Summer 1981. Beatlemania was in full swing. Wait, you say, didn't that happen about twenty years earlier? Well, yes, the real Beatlemania hit the North American shores in 1964 and drove legions of girls to hysterical fits for a couple of years. But the musical stage show, a tribute to the Fab Four, originally a Broadway production, went on tour from 1979 to 1984. And I caught a show midway through this amazing condensed recreation of the careers of the lads from Liverpool.
I was seventeen years old at the time, and though I'd travelled to The Big Smoke - AKA Toronto, Canada - a few times with family and friends, this was my first solo trip from small town (more like small city, with a population back then of about 21,000) to massive metropolis. It was a little intimidating taking to the streets of Cabbage Town (so many nicknames for T.O. - oops, there's another one) by myself, but I had a general idea of the layout of the downtown core. The streets are nicely laid out in a grid pattern so that it's hard to lose your bearings and get lost. Or at least get lost for very long. I think I did a little confused zig-zagging that day as I tried to locate the O'Keefe Centre but it all worked out in the end. And once inside the venue, all worries dissipated.
My friends in early high school weren't sophisticated enough to know anything about the legendary Beatles, who called it quits in 1970, when I was still playing with trucks in the sandbox. No clue about music back then. Anyway, I only knew one person at that time who would have enjoyed Beatlemania as much as me, and he wasn't even available that day. Ah, crumb!
So intrepidly I ventured out from the backwoods into the seething city streets. It was all pretty exciting, nervousness aside. And then the adrenaline surged again when the curtain went up on that special evening, and the sights and sounds of the 60's washed over me for a couple of hours. The musicians onstage struck similar enough appearances to the real Beatles that I really felt like I was in the presence of rock'n'roll royalty. The passing of time and the growth of the group was aided by frequent costume changes. From the skinny suits and mop tops to beards and bell-bottoms, all of the phases of the Beatles' career were brought to life once again. Images from that magical mystery decade were projected behind the band, loaning context to the music through establishing shots and funky graphics of major social, political, cultural, and economic events of that era. Anything newsworthy - it was tied into the performance to create the ultimate multimedia show.
My Beatlemania T-shirt is long gone, but the souvenir program lives on (pictured below).
From She Loves You to Let It Be, the vast catalogue of influential Beatles hits transported me to another time and another place. It was a little sad when the show finished. I felt like it could have gone on for hours more, working through the dozens more songs that changed a generation.
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