“Well, around 60 years ago America was at war with a country called Vietnam. And the government didn’t have enough soldiers, so they made young men who didn’t want to be soldiers go to Vietnam to fight, and sadly lots of them died. And some people didn’t support the war, and certainly didn’t support men being forced to fight in it if they didn’t want to. And the way of showing they didn’t support it was for them to grow their hair really long. And that’s what the musical is about.”
Playing it back in my head, I wonder what my 2010 self, fresh from seeing the West End revival of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical with its full-frontal nudity and pointed political message, would make of this explanation. But when a curious eight-year-old demands to know what the song “Let the Sunshine In” is about, how else do you answer?
The “why” stage of childhood is surely the most magical: the years when every new interaction prompts a question, and the answers prompt more questions, forever and ever, to infinity and beyond. Watching my stepdaughters map out the contours of reality can be a humbling experience – maybe I don’t fully understand how electricity works, or why we see colours the way we do; I just never realised until I was asked.
Mostly, though, it’s exhilarating. A conversation on what makes plants alive digresses into a philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness. Explaining what the Budget is and why it matters becomes a bid to define what money actually is. We’ve done experiments on whether Jaffa Cakes should be classed as biscuits or cakes for tax purposes (including attempting to eat them with a fork), tried to wrap balls in paper to show the limits of 2D map projections and forayed into cryptography to the extent that apology messages
in our household are now written in code – or, as my husband will no doubt correct me, ciphers.
It’s enough to nudge you down a nostalgia spiral. My father can turn anything into an impromptu lesson – grains of rice doubling on chessboard squares to signify infinity, the banking system demonstrated by the analogy of umbrellas, linguistic misunderstandings regarding the Old Norse letter thorn. My sister used to accuse him of “filling my head with duffness”. I prefer the notion of “ambient education”, knowledge slipped in under the radar before you realise you’re learning in the first place.
But I don’t think my father ever tried to explain the world via the medium of musical theatre. That phenomenon is entirely my own. A West End obsessive, I have the radio tuned to Magic Musicals whenever I can. And when my stepdaughters want to know where the songs I’m humming come from, the history lessons begin.
It started with Hamilton, which prompted a quick overview of the American War of Independence and how England really felt about it. Since then, we’ve done the Paris mob and the barricades courtesy of Les Misérables, the Cold War via first Chess then Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the rise of the Nazis inspired by Cabaret, and the ingenuity of Britain’s Second World War efforts as told by Operation Mincemeat. Some have required a bit of hasty contextualising to make them age-appropriate, it’s true. But then I remember my mother taking me to Les Mis when I was nine, outlining the plot beforehand and describing the “Lovely Ladies” as “women who are paid by men who don’t have girlfriends to go out to dinner and the theatre with them so they don’t get lonely”. My only concern was who paid for the dinner and theatre tickets – a misunderstanding of prostitution that may have lasted a decade, but in no way spoiled my wonder at the show.
And so far, my dad’s insistence that small children can understand big concepts if you find a way to engage their imaginations has proved accurate. Hair is just the latest duffness chapter. Next up: The Sound of Music, Hairspray and Miss Saigon.
[See also: Poetry doesn’t only exist on the page]
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This article appears in the 12 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What He Can’t Say