Chichester’s CAOS Musical Productions offer perfect musical boost

They are offering a two-hour compilation concert performance entitled Walking On Sunshine – A Feel-Good Show on June 20 at 7.30pm.

CAOS spokesman Ryan Moss said: “It’s hopefully our last virtual concert. The idea behind it is that everyone has had an atrocious year. It has been an awful year so we just wanted to do an eclectic mix of feel-good songs and performance. It is a compilation film we have done. It won’t be live. We did toy with the idea of doing some of it live, and we have done a couple of live things in the past, but this just gives us more variety. It is a concert, and I will be compering.”

It will include covers of artists including Tina Turner, The Four Tops and Bonnie Tyler. CAOS will also be showcasing songs from the musicals including Dear Evan Hansen, Hairspray and Blues Brothers. The promise is something for everyone “complete with sparkling dance routines and fabulous vocals.”

“We have also included some comedy sketches and a little bit of dialogue to fit in between. We have got songs that I think everyone will have heard of, and we have also got some musical theatre as well because we are well aware that we are a musical theatre company. We have got a song called It Only Takes A Taste from the musical Waitress and we have got some numbers from a brand-new show that hasn’t hit the UK yet called The Prom. It was on Broadway before the pandemic hit and they have just turned it into a film on Netflix. Some of the songs are really good heart-felt numbers.”

As for the future, well, CAOS Musical Productions are definitely optimistic: “We had a meeting last night and planned all our shows through until the end of 2022. Calamity Jane is not going to happen and has had to be cancelled, but we are moving on towards doing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. It’s a great show. You have got to have three really great leads to be able to bat off each other, and that’s one of the reasons we are so keen to do it. It’s a good story and the music is great, but it also requires a lot of quite difficult acting which is what we want to push for. We are looking at October for doing the show. We don’t know where yet. It has been difficult for us to find performance venues. We are still looking. It is quite tricky.”

They have also got two book shows for next year, but possibly they might even try a play, a show with no music at all.

“It is something that I have personally pushed for. That’s what I trained in. I do musical theatre and I love it, but I do think doing a straight play would really bring out different things in people. It may well be that we discover that we have got some fantastic actors within our membership that we didn’t know about.”