Where does magic start?

It started for me in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where I was born.

I was a rat who got killed.

It was a local production of Dick Whittington, the classic pantomime. My father was an amateur thespian, and when I was old enough to join in, that's what I did.

Dead and dragged unceremoniously off the stage.

But the lights, the makeup, the songs...

I loved it.

That's where the first magic started.

Ten years later, I was onstage in a school play in Melbourne. It was an original production written by two members of staff—a music teacher and a maths teacher.

I couldn't believe that they had written those songs—great songs, at least as far as I was concerned—and that there I was, standing on a stage singing them in the chorus.

Wouldn't it be amazing to actually do that? I thought.

Then I promptly forgot about it and got more and more buried in books.

I did a few more school musicals, but those original shows really got to me. I can still sing some of the songs.

Many years later, I'm on a Zoom call with Shawn Mahler, producer of the Nagoya Players Junior shows.

He's telling me about the next production, based on one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, “The Cat that Walked by Himself.”

One of the songs they want is about the cat.

Obviously.

But the other one is about the First Magic.

Huh?

First Magic?

That's odd.

But kind of cool.

What does the First Magic mean to me?

I had no idea.

But I liked the idea.

And then I found myself going back to the entire reason I started doing these shows.

I wanted kids to experience magic.

The kind of magic I'd experienced performing onstage: struggling sometimes under the lights, missing a cue, getting something wrong—but still being completely absorbed by it and loving it.

And then the hours, the days, the weeks after a show has finished, when you walk around singing that song that simply will not get out of your head.

You're completely hooked.

You want more.

That's what I wanted for the performers. I wanted them—or even just one of them—to feel that First Magic, even if they'd experienced it before.

So I started thinking about what that might sound like.

I wanted something delicate and lilting, but also dramatic and ultimately uplifting. Something that would start small and gradually open up, giving the performers somewhere to go with it.

I wanted it to be a slow burn, something rumbling deep inside that would eventually give the performer permission to soar.

I put a lot of myself into that song.

Listening to the demo now, though, there's something missing.

Them.

I wish we'd made a cast recording.

Seeing “The First Magic” performed onstage, watching the performers make it theirs, was exactly what I'd hoped for when I started writing music for these shows.

The lights, the songs, the missed cues, the excitement—and afterwards, that song that just won't get out of your head.

You're hooked.

You want more.

That's the First Magic.