No Rivals for Footloose, He Thought. Then the List Arrived.

A new student at UWC Maastricht had a plan. The school was putting on Footloose. He wanted the lead. And he reasoned that at a school where teenagers had come from every corner of the world to debate its future, hardly anyone would care about a musical, least of all the boys.

Then the audition list came out, and it was long.

The musical at UWC Maastricht, it emerged, was a tradition with a following. His expected lack of competition did not show up. He auditioned anyway.

He got the part.

I want to stop here and say that this is the single most reassuring story I have read about the teenage brain, because his plan was wrong in every detail and still worked. He misjudged the school, misjudged the boys, misjudged the size of the list, and was rewarded for it with the lead role.

My own children’s plans tend to be wrong in every detail and then fail. The middle one entered a school art competition in Madrid on the basis that “nobody does collage”. Forty-one people did collage. She came forty-second, out of forty-two, behind a boy who had glued a real fish to a canvas, and the fish was removed for health reasons before the judging.

The UWC student spent his first term in rehearsals, and somewhere in it the rivals on the list became his friends, which is how musicals have always worked and how none of us expect them to.

There is a lesson here for parents of teenagers. It is that you will never be told any of this at the time. You will be told “fine”, or that rehearsal has been moved, or that there is no lunch. You will learn the full arc of the term at the end of it, from a programme, standing in a foyer, holding a coat.

My husband says the lesson is simpler: always audition. He said this the night the middle one came forty-second, and she has never forgiven him either.

She auditioned for her school play this term, the first time in four years, expecting the part of “Tree 3”, and was cast as the lead. She is on the phone now, telling a friend.

The friend, she has just told me, also auditioned, and also got cast as the lead. It is a very short play with two leads. Rehearsals start Monday, and so, apparently, does the war.