All Balls and Glitter (24 page)

It’s funny what you recall. Lloyd’s mum had a backpack on and she was dancing with a gay bloke with no shirt, who was wearing flashing fairy wings and was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was a peculiar night. I’ve had much better evenings on a glass or two of champagne.

The gigs in Europe provided invaluable experience. The ongoing tour of
West Side Story
,
in which I took the role of associate director/choreographer for two-and-a-half years in the late nineties, was also significant. All my other jobs, such as
Martin Guerre
,
Hey, Mr Producer!
and
Fiddler
slotted in around
West Side
– I had a lot of balls in the air. The tour was organized by production group Pola Jones and went backwards and forwards across the UK, including two runs in the West End.

The company were completely mad. The story of the show, for those that don’t know it, is a Romeo-and-Juliet-style romance between members of two rival street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. The characters are fired-up juvenile delinquents, who go against anything that is socially responsible.

Unfortunately, some of the cast ended up taking their characters to heart, to the point that they were getting into fights outside work, with knives, the lot. They would go out to clubs, get into brawls and would come into work the next day with black eyes.

Backstage was a nightmare too and the number of bust-ups was unbelievable. There was a Liverpudlian girl who went round
bashing up all the boys, all the time. She would grab the lads by the scruff of the neck and really lay into them. It was bizarre.

I took her to one side to have a word with her and she responded, ‘That’s what we do up north. We don’t talk, we hit.’

‘Hang on, darling,’ was my stunned reply. ‘If we were in an office and you disagreed with a secretary, for example, you wouldn’t just go up and punch her in the face, would you?’

‘Yeah, yeah, that’s what we’d do,’ she said.

Oh dear! This kind of method acting I could do without. She was simply uncontrollable.

The tour ran for four years in total, on and off, although I didn’t stay for the full run. Stacey Haynes, who has since become a TV judge herself on
Strictly Dance Fever
, took over from me and she had to deal with the rabble from then on.

In fairness, the company were very young, straight out of school, and had been chosen precisely because of their feistiness. They’d landed these fantastic roles and they felt like they owned the world. That, coupled with their lack of experience of backstage etiquette, was an explosive combination.

To some extent, we caused their hostility too. They were playing rival gangs and their sense of loathing towards each other was encouraged, for dramatic realism, in the improvisations we did in rehearsals.

Arthur Laurents, who wrote it, told me that when they first did
West Side Story
in the States, they put all the Jets in dressing rooms on one side of the stage and the Sharks in rooms on the other side. Then they kept them separate the whole time. That way, they ensured the fight scenes were full of tension and drama, but my lot took that to extremes.

I felt like an old man, with all these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in the company, and they really tried my patience.

Nonetheless, it was a fantastic production and I was directing and choreographing with Arthur, which was inspirational. I was also working closely with Alan Johnson, who puts on
West Side
Story
all over the world and has notated the entire show, every single step and scene, lighting cues, design: a massive undertaking. It’s called ‘the bible’ and enables others to restage the musical in exactly the way it was intended by the original creators. Arthur and Alan are both legends of the theatre so they really taught me a lot, which prepared me for my next challenge –
Spend Spend Spend
.

The fact that I was offered the gig was all due to Rebecca Quigley from Pola Jones, who had seen and noted my choreographic efforts in
West End Bares
back in 1997.
Spend Spend Spend
had premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1998 and been a big hit there, but in 1999 it was coming to the West End and the producers wanted to introduce more comedy elements. They aspired to find a choreographer who could inject a bit more humour into the show. Enter yours truly.

Rebecca found out who I was and had a word with Andre Ptaszynski, the producer of
Spend
, and he asked me to come in for an interview. We talked about the
West End Bares
number, and everything else I’d achieved, and he gave me the job. It was my first big break and I am really grateful to them both for that. With hindsight, it was amazing of him to offer it to me, not to mention brave to take such a risk with a virtually unknown and unproved choreographer on a new musical.

The show was based on the life of Viv Nicholson, the 1961 pools winner who promised to ‘spend, spend, spend’ and did just that, eventually ending up penniless.

It was a fantastic period in my life. Perhaps some of Viv’s
joie de vivre
infected the whole company
because we partied very hard. It was one of those companies where loads of us went out, every single night, and we wouldn’t get home until six in the morning. Then we’d all be in rehearsal by ten.

We were based in Plymouth, and spent a lot of time at the Hoe, a large, open, public space that commands magnificent views of Plymouth Sound, Drake’s Island, and across the River Hamoaze to Mount Edgcumbe in Cornwall. We’d party there all night and
come up with some mad ideas for the show. It was as though nothing else mattered in life.

Barbara Dickson, who starred in
Spend
, has the most incredible, haunting voice. It was great to see her back on stage and I was thrilled that she won Best Actress for the role at the Olivier Awards that year. Of course, Barbara wasn’t involved in all the late-night shenanigans. She is quite clean-living, not one to go out and let her hair down. She’s like the mother I’d love to have – if I didn’t already have a wonderful mother myself – and she’s a pleasure to work with. There are no dramas or tantrums. So many theatre actors have huge chips on their shoulders and the amount of work that goes into unravelling their personal lives to get to the acting beneath is huge. There’s none of that with Barbara. She’s a joy and, in fact, the whole company were. We all clicked. On any production, there is usually at least one member who is prone to hissy fits, or there are a few moments of diva-style outburst, when someone throws in the towel and minces off. On
Spend Spend Spend
,
we were completely drama free.

The young Viv was played by a fabulous girl called Rachel Leskovac, who was straight out of the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. Steve Houghton of
London’s Burning
and
Bugs
fame, meanwhile, really came into his own. He’s had a successful West End career since then.

We were under the direction of the talented Jeremy Sams. He allowed me to be at my most expressive with choreography. This was the first time I’d choreographed a whole show and I was quite apprehensive, but it went very well. There was just one number, ‘Doing the Dance of Love’, on which I kept getting stumped, but Jeremy helped me out with that one. He told me to think of it as ballroom and I thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ It really worked.

Then came Saturday 11 September 1999 – opening night in Plymouth. Suddenly, I was really nervous. Panic set in as I realized that this was my first big gig and everyone would be judging my
work. Thankfully, it was a huge success and on 12 October that year, we transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End.

Every opening night is the same for me, but this particular show had a lot riding on it as it was my first ever West End debut as a fully fledged choreographer. In my mind, this would either make or break me.

As a general rule, I zone out on first nights and go very quiet, reeling from the shock that all our work is actually going in front of an audience and theatre critics, who can be extremely harsh in judgement.

Yes, I know, I can hear you saying to yourselves, ‘That’s rich coming from you!’ and I agree, but vicious criticism can close a show in a week, putting hundreds of people out of work.

Your life in the theatre and future employment do sometimes depend on good reviews. Bollocks to the people who claim never to read them; you simply can’t avoid them or other people’s reaction to them. There will always be a ‘friend’ who will just adore coming up to you in a public place and announcing how bad that review was in last week’s
Guardian
. Reviews tend to worry me.

On the night, I also fret about the cast and if they’ll remember all the notes I gave them; I’m concerned about the crew and whether that troublesome piece of scenery, which never actually went right in the tech or the dress rehearsal, is going to make it into position at the correct time; I worry that the lighting board will crash halfway through the performance; I brood that the laughs aren’t going to be where they were intended; I panic about whether I’ve been brave enough with the material I have been given to work with by the writers; I agonize that I have let down the cast, crew, other creatives, producers and the audience; I stew over whether I have made all the right choices for the company and given them steps they can be proud of each night; I’m anxious about whether I have told the story clearly enough and whether everyone will understand it and be moved or excited by it.

As you can imagine, I sit through the show in a cold, nervous
sweat, living every moment with the cast and crew, and it’s exhausting. Some moments of high tension, some of agitated anticipation, some of pure relief and some of elation. It’s a roller-coaster ride of emotion and sometimes feels like a form of medieval torture. In fact, that could be more pleasurable – at least you would know what was going to happen next. The theatre is such a horribly public domain in which to crash and burn. Is it any wonder that one hurries to the bar before the performance for a stiff one, before losing complete control of the evening and having to sit in a dark space and leaving it to the gods?

At the end of the evening, I brace myself for the 2,000 opinions I’ll hear at the after-party, where very few colleagues actually tell you the truth in any case. It makes me wonder sometimes why the hell I do it to myself, but it’s a passion I have for real drama and dance in the theatre that spurs me on. If, by some strange fluke, it’s all right on the night and pulls together to make a unique theatrical experience that will stay in the hearts and minds of the audience, then it’s all been worth it.

On this occasion, I had a couple of calming drinks at the bar before the show, with a few friends and my mum, whom I’d flown over from Ballarat at the very last minute to see it. Then, in a state of anxiety, we took our seats. Flicking through the programme, I discovered that they had misspelled my name by muddling up the ‘w’ and ‘r’ of ‘Horwood’ and also given me the wrong biography, printing that of the set and costume designer, Lez Brotherston, twice. The blurb read: ‘Choreography by Craig Revel Howrood.’ Then: ‘Lez began his design training at …’ My biog was nowhere to be seen.

The amount of ribbing I got for that misprint after the show was outrageous. ‘Oh look! It’s Craig Revel How-rood! HOW RUDE!’ They were all saying it, elongating the ‘rooooooooood’ to the point of nonsense. Little did I know what I’d become known for by the nation five years later!

It was hilarious, though, and set a tone for the evening that
could only be one of joy and insanity. The audience and the critics went mad for it. It got better reactions than I could possibly have asked for or even imagined.

The opening-night party was spectacular, as we all arrived in pink Chevrolets – but the reviews the following morning were even better. Maeve Walsh, in the
Independent on Sunday
, called it ‘the best of British’, while Charles Spencer, writing on the Monday in the
Daily Telegraph
, commented: ‘Popular entertainment at its best, devoid of the cynical contrivance of so many musicals and blessed with heart, humour and irresistible humanity.’

In February, my joy was complete when I was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Choreography. In fact, the show was nominated for seven awards altogether, as well as winning both the
Evening Standard
Award and the Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical.

It wasn’t my first Olivier Awards ceremony, of course, as Maggie Goodwin and I had collected the 1997 award for
Martin Guerre
in Bob Avian’s absence. But it’s an entirely different story when it’s your own name that’s announced alongside some of the leading legends in choreography. Other nominees were Peter Darling for
Candide
, Garth Fagan for
The Lion King
and Stephen Mear for
Soul Train
.

Sadly, I didn’t win the award, which went to Garth
,
but to be nominated for a show that was, effectively, my West End debut as a choreographer was breathtaking.

To be honest, I never thought for one moment that I was really in with a chance, considering the esteemed figures that I was up against and the success of their work. At least, not until the split second before, when you can’t help thinking to yourself, ‘What if they do call out my name? What shall I say? Whom should I thank?’

Naturally, I was disappointed when my name wasn’t read out, but I felt so proud of myself and the
Spend
company, and of what we had all achieved, that it spurred me on and made me hungry for more. Andre Ptaszynski was on the board of the
Olivier panel and told me that it was a really close call, so I was truly chuffed.

The nomination also gave me the most enormous confidence boost – and, at last, some clout in the industry. Directors wanted to work with me on all sorts of projects and the year ahead was filling up really quickly.

After the big event of
Hey, Mr Producer!
in 1998, Cameron’s showcase lived on in several different incarnations. Ken Caswell and I had just finished staging it on the cruise liners in 2000 when Cameron himself phoned to tell me about
The Witches of Eastwick.
It was a brand-new musical adapted from the book by John Updike
and would star Ian McShane as the devilish Darryl Van Horne, who exerts his charismatic influence over three women and increases their magical powers.