All Balls and Glitter (23 page)

In 1998, Lloyd and I set up a little business empire – entirely by accident. I was working on
West Side Story
in Plymouth and lodging with a couple called John and Anne Henning, who were on the theatre digs list and have become almost like family. They were furniture importers and, while I was there, they received a container full of outdoor goods from Indonesia. They were desperate to get rid of the stock because they didn’t have enough room for it in their warehouse.

‘What are London prices like?’ they asked me one day.

‘Well, they sell furniture in Camden, near my house,’ I told them. ‘If you want, I’ll go down and have a look for you.’

I visited their warehouse to take photos of the goods, so that I could match up the items with what was on sale in London and compare prices. Seeing me engrossed in the work, the Hennings suggested that I set up a shop of my own, which on reflection seemed a rather nice idea, especially given my artistic flair. I mentioned it to Lloyd, thinking that it was a venture we could perhaps try together. He was applying for law jobs and still working as a manager at The Engineer then. What with all that and my contract on
West Side Story
, we decided in the end that we were too busy to take on such a time-consuming challenge.

However, I left the photos of the goods on our coffee table and a few days later, a friend of ours, Janine Ruby Fay, happened to pop round and started flicking through them. They showcased really elegant outdoor furniture, which was very trendy at the time. After scanning the pictures, Janine said in her broad Australian accent, ‘Jeez, I absolutely love this stuff. Where can I get some?’

I told her that I could get it for her at cost price from the Hennings and she travelled down to the warehouse to look around. While she was there, John and Anne again mentioned the idea of opening a London shop and Janine got very excited about the suggestion. She rang me and said, ‘Craig, do you want to do this shop with me?’

As before, I liked the idea in principle, so I said, ‘I’ll help you to run it, but you’ll have to look after the shop on a day-to-day basis because I have my theatre career.’

After all that, at the very last minute, Janine had to pull out of the whole business. Lloyd came into the picture again as a possible replacement and so we ended up taking it forward together. The only way of getting the money for the first investment was for both of us to pool our resources. We negotiated a lease for ten years on a shop in Chelsea, which was terrifying. I remember saying, ‘Lloyd,
we have to pay the rent on this place for ten years! If it doesn’t work, it will be a nightmare.’

I’d only bought the house the year before, so I was slightly concerned about the situation; and then even more so because, just as the enterprise was looking solid, Lloyd was offered a job in Woolwich. He had finished his law degree and had tried for a year to get a position, but without success. You have to do two years of articles and he had completed a year with a firm in the City, but then they didn’t take him on. So when he was offered a job as an article clerk in a criminal law firm in Woolwich, he had to give serious thought to the new offer.

He sat there one night, saying, ‘Law or shop? Law or shop?’

I said, ‘Let me ask you this, Lloyd. You have trained for seven years to be a lawyer; we’ve been through your schooling, all the bad stuff, you’ve worked really hard to pay for it all and you have learned it all. What do you know about wood? What do you know about sales and marketing? Nothing!’

He went to see a psychic, who opened his door and said, ‘You’re not meant to work in an office if that’s why you’re here.’

‘Shop’ it was. Oh my God! We signed on the dotted line and opened our baby. We called it Revelloyd. I bought ten books on wood and furniture and we were in business.

Fortunately, the shop performed well – so well, in fact, that in 2000 we closed the Chelsea store and launched two branches in Upper Street, Islington. An opportunity also came up to invest in a restaurant – the Duke of York, in St John’s Wood – which we seized with enthusiasm. Unexpectedly, Lloyd and I were becoming quite the entrepreneurs. We were building up a rampant and wide-ranging empire.

In 1998, my theatrical workload became dominated by
Hey, Mr Producer!
a one-off event that celebrated Cameron Mackintosh’s life work to date. The list of stars who participated read like a who’s who of show business: Dame Judi Dench, Dame Julie Andrews, Michael Ball, Jonathan Pryce, Hugh Jackman and
Stephen Sondheim, to name but a few. It was a fantastic experience, but for me it was somewhat tainted. Cameron and I had always seen eye to eye in the past, but on this production, we didn’t agree on every aspect of the show, which was rather unsettling.

When you work with Cameron, he says, ‘What about this, dear?’ Then you go away and come up with a concept, take it back to him, and he rips it to shreds and reconstructs it. It’s your job, afterwards, to pick up all the pieces, put them together and make it coherent.

Cameron is very talented and has a very good eye, always seeing things that others might not. That’s why he is so successful. He doesn’t always listen – but then, what producer ever seems to? I’m sure us ‘creative types’ are all of a similar opinion, always thinking about ‘the art, darling,’ without much consideration for where the money’s coming from or how much is at stake if the show fails. I respect Cameron very highly indeed, as he would lay his last penny on a production if he believed it had legs.

It was Cameron and Julia McKenzie who came up with the idea of the showcase. I was attached to choreograph from day one, sitting through all the meetings and helping them pull it together. Cameron then brought in Bob Avian to oversee the work, though, which was a huge disappointment to me. Bob was credited as ‘Staged By’, while I was named under ‘Additional Musical Staging’.

Despite the discouraging credit, I had a large amount of responsibility, with the bulk of the rehearsals falling under my remit, and all sorts of issues left for me to resolve.

For the event, Dame Judi Dench was performing a Sondheim section with Broadway actress Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, the original star of
Miss Saigon
. They were perched beautifully on stools and one by one they were going to sing their individual bits and then take their own stool off the stage. One afternoon, Dame Judi was on stage mid rehearsal and I was talking to her through my ‘god mike’, which is a microphone that enables me to direct from the auditorium without having to shout over the orchestra pit.

‘Dame Judi, could you please just take that stool off at the end?’ I requested politely.

Suddenly, Cameron came rushing up to me in a panic and whispered, ‘Craig, what are you doing? You can’t ask Dame Judi Dench to drag a stool off stage!’

‘But Cameron, everyone is taking off their own stool. She doesn’t have a problem with it,’ I replied.

He was having none of it, so I had to mastermind a way to get Dame Judi downstage and off, while someone else had to carry her stool as well as their own.

Dame Judi is absolutely adorable and would do whatever was asked of her. It was only Cameron who was worried about a member of theatrical royalty hauling this big old stool off the stage. I suppose that’s a lesson one learns on the way: respect royalty.

When Dame Judi performs ‘Send in the Clowns’, it’s stunning. Standing ovation material. She is not the most talented of singers, in as much as she doesn’t have the voice technically, but she understands that singing is about telling a story. You don’t have to have the pipes, all the time.

In auditions, I have had scores of famous actresses come in and sing a song badly, but they tell the story so well that I am left gobsmacked.

Hey, Mr Producer!
was a Royal Gala performance, so the Queen and Prince Philip were going to be there. Dame Julie Andrews, who was the show’s compère, was really concerned about their presence. She came up to me beforehand and asked, ‘How do I address the Queen? Should I call her Your Majesty?’

Of course, I didn’t have a clue.

‘You’re asking the wrong person,’ I told her. ‘I’m Australian. I don’t know anything about Royal protocol.’ Nonetheless, I assured her that I would find someone to help, and that I did.

Julie was terribly concerned about her voice at the time too. She was backstage tapping her chest and broadening her diaphragm, trying to maintain the level of vocals that her
audience expect of her. It must be so difficult when you’re that big a star and your voice is that famous. She’d had problems with it in the past, and had to stop singing, so she was totally paranoid about it, which wasn’t surprising.

Julie is so wonderful. She’s polite, and very kind and generous backstage. Not a hint of the diva at all. Like many of those who are really famous, they no longer have anything to prove, so they take direction really well.

Bernadette Peters was the same. She’s fantastic to work with. I was actually quite nervous about meeting her. We rendezvoused at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and rehearsed the whole number in the front-of-house bar. I choreographed
‘You Gotta Have a Gimmick’ with her, Julia McKenzie and my old friend Ruthie Henshall. It was just brilliant because they are all divas, but each one in a very different way. Julia is out there – all bold and Broadway – while Bernadette is a smaller version, laid-back and funny, and Ruthie has that edgy, feisty, youthful quality about her.

It was tricky for Ruthie because she was still up-and-coming at that time, yet she’d been put on this pedestal with these two huge stars. In addition, Ruthie was starring in
Les Misérables
and shows like that can affect your voice. If you’re singing soprano, your chest belt range goes, so she was having some small vocal problems as we rehearsed. Also, she was on a very tough schedule, rehearsing from nine in the morning for one production and then going to rehearse another musical in the afternoon,
and
putting on a show in the evening.

I think she found it quite a struggle, especially as she felt she had to prove herself on this single performance. Not only was it in front of the Queen, but it was being filmed, so it was going out worldwide and it was for, and about, the biggest theatre producer in the world. Ruthie cracked a little bit under the pressure, just for a split second in the rehearsals, but like the trooper she is, she came up with the goods in the end. And then she wasn’t just good; she was out of this world.

I brought my mother over to the UK for
Hey, Mr Producer!
I knew it was going to be special. Mum was excited that she’d get to meet Julie Andrews, but she wanted to meet Hugh Jackman as well. Hugh wasn’t a mega movie star back then; he was appearing in
Oklahoma!
at the National Theatre. He is one of the nicest, most generous guys you will ever meet. He is so loving and down to earth. My mum had her photo taken with him and his wife. That snap is now blown up and displayed prominently in her house in Ballarat – except she’s cut Hugh’s wife out of the picture.

It was shortly after
Hey, Mr Producer!
that Hugh’s career really took off. I went to see him in
The Boy from Oz
on Broadway in 2003, and he was absolutely fantastic.

My mum wasn’t the only one meeting idols that night. I met the Queen, but even more importantly, I met Dame Shirley Bassey. In 1983, when I was on tour with
The
Black and White Minstrel Show
,
Shirley Bassey was all I ever played. I had a new ghetto blaster back then, so I used to put that on in my hotel room and listen to her formidable voice blaring out in stereo. Magatha would come along the corridor and bang on my door, shouting, ‘Craig, turn that bloody thing down!’

For a former drag queen such as myself, meeting Dame Shirley was a true life experience. She looked amazingly young and she had a vibrant personality, sparkly and vivacious.

In contrast, the Queen seemed very subdued and looked, the whole time, like she had something else on her mind. It must be so difficult, though, when you’re meeting loads and loads of people, to come up with something new to say each time. Cameron told her that I had pieced the show together, so she said she thought I’d done an absolutely wonderful job. I kept waiting for her to say: ‘Off with his head!’

The success of
Hey, Mr Producer!
was bittersweet. It was a tremendous event, but it marked the beginning of the end for my working relationship with Cameron.

F
rom 1998, I spent a great deal of my time in Europe. My old colleague Ken Caswell started putting on productions in Amsterdam and other European cities, and he asked me to do some choreography with him. I appreciated the opportunity to gain experience overseas, which would hopefully ensure that I wouldn’t make an idiot of myself in the UK when I came to take up my first West End choreography brief in my own name.

In Holland, I choreographed
Fiddler on the Roof
,
then
Titanic: The Musical
, and I also directed and choreographed Dutch productions of
Sweet Charity
and
Copacabana
. I was doing one show a year there and it felt like my second home. I adore Amsterdam and I love the Dutch because they are a friendly, amiable nation. The gigs did involve me being away from Lloyd, but he would come over for a week, and was always there for the opening night. We were never apart for longer than a fortnight.

When in Rome, as they say, you do as the Romans do, so I admit I have been known to try the hash cookies and space cake in Amsterdam. The problem is, you don’t get very much work done. Crossing the road, meanwhile, is downright hazardous. If a bike doesn’t run you over, a tram will. They come at you from every direction, which isn’t at all safe if you’re high.

Harder drugs, however, have never been my thing. As with cocaine, I wouldn’t want to repeat my experience on Ecstasy. I
couldn’t control it; if I’m drinking, I’m all right, on the whole, but I really don’t like losing control.

I took my first – and only – Ecstasy tablet one New Year’s Eve. I was at a gay club in Brighton, with Lloyd and his mum. Everyone else on Ecstasy gets up and dances, but I just ended up sitting down, in a corner, staring into space all night. I can remember everything that happened, and I wasn’t much fun on it. It’s ironic that it makes everyone else think they can dance, yet it stopped me from boogieing altogether.