All Balls and Glitter (30 page)

Over the next few months, I gave him numerous opportunities to come back. I told him we could move on, but only if he could get out of the hideous situation he’d put himself in, where he didn’t know what he wanted. I told him to make a decision and we’d take it from there.

I was in absolute turmoil. We would talk, but every time we got close to working things out, he’d fly off to New Zealand to be with Michael. He kept running away from things, so it was hard to get hold of him long enough to have a decent conversation. It gradually reached the point where I thought, ‘We’re going to have to go our separate ways.’

In spring 2006, we decided to meet up for dinner in London at a local Indian restaurant, which was one of our old haunts, to try to talk about things in a calm and adult manner. By the time the
meal had ended, we were both none the wiser about our relationship and what he wanted. As we approached the road outside our house, I was so frustrated that I gave him an ultimatum.

‘Lloyd,’ I said quietly, ‘when I cross that road, I’m going to be on the other side. If you stay on this side, I will know that you don’t want to be with me forever. If you cross with me, I will know that you do want to be with me, and you’ll finish with Michael and never see him again.’

I crossed the road. He stood there and stood there and, finally, he crossed the street and came to me. Then he said, ‘But there’s one thing. I’ve got to see Michael one more time.’

That was the final straw. I said, ‘That’s it. It is now officially over! I can’t take this any more.’

I really was devastated because I’d tried for months to sort it out. We’d set up meetings to talk about our relationship, but every time I tried, I received a glazed-over, non-committal response. He couldn’t tell me anything about Michael. He was having real problems with the dilemma and essentially he was going through a breakdown. Sadly, I couldn’t help him out of it.

In the end, I knew it just had to finish because the limbo was destroying me. It was agony to know we weren’t a couple any more, but from that moment, I could begin to go forward.

L
ooking back, there had been hints along the way. Just before we split, in autumn 2005, we’d gone to Prague for a romantic break. We were trying to get our sexual relationship back on track and where better than in that romantic city? Lloyd had only been there as a student, so it seemed the perfect place.

Unfortunately, I had to fly back in the middle of the trip to do a snooker challenge with Dennis Taylor.
Strictly Come Dancing
viewers may remember that he had dared me to learn snooker in five days after I criticized his dancing. He said I was being horrible to him and asked, ‘Have you ever picked up a snooker cue and tried to learn?’ Of course, I was absolutely hopeless. The challenge was to see how many balls I could pot in sixty seconds. The answer was none, so clearly they had the last laugh.

The BBC wanted to include the story directly after Dennis’s challenge to me, for continuity, so it had to be filmed for that weekend’s show.

As soon as I’d finished working, I flew back to Prague and Lloyd seemed to be annoyed with me. It wasn’t ideal, I know, but it was part of my job and there was nothing I could do about it.

The worst part was that it had fallen on the date of our anniversary. It was atrocious timing. We went out for dinner, and things were fine, on the surface at least. There were no fireworks,
though, no big celebration. It simply was not the holiday I’d planned.

After Lloyd and I officially broke up, his phone calls and texts continued, but all my friends kept telling me, ‘No contact,’ and they were right. I had to go cold turkey.

In April, I was summoned home from the Friedrichstadtpalast, Berlin, where I’d been choreographing for a couple of months, following my plan of staying out of London for the year. Lloyd needed money. We had some savings in a shared account, which was only in my name, and he wanted his half.

He had got a place of his own by then, and was renting a flat down the street from our house – which I thought was a little bit close for comfort.

The day I got the cheque out of the account for him, I went round to his new apartment and knocked on the door. He wouldn’t open it. I knew he was in there because his bike was visible and so was Michael’s. I knocked on the door and the window, and then I kept my finger on the buzzer for a minute or so, but they wouldn’t answer the door.

I thought angrily, ‘OK, so it’s come to this. I’m keeping the money, going back to Berlin and fuck him.’ I started off down the street, my brain racing. ‘This is going to be a nightmare if we can’t even see each other to hand over a cheque,’ I mused.

Just as I was thinking this, Lloyd came running after me down the road, shouting, ‘Craig! Craig!’

I turned around and said, ‘I was only trying to give you the cheque so you could cash it.’

He replied, slightly breathlessly, ‘I thought you were going to bash Michael up.’

I was horrified. After all we had shared together, and especially given my family background, he should have known that I would never take that route. I’ve always been a very peaceful person.

The assumption was completely out of character for Lloyd, and was rooted in no friendship that I recognized. From that moment,
I could clearly see that he was having some sort of breakdown. I told him he should go to see a counsellor, and gave him the name of the person whom I’d been planning to use for our relationship counselling, before the split. Apparently, he went two or three times, but he didn’t keep it up.

I handed him the cheque and went back to Berlin. The whole episode made me consider all our financial ties. I started thinking about the house. I didn’t want to move back into it if it was partly owned by him. I concluded that we needed to make it all legal and get a proper ‘divorce’. So that’s what we did – and that’s how it ended.

It had been a long time since I’d had my heart broken. But I remembered how I used to get by. The producers of my 2004 Guildford show
Beautiful and Damned
, Charlie Dobson and Laurence Myers, asked me if I would direct it in the West End. Eager to sign up, I insisted on only one condition – that it was rewritten and I was happy with it.

Then we had to figure out who was responsible for that, because there had been a lot of people working on it to begin with. That’s where it all went a little bit wrong. Kit Hesketh Harvey had written the original book, Phil Willmott had rewritten some of it and Laurence was contributing as well. The songs were penned by Les Reed and Roger Cook, who also wrote ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ for the New Seekers.

I was disappointed that I wasn’t allowed to tell the whole of the Fitzgeralds’ tragic tale. The producers didn’t want it, so we had to miss out the alleged abortions that Zelda reportedly had, and her lesbian sex sessions. However, there were a lot of anecdotes on record about her amazing life with her husband in the 1930s, when they just squandered money and drank champagne until they dropped. We dramatized that story instead.

The production opened in the West End in May 2006 … and it was a critical disaster. The reviews were horrific, although the audience at least were swept away. The press decided to go for the
jugular – and when that’s what they’ve determined, all the media follow suit. The show was massacred.

The leading lady, Helen Anker, whom I thought was extraordinary, and still do, did a wonderful job. She was playing Zelda, who was completely mad and ended up dying in a fire at a mental institution. Only a truly gifted actress could have taken on the role. We need people like Helen in the theatre and it’s a shame when the critics come along and annihilate such talented artists.

Robert Hanks, in the
Independent
, headed his review with ‘Fitzgerald musical not beautiful – and must surely be damned,’ which was obviously not a great start. It continued: ‘Helen Anker’s portrayal of insanity is picturesque and stereotyped.’

Just one critic, the
Daily Mirror
’s Kevin O’Sullivan, gave her any credit, writing, ‘Helen Anker charismatically makes the entire production sparkle.’ He also said that she ‘dances like a dream’, and commented that the relationship between Fitzgerald and his wife was, ‘Not perhaps ideal material for a feel-good night at the theatre. But I promise that feel good you will after this exhilarating show, which triumphantly combines a damned good story with some beautiful songs.’

At least someone liked it.

The experience didn’t do me any favours, career-wise, but on a personal level it taught me that you can’t always achieve everything you want to – because you need the circumstances to be on your side too.

It was the hardest criticism I’d ever had and it was painful to read. Oddly, though, the direction and staging were really left alone. The music, lyrics and book were roundly attacked and, if reviewers don’t like those three things in a musical, there’s not much you can do to secure positive comments. It was a shame, because the idea had such potential. I really wasn’t expecting the reaction we received.

By the time the reviews came out, I was in France again, this
time directing and choreographing
The Legend of the Lion King
for Disneyland Resort Paris. Picking my way through the outpourings of venom in the papers, I felt sick. I felt sorry for the cast because they still had to perform it every night and I felt awful that I wasn’t in London to be able to go to them and say, ‘Guys, don’t worry. Don’t listen to the critics.’

The show ran for about four months, but I think that it was heavily supported by Charlie Dobson, who was a lovely man who just wanted to pay homage to Zelda Fitzgerald. My father, incidentally, can’t stop watching the show on DVD. He absolutely loves it.

The Legend of the Lion King
is a thirty-five-minute truncated version of the film
The Lion King
, and took me two years to complete. I had to go through so much red tape, first with the Americans and then with the French – and even then I didn’t foresee everything that could go wrong.

I arrived in Paris to find that the floor of the stage was a total mess. After twenty-four months of meetings, discussing it in intimate detail, the floor arrived and it was undulating and sculpted like desert sand and rock. It covered the whole stage and was utterly impossible to dance on. On the model, it had looked flat, but the computer had misread it and there were lumps and bumps everywhere. We had to cut it all away and redesign at the last minute, which cost thousands.

A happier experience was my first directing stint at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, Berkshire, later that year. The Watermill is a wonderful venue. I’d love more people to go to see the shows there. It’s a gorgeous, tucked-away barn of a watermill, surrounded by a stream, which is home to lots of ducks. The building is set in opulent grounds, where you can have a picnic and a glass of champagne before the performance. It’s truly beautiful.

The people behind it are really creative and you get top actors, such as Dame Judi Dench, working for next to nothing to appear there. It’s a chance for them to perform the role of their dreams
to a live and intimate audience. Roughly five or six shows are staged each year, which gives visionary people an outlet. You don’t get paid much; everyone does it for love, which generates a fantastic working environment.

My first production there was
Hot Mikado
in summer 2006. It was an unprecedented success, and played a big part in me subsequently securing a regular slot at the Watermill, which is a tremendous honour.

At the end of July through to September, I was asked to choreograph the BBC’s new talent show
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
Although I was now an old hand at appearing on programmes for the Beeb, this was the first time I had worked for them in that capacity. Zoë Tyler was overseeing the vocals; I was to direct and choreograph the girls, helping them to stage their numbers and develop their characters.

In the early stages of the competition, the girls were whittled down from forty contestants to twenty. That group was then asked to perform in front of influential people from the theatre at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s house.

The venue was a deconsecrated church in the grounds of Andrew’s Sydmonton estate, which he has had converted into a theatre. He often uses it to premiere his own works, such as
Sunset Boulevard
and
The Phantom of the Opera
,
and also accommodates the Sydmonton Arts Festival, which is held there periodically. The festival comprises a variety of exclusive previews, which are presented to a private audience of key players from theatre, television and film in order to gauge the future potential of the works. The showcases feature some of the finest talents in entertainment. That year, the
Maria
contestants were part of it. I travelled to the country house to rehearse the girls before their all-important performances.

It was a blazing hot summer weekend as we created the routines and finalized the running order. There wasn’t enough room for everyone in the theatre, so I had all the Marias dancing
on the tennis court. The sun was beating down and I was getting burned, so I slathered myself in gallons of sunblock; I looked like a ghost.

Naturally, this was the bit they showed on telly – so the first glimpse the viewing public got of me, without my judge’s suit and austere expression, was a sweaty, white creature going ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ on a tennis court. I felt right at home doing that, of course, because that’s my proper job.

The concert that I staged at Sydmonton was the girls’ only chance to bag a place in the live programmes, so it was my duty to present them in the most positive light. I got to know them, established their strengths and weaknesses, and tried to give each one the best possible chance of becoming Maria.

Once we were into the frantic schedule of the weekly live shows, I rehearsed the remaining contestants through the week for their four group numbers and would also direct their solos.
Maria
was a great experience for me because I’m used to working fast, but this was at breakneck pace. The rushes would head off to the BBC and then I’d get notes back from the programme’s director, Nikki Parsons, saying they wanted more of this or less of that, or they wanted to redo a whole number – which happened a lot. They also might suddenly decide on a different song.