All Balls and Glitter (22 page)

The choreography was the one aspect that was praised in most of the reviews, which endorsed Bob’s later triumph at the Olivier Awards.

As the producer, Cameron had already spent £3.5 million on the show, so he wasn’t prepared to let it fail. He decided to throw another £500,000 at it, and they rewrote, redirected and then closed for a week so that the cast could re-rehearse. Then they put it on again. It was a higher standard and a much better show. Consequently, it received a much warmer reception, but it still lasted only two years and never made it to Broadway.

Shirley MacLaine came to see the original production during its West End run. As the resident choreographer, I would entertain the VIPs in a special room in the theatre, so I was looking after her that night. At the interval, Shirley wanted a gin and tonic, but she was also desperate for some Twiglets. I dispatched one of the front-of-house staff to go out and buy her some. We guzzled two
gin and tonics and a bowl of Twiglets, and consumed it all sat in the stairwell because Shirley didn’t want to go into the VIP room. She said she was happy on the stairs, so we just sat there talking about the show.

She was really interested in the subtext and said to me, ‘Craig, I was wondering, is this a gay story? The two lead guys, the imposter and the real Martin, go to war together – are they having a relationship?’

I said, ‘They’re not meant to, but I suppose it could look that way.’

It was wonderful listening to her points of view, especially after reading her books, which I’d loved.

I kept the glass that she drank her gin and tonic out of and took it triumphantly back to the Heartbreak Hotel as a memento of our evening. Unfortunately, some ‘helpful’ person there washed it, which was rather devastating.

Cameron Mackintosh is legendary for his wild parties. One of the best he ever threw was the
Martin Guerre
do, which was in fact better than the show itself and probably cost more to put on. He took over Bedford Square in London and erected a huge marquee. There were big hogs on spits and we savoured a rustic medieval banquet, washed down with massive goblets of wine. He even laid on medieval games.

I dyed my hair blue for the bash because, for some bizarre reason, I wanted it to match the blue shirt I’d bought for opening night. The first colour wasn’t intense enough, so I sprayed more blue into it just before I left the house. Unfortunately, it was a swelteringly hot night. As I started perspiring, my sweat mixed with the dye and then ran in indigo streaks down my face. Not a good look.

Cameron loves throwing Christmas parties at his house in north London, too. Every year, he gets his office and production staff to put on a panto. He sets up a stage and a giant marquee and you have a day to rehearse the pantomime. One year, Ken
Caswell and I were ugly sisters; Howard Harrison, who is one of the leading lighting men in the West End, played Spurterella; and Cameron took the role of the king. At the end of each party, he fills the entire marquee with foam, or it ends in a mud wrestle or a food fight. At a Cameron shindig, you expect to come out looking a mess.

For Cameron’s fiftieth birthday bash, Lavish came back from the dead, dressed as Wonder Woman, to jump out of his cake. She’d been resurrected for my thirty-first birthday, when I’d thrown a superhero party. Someone from the Mackintosh office saw my costume there and asked me to pop out of the cake. So I got all tarted up in my Wonder Woman garb and gave Cameron the surprise of his life. I was the only one dressed up so I felt a bit of a prat, but he loved it. He laughed his socks off.

It was a tight little team at the Cammac office and we all got on really well. It was a mad and eclectic crowd. All the staff were fabulous characters, but none more so than Cameron himself. He loves to party, he adores the outrageous and he’s an extreme personality. He’s also remarkably generous, as I was about to discover for myself.

In 1997, the time finally came for me to move out of the Heartbreak Hotel. In truth, I’d got sick of sharing the house. There were just too many people living there. Transferring into direction and choreography had meant that my salary had improved, so I’d managed to pay off my debts, start saving, set up a pension and even make some investments. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t need to live with loads of other people. I thought it would be nice if Lloyd and I had our own place.

Serendipitously, the house next door was for sale. The property was only £160,000 and it was a six-bedroom house in Camden. The two of us couldn’t afford it alone, so Clifftops, Lloyd and I all went to apply for a mortgage. We thought we could club together on the home loan, but the bank turned us down. Clifftops was a waiter; Lloyd was still studying law and was
working at The Engineer too. The majority of their money came in tips. On paper, it looked like they earned little more than £5,000 a year. The bank wasn’t willing to risk it.

I decided that I would have to go to the Halifax and see how much I could get by myself. They said they would lend me £120,000. I received a certificate to confirm it and then I went shopping. For months, I just looked around. Although I told Lloyd about it, I didn’t mention what I was planning to anyone else at the Heartbreak. I didn’t want to fragment the family.

One day, Lloyd and I went for a stroll and came across an adorable little house around the corner that was for sale. We enquired about the price and were told it was £149,000. Naturally, we tried to get it for £120,000. The estate agent said that the value had already gone up £50,000 since the property had gone on the market, and that the vendors wouldn’t accept less than the asking price.

There was nothing else for it. I put on my most engaging smile and went to ask Cameron Mackintosh for a loan.

He was amazing. Cameron is really into property and owns a lovely Nash house near the area I wanted to move to in north London. I said to him, ‘I’ve found this exquisite place, darling, and I would like to have a financial meeting.’ He agreed. We talked about the weather for a few minutes and then I got straight to the point.

‘I’ve seen this gorgeous Grade II listed house,’ I said. ‘It’s £150,000 and I’m £30,000 short. I was wondering if I could borrow £40,000?’

Naturally, ever the extravagant one, I’d calculated that I needed ten grand extra for furnishings.

I told him I’d pay him back, with interest at the going rate, and that I’d worked out a payment plan over five years. He looked at the estate agent’s details for the house and commented, ‘Yes, it’s a beautiful property.’ I waited with bated breath. Unbelievably, at the end of the meeting he announced, ‘We’ll go
down to see my accountant now and the money will be in your account tomorrow.’

I said, ‘Thanks, darling,’ and the deal was done. The next day, forty grand landed in my account, and the house was ours.

As it turned out, Cameron didn’t make any money out of my ‘financial plan’ because I’d worked it out at 5 per cent, which he informed me was less than the base rate, which at the time was 6 per cent. But he accepted my proposition nonetheless. I can’t thank him enough because I couldn’t have done it without him. His generosity gave me independence, got me out of the Heartbreak Hotel and provided me with an investment. I don’t think Cameron would have done it for just anyone, but by then I was firmly established as a member of the Cammac clan. Sometimes, I guess, you have to be bold and ask for help.

When we told the gang that Lloyd and I would be moving out, the reaction from Clifftops was not great. Not only was he losing his friends to the property ladder, but he would also have to find another couple for the Heartbreak to make the rent as cheap as it was when Lloyd and I were there. The paperwork and practicalities were a real stress, but our friendship endured all the same. Clifftops eventually got some other people in and has managed the property ever since. It’s thankfully still the same old Heartbreak; it’s just the cast that keeps on changing.

When Lloyd and I first moved into our new house, it felt really small, as we were used to a sprawling four-storey pile. Nevertheless, because it was our own, I fell in love with it. It was gorgeous: loads of light came streaming down the stairway into the entrance hallway; a wall of ivy cascaded down the garden wall; a big magnolia tree bloomed boldly in the middle of the verdant lawn; beautiful arched windows adorned the bedroom at the front of the house … and it was all located on a tree-lined street that was dotted with traditional gas lamps. It couldn’t have been more perfect. The property needed a lot of work done to it, however, as it didn’t have gas central heating
or any kitchen or bathroom to speak of. My extra £10,000 went within days.

Mel, my sister, was in England at the time. She came over to experience life in London and we got her a job as a waitress at The Engineer, the restaurant owned by Tamsin Olivier, where Lloyd was manager and Clifftops also worked. We made our dining room into a bedroom for Mel, while Lloyd and I lived upstairs.

Mel fell in love with London – and also with
Martin Guerre
. I would come home and she would have the CD player blaring at major decibels. She’d be singing along to all the tunes; I swear she knew that score better than the writers. She was so much fun to live with. It was an amazing opportunity to get to know my little sister, after I’d left home when she was only ten. She was well and truly all grown up now, and a total unit (an Australian expression for someone who comes with the whole package!).

Lloyd and I thought it would also be a good idea to rent out a room to touring actors in order to raise some extra cash, given that money was so tight when we first moved in and began our extensive renovations. Two Americans, who were performing in
Damn Yankees
in the West End, took us up on the offer and stayed until we got settled financially.

So, although I had desperately wanted to get away from sharing, I ended up in a two-bedroom house with four other people and one tiny bathroom! But when you own it, it feels completely different. Actually, it was good fun all being together, and the lodgers helped with the payments on Cameron’s loan.

There wasn’t a huge garden, but there was a wonderful roof terrace, on which we were always having barbecues in the summer. Barbecues remind me of home, so I put a whole row of eucalyptus trees up there, to complete the effect. My dad was the barbecue king and I think I inherited my passion for them from him. He loved having barbies and put hours of preparation into them. They’re very Australian anyway, but he made them into an art form. When we’d go and visit relatives, he’d show up with 30 kilos
of raw meat and a trailer full of booze – cans of Melbourne Bitter and 20 litres of Coolabah (which was wine in a cask, otherwise known as ‘goon juice’).

One Fourth of July, soon after we moved in, my dear American friend and colleague Heather Douglas, whom I’d met and befriended on the USA/Berlin tour of
Crazy for You
, persuaded me to have a barbecue on the roof terrace. Carried away with the celebratory spirit, Lloyd unintentionally blew everyone up. He put a firework – a rocket – into a pot plant and dug it all the way in, then lit it. The roof terrace was full of our friends and the whole thing exploded over everybody. There were holes in people’s clothing and one of my friends received quite a bad burn. I escaped, totally unscathed, because I was standing at the opposite end, but everyone else ran towards the door and that was the direction in which it went off. It was awful. Luckily, there were no serious injuries, but it goes to show you how dangerous those things can be.

Lloyd and fire were not a good combination in general. He set my outfit alight once. Admittedly, I was wearing a shell suit, which is not cool, but in my defence I’d been rehearsing all day and it was the nineties. We were having some drinks upstairs on the roof terrace. Lloyd had purchased some new gel fuel that produced the effect of candlelight and, while it was lit, he tried to add more in. It splattered all over me and I was aflame. I couldn’t put myself out. The gel kept burning and the shell suit was going up quickly. It was a nightmare. I screamed and screamed and Lloyd just stood there killing himself laughing. I managed to put myself out without any injury, but he was no use at all.

My career as a choreographer in my own right started in a urinal in 1997. I became involved with
West End Bares
, a benefit for AIDS charity West End Cares, which was looking for people to contribute a number. The idea of the event was that individuals from all the West End productions came together and performed various original sequences. Each one had to be about baring something – in layman’s terms, stripping.

I was still working on
Martin Guerre
, and a touring production of
West Side Story
,
at the time. I was asked to put something together for non-dancers, using weird and wonderful people whom you would least expect to see on a stage, let alone stripping; like the staff in Cameron’s office. I collected together an eclectic group of lads who were willing to expose themselves and came up with a reverse strip.

After looking through my albums for inspiration, I decided the music should be Rickie Lee Jones’s song, ‘Easy Money’. I started with all the boys stark bollock naked. The curtains opened and there was a row of naked men with their backs to the audience, peeing in a urinal, and pumping their hips at the same time. This was just before
The Full Monty
was released in August 1997. Then, individually, you saw their characters come to life as they started getting dressed. They all wore construction workers’ clothes, but the underwear beneath gave away their fetishes. For example, Bob West, who was a Cammac exec and a company manager on
Cats
when I was in it, donned pink frilly knickers, others slipped on stockings and suspenders, and so on. It brought the house down.

In the audience, unbeknownst to me, sat a girl called Rebecca Quigley. She worked for production company Pola Jones and she wanted to know who had come up with the choreography for the number because she thought it was hilarious. It wouldn’t be the last I heard of Rebecca, though our paths didn’t cross again for some time.