All Balls and Glitter (18 page)

Instead, the producers offered me the part of Admetus in the London production of
Cats.
It was only a dancing role and I wanted to sing as well, which was what I’d been doing for the last five weeks in Ireland as Munkustrap. So I said, ‘No, I’m not interested in that.’ My logic was that they would then maybe offer me
Les Mis.

What a cocky so-and-so! They did nothing of the sort.

It had been a bold move – but then again, I knew what I wanted. I always knew what was right for me. Consequently, I was never scared of taking risks.

Luckily, the producers came up with another offer, which was
Miss Saigon
– my very first West End show. Although I’d had my
sights set on
Les Mis
, the opportunity to join the cast of
Miss Saigon
was a gift. The show was in its first year, starring Jonathan Pryce and Lea Salonga, and it was huge. Everyone wanted to be in it, so it was actually better than joining a company that had been running for as long as
Les Mis
. I came into it through a sheer stroke of luck.

Jimmy Johnson, who is now quite famous in the theatre, had been cast as a singer and acrobatic dancer. When he left, they couldn’t fill his part with just one person. There was no one else who could be both a tenor vocalist and an acrobat. So, they employed Louis Spence, who is now a judge on
Cirque De Celebrité
, to do the acrobatics and they hired me to sing and dance as a G.I.

Miss Saigon
was seven months into its run when I became a member of the company in 1990. I’d seen the show when it opened and had totally fallen in love with it: I couldn’t believe my luck.

I didn’t have long to wait to prove myself. After two days of rehearsals, they were short of dancers in the big number at the end, which was the only part I’d learned by then. The dance captain, Tash O’Connor, had a hurried discussion with the associate choreographer, Maggie Goodwin, and said to me, ‘You’ve learned that number, haven’t you?’ Then he slung me on stage. Fortunately, I was a quick study and could pick up routines in a very brief period of time. After being a swing dancer in
Cats
, the
Miss
Saigon
‘American Dream’ number was a doddle.

Standing in the wings of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, about to perform on a West End stage for the first time, is a moment I will never forget. I stopped for a second to catch my breath. It was so big, it was amazing, but I could see the audience already enjoying the show, so I had no time to be nervous. All that was going through my head were the counts – 5, 6, 7, 8 …

Sadly, I can’t remember the actual performance. I was too busy counting to know what was going on around me. Usually, I
would have had more on my mind while I was dancing, but if you don’t know a routine terribly well, you have to concentrate on the count or you will slip up. After you have performed it a few times, your body goes into muscle memory. When I was in
Crazy for You
, later on in my career, I could come off stage at the end and not even know I’d done the show. My body would sing and dance at all the right times, out of repetition, but my mind could be entirely elsewhere. It’s rather dangerous and, at that point, it’s advisable to change jobs.

At the end of my first performance in
Miss Saigon
,
there were no fireworks or fanfares, just a quiet drink with the rest of the cast in the theatre bar. After all, they’d been doing the same thing every night for over half a year already.

Bizarrely enough, my wish to portray Munkustrap in the West End production of
Cats
was granted eventually
.
The show was on at the New London Theatre in Drury Lane; the Theatre Royal, where
Miss Saigon
was playing, backs on to Drury Lane. One evening, they’d run out of Munkustraps because they were all injured or sick, so the producer called me up and asked if I would go over the road and be a ‘cat’ for the night. It had been six months since I’d done it and it’s a very wordy part, but I went through it in my head and I thought I could remember it all.

Of course, I had forgotten that
Cats
in London was in the round (where the audience sits on all sides of the stage). I’d never done it that way before. On tour, it was a proscenium arch show, meaning the audience faces the stage. That first night in London, I was completely disorientated. I did a speedy run-through before the performance, but then I just had to go on, without any further preparation. I didn’t even meet the major cast members beforehand, so the first time I encountered Ria Jones, who was playing Grizabella, I was hissing at her on stage. Afterwards, I didn’t know who anyone was because I’d only seen them in their cat make-up.

The stage was on a moving revolve. As usual, Munkustrap was
supposed to be popping out of the boot for his big entrance, but I had no idea where the boot was. I was running around backstage, saying to any ‘cat’ I could find, ‘Where’s the boot? Where’s the boot? Where
is
the fucking boot?’ I had to crawl into it to be able to pop out of it.

I finally found it at the very last minute, only to discover that it was a lot smaller than the one we’d used on tour. As I came out of it, I scraped the skin off my back and then had to jump out, walk forward and sing the opening line of the show. Luckily, I didn’t feel a thing as I was on a major adrenalin rush, trying to zone back into the role I’d performed six months earlier. It was exhilarating not knowing anyone and just winging it.

The rest of the cast couldn’t believe I’d simply walked in and done it. They thought it was amazing because it was my first experience in the round. In London, Munkustrap doesn’t dance in ‘The Jellicle Ball’, which is the seventeen-minute high-energy finale of act one. Instead, he remains stationary on a rubber tyre at the back of the stage. However, on tour he’s included in the choreography, so I just did what I had always done. The dancers were all whispering to each other mid routine: ‘Munkustrap’s come off the tyre. What’s going on?’ It was hilarious, but I was like a cat on acid that night. I was so wired. I was thoroughly exhausted after the performance, from sheer nerves.

For a whole month, I was doing four shows a week in
Miss Saigon
and four in
Cats
. There can’t be many people who have been in two West End productions at once.

Most nights after the show, the
Miss Saigon
cast
ended up in PJ’s Bar and Grill, which is opposite the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. It’s a restaurant, but we would put the chairs and tables round the outside of the room and then get up and dance. Ruthie Henshall was often my partner in crime on those nights. She was in the chorus with me and danced opposite me in the ‘Dreamland’ sequence –
Miss Saigon
’s opening ensemble routine, which is a drug-, drink- and sex-fuelled scene set in a very smoky bar, in
which all the girls play prostitutes in bikinis. Ruthie and I used to get up to so much mischief together, on stage and off.

We were with a crowd in PJ’s one night when I commanded, ‘Come on, darling. White Cat Lift.’

That’s a move from
Cats
, where you lift the girl with straight arms and she does the splits at the top, upside down. So we abandoned our chairs, I bunged Ruthie up there and she did the splits – only to reveal that she wasn’t wearing any knickers, or so the present company told me. I could see nothing as her dress was well and truly over my face. There I was whirling her about, and she was doing the splits with her dress round her waist and no underwear. Everyone was screaming.

It was always an eventful evening in there. On one occasion, a lady from
The Woman in Black
,
which was playing at the Fortune Theatre round the corner, stood up on the bar and started swinging from the chandelier into the centre of the room. She loved a drink and she was great fun.

That company was insatiable, partly because it was the first year of a new show. Additionally, they were all a bit pissed off because they’d anticipated massive roles, but
Miss Saigon
is really a group piece. Everyone thought it would be like
Les Mis
, in which nearly all the performers get some really nice individual bits to do, but
Miss Saigon
has five leads and the rest is chorus. The cast were a talented bunch, but quite frustrated.

We were fortunate that the show wasn’t our only performance outlet. The cast were often asked to participate in various events for charity and publicity. One such task was to appear on
TV-am,
a breakfast programme that was popular in the eighties and early nineties.

Four of us were asked to take part in a live exercise class alongside the programme’s fitness expert, Lizzie Webb. We were commandeered to do it in our costumes, which for the lads meant our army get-up. It was my very first TV appearance in the UK: doing a Jane Fonda-style workout live at 7 a.m. in my
jungle greens, complete with army boots, dog tags, a pistol and a holster!

Lizzie led the routine and we followed her instruction to the music of the
Miss Saigon
song ‘Solo Saxophone’. We were trying not to laugh as we did this very serious exercise plan, yet – as professionals – we were also really nervous in case we went wrong. Lizzie was great. Funny as it may seem, it actually looked really good when we saw it back. It certainly goes down as one of the more bizarre experiences I’ve had, and I remember it fondly.

Recently, Lizzie came across the video of that particular episode and, because she’d seen me on
SCD
, she sent it to me, along with a note saying: ‘Remember this?’ Oh, it made me howl with laughter.

As well as marking my debut on the West End stage, and on UK TV,
Miss Saigon
allowed me to fulfil another lifelong ambition – meeting Joan Collins.

Joan was playing in
Private Lives
at the Aldwych Theatre at that time. Keith Burns, who had the role of Thuy in
Miss Saigon
, arranged for her to switch on our company’s ‘Christmas lights’. Before she arrived, we adorned our dressing rooms with festive decorations and had a competition to decide whose was the best. Of course, all the queens in the dancers’ dressing room won. It was a fantastic display, inspired by the opulent theme ‘excess’.

As Joan came up the stairs – followed by fifty of her closest friends – the trumpeter from the band, who was standing at the other end of the corridor, struck up the theme from
Dynasty.
It was brilliant.

She came in and flicked the switch, and we all cheered with glee. We couldn’t believe it. For me, it had always been a dream to meet her, and I wasn’t alone in my aspiration. The amount of people who were squeezed into that corridor on the third floor would put a rush-hour Tube to shame. The eighties had just ended and
Dynasty
was finished, but she still had this massive profile and had recently launched her own perfume.

I even got to speak to her. I said, ‘I’m one of your biggest fans.’ (Original, I know.) It was true: I had modelled Lavish on the
Dynasty
look and everything Joan was about. That night, all I could think was, ‘Oh my God! I’ve made it! I met Joan Collins!’

I managed to get hold of a round cardboard advertising sign promoting her new fragrance, which she signed for me. She wrote: ‘To the boys in 20 [that was our dressing-room number at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane], much love, Joan Collins xxx.’ I still have it at home. If you look very closely at the pictures in this book, you can just see it hanging up in the background of the photo of me at the Heartbreak Hotel.

Thus far, our paths have not crossed again, but I’m sure if death doesn’t beat me to it, they will. Thinking about it, Joan would make a magnificent
Strictly Come Dancing
contestant. Over to you, Ms Collins …

L
ife took a bizarre twist once I started
Miss Saigon
. I found myself falling for my flatmate, Jane. We’d been getting closer and closer since I first arrived in London, and now that my job was based in the big smoke rather than in random towns across the country, I was spending much more time with her. Gradually, our intimacy developed into a proper relationship.

Jane had in fact thought I was gay when we first met. That was because our mutual friend Clifford had told her, ‘There’s some drag queen coming over from Paris,’ as he’d only ever seen me in my Lavish get-up at Halloween. So she was expecting a garish queen to turn up on her doorstep, but she got me instead. I did have matching floral luggage – God only knows why – but that was the extent of it.

Shortly after I moved in with Jane
,
we had a fantastic holiday together on Lundy Island, just off the coast of north Devon. She and Cliff and a few others had hired the Lundy lighthouse from the Landmark Trust and they happened to have a spare ticket. I’d only just arrived in the country, and had no money at all, but I couldn’t resist.

Lundy Island was beautiful and I loved it. It was supposed to be a puffin sanctuary, but we didn’t see one bloody puffin all the time we were there. Just loads of seals.

The lighthouse is a gorgeous old building and the island is
tiny, so everything was within walking distance. There was nothing much there except for a few cottages and a public house with a little store attached, but we had a crazy time, partly because one of our group had brought some dope with them. We sprinkled it on to bread-and-butter pudding and totally overdid it. We were all off our faces at the local pub, and I started tripping out. I was awash with waves of paranoia, thinking that everybody was staring at me and talking about me. It was awful.

Another night, we threw a party at the top of the lighthouse and invited all the inhabitants of the island. We had Madonna and the Gipsy Kings blaring out and, from somewhere, a whip was produced. One female friend was topless and being whipped, and then Clifford was whipping himself. I’m not sure the islanders had ever been to a party like that before.

We spent two weeks there and the break really solidified my burgeoning friendship with Jane. The downside was that I hammered my Australian credit card and got into horrible debt – again.