his car spent singing the tracks from Evita helped drill the lyrics into his head. “It’s an unbelievable feeling to be a part of something like this – to be on stage, under the spotlight in an Andrew Lloyd Webber production,” he says. Now that he’s officially had a taste of Broadway, Rehan says he’s come away more confident – if nothing else, he is finally ready to admit he can sing and dance.
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