Anything Goes (18 page)

Most of my family is superstitious, too. My mum never puts shoes on the table, always throws salt over her shoulder if any spills, and if she were to drop a glove, she’d stand around for hours waiting for someone else to pick it up for her, because it’s bad luck to pick up your own dropped glove.

Hang out backstage with me and you’ll see that superstitions are only one small part of what keeps a company on its toes, actors fresh and at their creative best. Audiences attending the theatre may enjoy the performance of a lifetime, but there’s always another show going on behind the scenes, one that never interferes with the quality of the one they’re watching, but that can be just as entertaining.

A theatre company backstage is a lot like a big family getting ready for a visit from the Queen. Lighting folks, stage crew, stage management, wardrobe artists, wig designers, hair and make-up
people, musicians, dressers for all the performers, and then the performers themselves are all running around frantically, all with a mission: put on a great show. Behind the scenes in a theatre there’s a complex network of people all supporting each other.

After the preview performances, the director of the show makes only an occasional visit to the theatre, and he rarely has anything to do with the show going on behind the scenes that he never blocked or rehearsed. Once the production opens, it’s down to the rest of the cast and crew to keep the energy up and the standard high. Performing in live theatre, on average actors have eight or nine shows a week, depending on the matinee schedule. If they’re lucky, and the show runs into years, that’s eight shows multiplied by fifty-two weeks, minus one day off for Christmas. That’s 415 shows in a year. When you, the audience, come to see the show, it may be our 365
^th
performance, but it’s your first and may be your only one. In order to keep ourselves fresh and to keep our creative adrenalin running at the level it was during show number ten, we shake things up on stage for each other. Sitting in the stalls, you perhaps had no idea – did you? Until now.

During a scene in
Matador,
for example, we had to recreate convincingly a dinner party as a backdrop. Many of the characters were seated around a table, being served a meal, while the main action was taking place at the centre front of the stage. The audience could see us enjoying a meal, and they had to believe we were having a dinner party, but they could not hear a word we were saying.

Oh my God, some of the things we said. The actress playing my character’s sister, Caroline O’Connor, who later went on to appear as Ethel Merman in
De-Lovely,
would begin the conversation by introducing Stefanie Powers as Ginger Dungbucket. That’s all it took. We were off. One of the boys, dressed as a waiter for the scene,
would serve us stupid notes with dirty jokes on them or he’d bring us someone’s panties on a silver tray. Through the whole scene, no one could hear or see what we were really doing around that table, which was just as well, on reflection.

In 1994, I played Joe Gillis to Betty Buckley’s Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Sunset Boulevard
at the Adelphi Theatre in London.
Sunset
has one of the best opening scenes in musical theatre. When the curtain rises, the audience is looking at Norma’s swimming pool where my character, Joe, is floating dead on the shimmering surface. The musical is told in flashback from that moment.

The show is set in 1949 and is about an ageing Hollywood diva, Norma Desmond, who is clinging pathetically to her past glory in silent movies twenty years before, and hoping once again to find fame. Joe Gillis is a poor, disaffected writer who accidentally meets Norma late one night when he is trying to flee his creditors. Norma sees in Joe the chance to perfect her comeback script,
Salome,
at long last. Joe views Norma as a meal ticket. Their relationship eventually collapses under the weight of Norma’s delusions and ends with Joe’s watery demise. His death is hastened by his developing relationship with Betty Schaefer, whom he meets at his friend Artie’s flat, and who helps Joe to write his own movie script.

The set for
Sunset
was one of the most complex and massive stages ever created. It was constructed to look like the inside of Norma’s decaying Sunset Boulevard mansion – spiral staircase, chandeliers and all. The entire set shifted at various times during the show with two levels that moved up and down using powerful hydraulics. During one scene, Norma Desmond’s house ‘flies’ into the upper area of the theatre, leaving the set underneath visible for a scene we affectionately called the ‘Artie’s Party’ scene because it took place in Artie’s apartment. The room was furnished for a sing-along
party with a table and chairs, a piano, a bar and a small toilet off to the side. The toilet’s interior wall was cut away so that Joe and Betty Schaefer, played by Anita Louise Combe, can have a private moment to which the audience is privy (pun intended).

The final matinee of an actor’s run in a production is usually the one in which the most pranks are pulled. During Anita’s last matinee of
Sunset,
she and I moved into Artie’s small toilet as usual for the scene where we flirted in song using the towel rail as a dance bar. The song started and Anita promptly hiked up her skirt, dropped her knickers and proceeded to sit on the loo as if she was having a pee.

I couldn’t lose my composure, because it’s impossible to stretch or stop one of Andrew’s duets once it’s begun. Between my lyrics, I was biting my cheeks so hard to keep myself from laughing that I could taste blood. I still don’t know how I made it through the number with my romantic interest taking a leak in front of me. To make matters worse, for the entire duet we were full front to the audience, who I can only imagine thought such an intimate moment was part of the script. When Anita was finished, she wiped – she really did – and then she flushed all before the song ended. By then, I could barely hold it together, though I managed to make it into the wings before completely losing it and peeing my own pants.

Unfortunately for me, Anita was just getting warmed up with her stunt in the toilet. Later, in the same performance, during one of the final scenes, Anita’s character stormed into Norma’s mansion to tackle Joe about his infidelity. The moment was dramatic and very ‘in your face’. When Joe – me, that is – saw his girlfriend charge down the huge spiral staircase, he turned in anger and confronted her.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said angrily to Anita as Betty.

‘I’m here with my twin sister,’ she replied, and then Anita pulled the actress who was due to replace her on to the set behind
her. She was dressed in the same outfit as Anita. This was so not in the script.

‘Your sister?’ I sputtered, choking back laughter and turning my back to the audience in an attempt to regain my composure.

We proceeded to play the scene with two Betty Schaefers and probably most of the audience had no idea how wrong the whole scene really was. Anita’s replacement said nothing. She just stood there grinning while I desperately tried to avoid making a fool of myself and wrap up the scene as quickly as possible. After all the jokes I’d played during our long run of
Sunset,
I was the first to admit that payback was in order, and Anita’s were gems.

Earlier in the week, during another performance, I’d made a mistake during a scene with Betty Buckley and I think Anita had taken her cue to pull a prank or two from my screw-up. In the scene before Joe and Betty Schaefer have their confrontation on the stairs, Norma Desmond rushes to the phone, picks it up and out of pure spite calls Betty to tell her what Joe has really been doing in the mansion for all these months.

Into the phone, Norma says, ‘Miss Schaefer, why don’t you come over and see what Mr Gillis is really doing at my house?’ or something like that.

My character, Joe, then marches into the room, catches Norma on the phone betraying him and, in a two-can-play-at-that-game routine, he’s then supposed to pull the phone from her, give Betty the address of their house on Sunset Boulevard and slam the phone down. My character’s intention is to explain everything when Betty arrives and then both of us will abandon Norma to her pathetic lonely existence.

Instead, I entered from the left, marched over to Betty Buckley as Norma, grabbed the phone from her hand and my mind went blank. Nothing. No lines came into my head and I slammed the phone down without saying anything. No address. No cue.

Betty looked at me as if I was insane and then she covered and said, ‘I have to call her back,’ and began dialling again. She really did have to call her back because if she didn’t, there was no way to explain how Betty Schaefer, the girlfriend, could get to the mansion to confront Joe and Norma, which had to happen in the next scene.

As if I needed to prove I was really insane, I then did it again – in the very same scene. I took the phone and, once again, drew a complete blank, another major brain fart. I slammed it down without the required ‘10,086 Sunset Boulevard’. I don’t know what came over me. By the third try, Betty Buckley couldn’t decide whether to sob or sucker-punch me. To the audience, she and I must have looked like we were wrestling back and forth with the phone. She was yelling, ‘Joe, don’t hang up the phone,’ then whispering under her breath, ‘John, we’re running out of music. Give me the fucking phone.’ Finally, I let her snatch the phone from me before I could get near it for a fourth time. She gave the address and the cue herself.

As Cole Porter wrote, ‘in olden days, a glimpse of stocking’ may have thrown an audience into a swoon, but if you were in the audience of
Sunset Boulevard
on occasion, if you were really paying careful attention, you may have seen something even more scandalous. Some actors are known for their quirky dressing-room requests, some for their temper tantrums, and some for their weird rehearsal rituals. Me? I’m notorious for flashing my bum or bringing my Willie
⁴    
out to play.

On the
Torchwood
set, my co-star Eve’s breasts are known as ‘the girls’ and my naughty bits are ‘the boys’. Whenever we’ve had too many night shifts in a row or when morale needs a bit of a boost,
the boys and girls come out to play. This kind of exposure is often a bit of a shock to non-theatrical folks, but modesty is not something that you can have much time for when you have about thirty-four seconds to change costume in the wings or if you have to pee in a bucket offstage because you’ll never make it back to your dressing room before your cue. There is not a pause button in live theatre.

Well, maybe I’ve used it once. Let me pause here to explain.

Over the years, I’ve developed a shellfish allergy.
⁵    
Like turning thirty, the whole thing kind of crept up on me.
⁶    
One evening, I’d eaten dinner at a noodle bar in Guildford before a preview performance of
The Beautiful and Damned,
or
The Beautiful and Doomed
as the cast not so fondly referred to the F. Scott Fitzgerald story because we knew the production was never going to make it beyond previews. I hadn’t known the bar used fish oils in their cooking. I got dressed for the show, as my stomach started to make rumbling noises and then began to cramp. The stage manager gave the curtain call. My character had to be kneeling on stage as the curtain came up.

‘Everyone in place,’ the stage manager announced.

By this time, the cramps were almost unbearable, so I thought I’d release a bit of the pressure – you know, Rabbie Burns, free wind and all that. Not a good idea. I completely shat myself. For the twenty seconds that I knelt there, in my mind I played out the entire show, every scene and every song, thinking, ‘How far will I have to go through Act One before I can change?’ I knew I couldn’t make it. The curtain had already gone up an inch. I yelled, ‘Stop the curtain!’ By now, the audience could see my feet, but I dared not tell anyone what I’d just done. I’d never have heard the last of it.

I raced off the stage and ran upstairs, with my dresser flying behind me.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this,’ I said as I stripped off my costume, ‘but I’ve shit in my suit pants.’

‘Get them off,’ she ordered,
⁷    
‘and I’ll scrub them.’

She cleaned my trousers while I had the fastest shower in theatre history. I was a little damp, but I was back on stage within four minutes.

Now, that’s talent. The dresser’s and mine.

Rewind to
Sunset Boulevard.
During the ‘Artie’s Party’ scene, before Anita and I moved into the bathroom for the flirtatious section of the scene, I had to play the piano for a few minutes to establish some party ambience. Except on some nights, I’d play the piano perfectly with my penis.
⁸    
I kept this up, so to speak, for a number of shows, until I received a letter from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group insisting I stop. Andrew wrote, ‘Your penis may not upstage my music.’

I went back to playing the piano with my hands. In reality, the audience couldn’t really see what I was doing, but I have to admit I was quite proud that some folks thought my ‘boys’ might be seen from the centre stalls.

That wasn’t the only time I received a wry reprimand from producers. There was another during my run in
Miss Saigon
in 1993, when I played the character of Chris. Ruthie Henshall, a terrific actor and singer with as wicked a sense of humour as mine, portrayed my American wife. We had a scene together where we were raised above the stage in a double bed, in which Ruthie would sing to me. One day, we were called into the company manager’s office to be informed
that we were making too much noise in the bed.
⁹    
I blamed it on Ruthie who, every time the bed rose above the set, would try to flick my jockstrap. My retaliation of pinging her bra was clearly the only appropriate response. Ruthie and I have worked together a number of times now, and she and I always seem to pick up where we left off.