She has played many parts - from the beautiful and fiery Anita, girlfriend of Bernard, in “West Side Story” to one of the queen felines, skittish Demeter in “Cats”. She acted, she sang and she danced to the tunes of many popular English musicals in her time and now years later Cuckoo Jayawardhana Mushin is looking to train people to make musicals and to empower them with the knowledge and experience that she garnered on stage playing and living different roles. “Musical theatre is a mix. It requires one to be well versed in acting, singing and dancing and that is what we will teach students at the institute,” Cuckoo explains.
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| In the good old days: Cuckoo (right) and Michelle Leembrugen |
The institute is her very own effort – the Accenxia Centre for Communication Training which she launched a few years ago after having taught Speech and Drama at the Wendy Whatmore Academy for 29 years.
She holds a licentiate in speech and drama from both the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and Trinity Guildhall, and traces her acting back to her schooldays when musicals were all the rage on the Colombo stage.
“My first stint in musical theatre was in 1975 when I acted in 'My Fair Lady'. It was an experience that couldn’t be explained in words. It is on this platform that I met people who became renowned names like Jerome De Silva, the late Richard De Zoysa, Steve de la Zilwa, Michelle Leembrugen, Ranmali Mirchandani and Peter de Almeida,” she recollects.
Later, she with others put on many musicals, dramas and street plays. “We were a bunch of people who never thought of remuneration or the pay while preparing and performing for play. We did it just for the love of drama. We sometimes used to rehearse till 1 or 2 in the morning. It was also a time when there was a dearth in sponsorship and this affected our costumes. But more than anything, what mattered was that we could perform,” she reminisces.
Bells of Bruges, Annie, Oklahoma, Sound of Music, Godspell, Little Shop of Horrors and Poppy are some of the other musicals that she was part of.
Coming back to the present day, she says children today suffer from lack of time- time to dream and to develop their creative side.
“In this ‘dog eat dog’ world, schools are competing with each other to enable their students to get top marks. They forget that children should be able to have time to stop and look around and dream. They should be able to hone their creative skills,” she says.
Through her school, Cuckoo aims to provide an opportunity for children to stage musicals without the help of a huge production team.
She has just begun classes for musical drama at the Accenxia Centre for Communication Training and says the aim of the institute is to broaden children’s creative abilities and their communication skills.
She believes that to teach musical drama, one should have experienced the thrill of performing on stage.
“The emotion one feels while performing is absolutely astounding. I feel that this is the qualification for teaching drama. One cannot give students theoretical classes about musical drama,” she says.
“I brought in drama into the realm of improving communication skills. Thus, my students don’t make or read out extracts but act out parts in drama to improve their communication techniques,” she says. |
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