The Production Moves To Bristol

Victor Spinetti was wrong to tell me I'd got the part. It was highly flattering that Peter Wood wanted me to play the role of Pincus but the reality was that the other actor had been contracted and to give it to me the management would have to buy him out which would be prohibitively expensive. 

   My heart went out to the other actor that afternoon as I watched him working with Peter Wood on the scene I'd read that morning. It must have been very difficult for him in the light of Wood's loudly proclaimed wish that I should play his role.

   However these guys were all pretty tough when it came to such situations. During lunch one day I had a chat with Jeff Shankley who was playing one of the reporters. By this time Peter Wood had developed a palate of insults for each of the actors and I asked Jeff if he was at all affected by his remarks. "I'm director-proof," was his answer.

   Whenever Peter Wood became exasperated with the company he would rasp loudly: "My god! It's like pushing treacle upstairs!"

   He soon became something of a tyrant to certain people. Both Tony MacCauley and Dick Vosburgh were often banned from rehearsals. Vosburgh occasionally sidled up to actors and surreptitiously handed them a slip of paper with a line change on it. When Wood saw him doing this one day he bellowed: "Out!' The hapless Vosburgh shuffled away.

   There were certain roles which hadn't yet been assigned understudies and the part I dearly wanted to cover was that of Earl Williams, the sad convict whose execution by hanging formed the basis of the plot. Earl was being played by Robert Longden who, unlike me, was over six foot tall which was difficult as he had to spend almost all of the second act inside a roll top desk. 

   I began lobbying by telling Rosemary that I dearly wanted this job. 

   Three of us were playing police officers. Myself, Murray Ewen and Steve Law. The day that the guns were passed out for us to use in the chase scene when Earl Williams escaped, I was approached by Shaun Currey, who played the mayor. A distinctive looking man with strong eyebrows and a thick moustache, Shaun looked me straight in the eye and beckoned me to follow him.

   "I'm going to show you how to use a rifle," he said. Shaun had a military background and in addition to teaching me how to handle the weapon he took me through an exercise, spinning the rifle around which I incorporated into my daily warm up routine.

   The chase turned out to be a fairly exciting and mildly exhausting experience for it had to work the same way every time. 

   Steve Law and I began to improvise in character as our respective cops had a quiet moment talking before the alarm went off. We invented long elaborate tapestries of intolerance in which we'd complain to each other about this minority or that. This was a therapeutic way of fighting off boredom and it amused us enormously.

   "Hey Tom," Steve would stage whisper to me as my sergeant was Thomas O'Roone. "Have you heard the latest news about that fruitcake Williams?"

   Murray, the other cop, never engaged in this routine with Steve and I so it remained our little club however, many of the actors did this in the show. Neil MacCaul who played Woodenshoes, a police officer of European extraction was constantly making observations in character much to the amusement of those who heard him.

   Somewhere during rehearsals I had to escort Longden's Earl Williams down into the cell and Dennis Waterman as Hildy would bribe me so that he could sneak in and get an exclusive interview with the condemned man. Standing nearby, Victor Spinetti described it loudly as: "The bribing of Johnny M."

   The sight of me at 5'6" aggressively escorting Longden who was at least 6'2" must have amused Peter Wood as he suggested the two of us should develop a comedy act.

   Because of gigs, I wasn't able to go to the pub in the evenings while we were at Alford House but I heard all about these sessions from Steve Law who told me that Spinetti would put a pair of nipple clamps on the bar along with a £50 note and challenge anyone to down a pint of beer while wearing the nipple clamps. If they could keep the clamps on for the duration, the £50 was theirs. If not they paid Victor a fifty. Presumably he made a fair bit of money on that one as the nipple clamps were, according to Steve, excruciatingly painful.

   Spinetti was very funny and a thorough going rogue. I remember him with a wicked twinkle in his eye suggesting that I should come up to Shevelove's flat with him for some candy.

   He was a very outspoken actor who didn't have a high opinion of Peter Wood, particularly his habit of making personally insulting remarks about the actors in front of the whole company. 

   Spinetti was also a marvellous raconteur and, since he knew so many famous people in show business, his yarns were never dull. 

   His skill with accents and impersonations meant that he did wonderful imitations of all four Beatles. One of these yarns involved the time he took John Lennon and Yoko Ono to the National Theatre to discuss his production of Lennon's play with Sir Laurence Olivier. Spinetti bounced from a perfect Sir Larry to an equally perfect Lennon with ease.

   "My dear Johnny," he said frenetically as Olivier, "My dear Johnny if this play that dear baby is directing is turned into a film. If this play is turned into a film my dear Johnny I have to tell you that…" At this point he babbled emphatically: "…the National Theatre will own 60% of it!"

   To this Victor's Lennon replied in quiet drawling Liverpudlian: "Don't you have people you pay to talk about these things who can talk to the people I pay to talk about these things?"

* * *

Alford House where we rehearsed was big and a bit dusty and the set we were working on was on two levels. The first floor was just lumber on scaffolding so that the planks actually bent a bit when you walked on them.

   One physical detail about the set I didn't quite understand was that, at certain points in the show, it was to move hydraulically as the full set, which included a police station, press room, mayor's office and a jail cell was actually wider than the stage at the Hippodrome, Bristol and the Victoria Palace.

   So the stage management would loudly announce that the set was moving at the appropriate times during rehearsals.

   The days leading up to our departure for Bristol were fairly hectic. Steve, Murray and I all visited Berman's in Camden Town to get fitted for our police uniforms and I also got my Pincus costume. 

   In spare moments I was also making preparations for my Hoagey Carmichael night at the Pizza Express. Having a background in graphic design, I did all my own publicity and got some handbills printed before taking the coach to Bristol from Victoria. My girlfriend Annie, a nurse living in Pimlico, promised to come to Bristol to visit as soon as she could.

   My Bristol digs were up in Clifton not far from the suspension bridge which became a regular landmark in my early morning walks.

   Ant Bowles had two deputy musical directors who would conduct the shows when he couldn't and who played keyboards in the orchestra. They were Robert Tapsfield and Gareth Valentine and both served as rehearsal pianists at Alford House. 

   Gareth was the younger of the two and the whisper was that this was possibly his first job after graduating from music college. Another whisper was that Ant was his god father.

   It was no great surprise to anyone who met Ant that he was gay as he was extremely camp and spoke in a highly flamboyant manner with equally animated gesticulations. But there was nothing ostentatious  about the way he dressed which was very low key and ordinary. For the duration of the rehearsal period in London this was true of Gareth too.

   But when we arrived in Bristol Gareth had died his hair bright orange. His natural colour was blondish brown. On my first evening there I bumped into both of them down near the Hippodrome and we went for a meal.

   Ant was not happy about Gareth's vibrant new hair colour and told him so. The older M.D. was somewhere in his fifties while Gareth was early twenties and though both were gay there was a generational difference in their approach. For Ant, being respected by the musicians was terribly important and, though he never disguised his sexuality, he certainly didn't flaunt it in their presence. Gareth, however, didn't feel that way at all and if his hair colour and dress sense caused offence so be it.

   Our new rehearsal hall was the ballroom at the Grand Hotel which was as different from Alford House as it was possible to be. The dusty approximation of the set had been constructed exactly the same but in sumptuous surroundings. 

   By now we were engaged in full runs of both acts which were followed by detailed notes from Peter Wood. Everything had moved up a gear and the tension increased significantly. Dennis Waterman, whose dance rehearsals had always looked a bit casual to me, suddenly became very polished indeed. 

   The nightlife also hit a new high for me as I was able now to indulge in evenings out with fellow cast members and did so. I was already friendly with Steve Law who was a regular drinking companion of Dennis Waterman's so I naturally was pulled in that direction and my first few nights in Bristol produced some serious hangovers.

   Our first daytime visit to the Hippodrome was terribly exciting for me. Seeing Carl Toms' set in the theatre was a bit like discovering the lost ark of the covenant. It was a fabulously beautiful piece of work and must have cost a fortune. The wood was as solid as any house and the detail took my breath away. They let us all loose on it and while wandering around upstairs I encountered Tony MacCauley who asked if Steve and I would like to see the train. Naturally we said yes and he got someone to run it past the top window with the skyline behind it. Tony was even more like a kid in a toyshop than usual. 

   Ant and his colleagues were not with us at the Grand Hotel rehearsals because he, Robert and Gareth were all working with the musicians who had convened in the bar down at the Hippodrome. It was like seeing the different parts of a model plane converging to witness the separate components of this new musical locking together. The set, the orchestra, the lights and the singing all met each other for the first time.

   We also were assigned dressing rooms and I was sharing with Neil MacCaul, one of the funniest members of the company so I had no complaints. 

   As the technical rehearsal grew nearer the nightlife also became more intense and Peter Wood, whose notes were now much more detailed and pointed, began lecturing us on the need to conserve our energy. Warning the assembled company about all night drinking sessions Dennis Waterman shouted out: "I'm over here!"

To be continued… 

Rehearsals Begin In South London.

Having cast Windy City and set the rehearsal schedule the director Burt Shevelove then died of a heart attack.

Upon reading his obituary I immediately rang Dick Vosburgh who was as shocked as I to learn the news.

   Dick told me a meeting was being organised at Stoll Moss to decide how to proceed if at all. So it was not known at this stage if the show would go ahead.

   The next few weeks felt very uncertain but eventually a date in May was set for the start of rehearsals. A new director, Peter Wood, was appointed to take over. He was most famous as Tom Stoppard's director of choice.

   I had plenty of gigs to fill the time and I seemed to commute between the house in Islington where I rented a room from my good friend Pete Robbins and the flat my girlfriend Annie shared with her nursing colleagues in Pimlico. 

   At this time I always did a monthly gig for Peter Boizot at the Pizza Express and I arranged to do an evening of Hoagey Carmichael songs after Windy City had opened at the Victoria Palace in July.

   An actor I had become friendly with was John Turner who was currently playing Juan Peron in Evita at the Prince Edward. I knew John from the 100 Club where he would get up to sing with our big band and he was a sensational blues singer.  John was a big man and his voice was equally big.

   I went to visit him to ask if he'd join me at the Pizza Express for my Hoagey night. He said he'd like to but couldn't commit just yet. Before I left he gave me a bit of advice about Windy City. "Keep a diary. The show will go through so many changes. I've always meant to keep a journal and never have." It was advice I acted on and was soon recording my daily doings. 

   A feature of this time was the escalation of the Falklands War. Over the weeks in which Britain had mobilised a task force to head for the south Atlantic there had been much rhetoric but on the morning of 4th May I awoke to news on LBC that the British had sunk the General Belgrano and that estimates fluctuated between 500 and 800 deaths. Suddenly it was all deadly serious.   

   Some months before I had done a photographic modelling job for a friend named Pete Chippendale, a writer of novelty books and he had me dressed as a South American football referee blowing a whistle for a pull out poster to be included in his book about the upcoming World Cup to be held that summer in Spain.

   The title of the book was Balls and a columnist friend of mine on the Evening Standard ran a piece on me and printed this photo.

   All of Pete Chippendale's plans for a best seller were completely scuppered by the Falklands War and his book, despite some excellent publicity, didn't sell.

   On 10th May rehearsals for Windy City began at Alford House, a big dusty hall in south London near Kennington tube station. An approximation of the enormous and elaborate set design by Carl Toms had been constructed in the hall with scaffolding and staircases.

   Dick Vosburgh came over and introduced himself. He had rather long dark hair, a beard and one eye which remained stationary while the other one moved. It made him resemble Rasputin a bit.

   Chairs had been set out for the full company to sit and listen to Peter Wood speak before a read through of the script. I found myself sitting behind the show's stars, Dennis Waterman and Anton Rodgers. To my left was the immediately recognisable Victor Spinetti whose face was burned onto my consciousness through his performance as the neurotic TV producer in the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. 

   Peter Wood was a tall, striking fellow with wavy reddish brown hair and rugged good looks. His voice had a slightly distant quality like someone shouting through a snowstorm. I always heard him though I was never certain why. 

   One striking feature of the read through was the vocal performance put on by the actors playing the reporters. It was the only song which had been rehearsed and their harmonies on The Day I Quit This Rag were beautiful.

   After the read through a champagne party was hosted by Tony MacCauley, the show's composer. I met a few of the cast, John Blythe, Sean Curry and Bob Sessions. I was still using my singing name, Johnny M and it didn't take long before jokes about it began to surface.

   The next day we had a vocal call with Ant Bowles, the show's musical director and at some point Tony MacCauley wished to address us about how we should approach the singing of his songs. Ant was visibly annoyed by this and stood aside with his arms folded while Tony spoke.

   There are certain people who we meet in life that we describe as a 'one-off,' as they are so individual that you'd never meet another one like them. Such a person was Ant Bowles.

   Ant, short for Anthony, was a unique, interesting and talented fellow who actually looked a bit like the insect of the same name. My first encounter with him was to occur the following morning when I turned up a half hour late for his vocal call. I had mistakenly thought that the morning rehearsal began at 10.30 rather than 10. As I entered to find almost the entire company assembled in chairs before him he turned and began shouting abusively at me. I was mortified and clearly in the wrong but to be verbally attacked in this way was more than a bit painful in front of the full company. His tirade was not brief. It went on for what seemed to be a very long time. He even commented on the fact that The Stage had printed a photo of me that week and suggested that I shouldn't think that this made me special.

   Doubtless this was highly entertaining for the rest of the company but I was somewhat traumatised. I soon recovered and joined in the session and when the coffee break came I approached Ant to apologise again and explain that I did really think it was a 10.30 call. He was sweetness and light. "We were worried about you my darling," he purred. I vowed never to be late for one of his calls again.

   The entire rehearsal period and, frankly, the job of being in Windy City, was, for me, a bit like going to drama school. All the cast were seasoned pros and had confident ways of approaching the work. One detail I noticed was that many of the actors brought tape recorders to the vocal sessions and would get Ant to play their parts for them.

   My friend Pete had an Olympus Pearlcorder which could be carried and operated with one hand so I borrowed it and began taping bits of the sessions so that I could practice my parts more efficiently.

   I had never learned to read music and so any help I could give myself I grabbed at. I had terrible trouble with a particular phrase in the slow atmospheric Long Night and the day I finally got it right Ant came up to me and said: "Well done J.M. Now please do it like that forever."

   Over lunch with Bob Sessions I learned about the importance of having a half page ad in The Spotlight. I also was aware that I should do something about finding an agent so I turned to Dick Vosburgh who suggested I contact his friend Jeanne Griffiths, a Canadian, who ran her own agency on Oxford Street. Jeanne invited me up to visit her and without so much as an audition took me on.

   Being in a new musical is terribly exciting and when the songs are as good as they were in this show they sort of creep up on your consciousness and before you know it they're running through your head all the time. I found myself passing Tony MacCauley on the street one day and stopped to tell him how much I loved the songs. I was genuinely surprised at how happy this seemed to make him. Perhaps nobody else had told him.

   I made a decision to attend all the rehearsals I could regardless of whether or not I was called. If I was going to learn anything about this acting business I needed to take advantage of the proximity I had.

   Watching Dennis Waterman work on his dance routine for Hey Hallelujah was interesting as he was very low key about it. He had a hat and cane and did a bit of a tap routine. His love interest was played by Amanda Redman who turned out to be very good company as was Di Langton who played Molly Malloy, the prostitute. Spinetti played Benzinger, the patsy of the piece.

   Because of gigs, I hardly ever did any socialising with the cast during the rehearsal period. I had quite a few punishing one nighters as well as a Duke Ellington concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall featuring Adelaide Hall, the original vocalist on such famous disks as Creole Love Call.

   One morning Victor Spinetti, who lived in Brighton but was staying in Burt Shevelove's flat while in London, told me that a photo of the young Shevelove was the spitting image of me. A few days later Anton Rodgers said the same thing. 

   We were all set to do a run through of Act 2 at a morning rehearsal when one of the stage crew approached and told me I'd be reading the part of Pincus. This was the role which I was contracted to understudy and the actor playing it hadn't turned up.

   Although I had read the play several times, I'd simply concentrated on my main role as the desk sergeant and hadn't done any work on the Pincus scenes so I was really doing it cold. My approach was to play him very straight but something about my physicality must have struck a chord with the assembled cast members who all howled with laughter as I did my scene. 

   When it was over and we had a break I saw the actor playing Pincus looking sheepish. He told me that the director wanted me to play the part. My immediate reaction was disbelief and we agreed to meet in the pub. 

   Peter Wood then appeared saying I was perfect for the role and should be playing it. Conflicting emotions consumed me. On the one hand I was thrilled to be considered but I felt terrible for the other actor. Our stage manager Rosemary said that it was highly unlikely I could take over the role. 

   I went to the pub where I found Victor Spinetti, Matt Zimmerman and Neil McCaul telling the actor playing Pincus that he should go and call his agent right away.

   As soon as he had left the bar Spinetti turned to me with a seriously wicked grin on his face and said: "You got the part kid!"

To be continued…

A Crooner Auditions

During the spring of 1982 I found myself standing in a blinding spotlight on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, being talked to by a male American voice from the stalls.

   "Tell me about yourself," said the voice.

   I was there to audition for the musical Windy City and I had never auditioned for anything theatrical before. 

   I remember noticing the nervous actress in the green room shuffling through her sheet music and realising I hadn't brought any dots with me. 

   Although I had an enormous collection of sheet music which I did use on certain gigs, for most of the jazz jobs I did, as a professional crooner, I would check what songs the piano player knew and agree keys and tempos. 

   So when I was called out on the stage I asked the pianist if he knew Honeysuckle Rose in F. He said he didn't but he would follow me. Well...this guy never played a single note and I wound up accompanying myself vocally as I scatted my way through the Fats Waller standard for the amusement of the two American men sitting back in the darkness of the stalls.

   Next they asked me to read the scene which one of the Americans, Dick Vosburgh, had sent me. An actor came out to read with me and the scene went okay though I had my face buried in the text. 

   When it was over the director, Burt Shevelove, came walking down front to talk to me.

   "Tell me about yourself," he said. I proceeded to explain that I was a crooner and band singer specialising in popular songs of the 20s, 30s and 40s and that I felt that I had the right instincts to also be an actor.

   Shevelove was very friendly and was clearly giving me the time of day. I would later learn from Barry James, the actor who had read with me, that he could be cruel and blunt so I was very lucky. In fact one American star who had auditioned for the part of Walter Burns was Telly Savalas. According to Barry, after Savalas finished his song, Shevelove said: "Okay Telly. Now sing us a song with some notes in it." 

   I had no idea who Burt Shevelove was and this was almost certainly a good thing as I might have been intimidated had I known that he was the writer and director of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. To me he was just a very nice guy.

   This whole adventure had come about because of a gig I'd done at the Pizza Express in Dean Street. It was an evening of Harry Warren songs and one of the people to sit in and do a number was Frank Lazarus who had written a show about the Marx Brothers with Dick Vosburgh. The guy who managed the jazz at Pizza Express at that time was another American who I was friendly with. Vosburgh got my number from him and rang me up.

   Dick Vosburgh was a writer and sounded very dynamic on the telephone as he had a distinctive, deep American voice and a truly engaging manner. He explained that Windy City was a musical based on the Hecht & MacArthur stage play The Front Page which I knew from the Billy Wilder film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

   Dick had written the book and lyrics and the music had been composed by Tony MacCauley.

   The first question Dick asked me was if I could act. I was able to say yes with some conviction because of a series of classes I'd had with one of the teachers at the Central School Of Speech & Drama. I had sought these out on the advice of Frank Marshall, a Hollywood movie producer I'd gotten to know.

   One thing about being a performer is that you meet a wide variety of people from all walks and on one occasion I attended a lunch at the Inns of Court with Keith Nichols, my bandleader in the Midnite Follies Orchestra. We were there to discuss a ball the band was booked to perform at. As I arrived, this law student cornered me before entering and asked if I'd be willing to sing a duet with an actress. I told him it depended on whether she was any good but he rather put me on the spot by saying she was sitting at our table so I said I was open to the idea.

   We went in and I was immediately struck by the beauty of this young woman. Her name was Betsy Brantley and she was a brunette from North Carolina. She was intelligent and charming in the extreme. We quickly became good friends.

   This actress was still studying at Central but was on her way that afternoon to an interview with Frank Marshall, the producer of Raiders Of The Lost Ark which was about to begin filming at Elstree Studios.

   The duet we agreed to do was Wait Til The Sun Shines Nellie which had been sung by Mary Martin and Bing Crosby in the film Birth Of The Blues. We got together a few times to rehearse and our first performance was at the Pindar Of Wakefield where Keith Nichols ran a jazz evening on Tuesday nights. 

   The duet went very well and, as I was leaving the Pindar with my girlfriend, a very American fellow approached me, handed me his card and introduced himself as Frank Marshall, the producer of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

   Like most people who grew up going to the cinema, I had a preconceived notion of what a movie producer looked like and the few I had met conformed to that stereotype. Frank, however, was nothing like that and over the next several weeks he and I became very friendly. 

   Not a single thing about his sartorial appearance said Hollywood. He was casually dressed and, as it was raining, I pointed him and  his colleague Kathy Kennedy towards a tube station as there were no cabs around. Asking where I was from I told him Marin County and he said: "Oh. That's where George is from," meaning George Lucas who was executive producer on the movie. 

   Frank and I had a few things in common. We were both short at 5' 6" and we were also the same age with many similar experiences in life. 

   Over dinner one night he was talking about a difficult  scene they had shot that day with Harrison Ford. When I asked about how it had worked out he said: "You know these guys have a lot of little tricks that they've developed over time."

   I then told him that I had always felt that singing would eventually lead me to acting but that being around Betsy and him had finally made me think I should do something proactive about it.

   "Get Betsy to fix you up with some private classes at her drama school," he told me. It was probably a thing to say which he instantly forgot but it was advice I acted on.

   The movie eventually wrapped, the circus moved on and I hardly ever saw Frank Marshall again. I did my classes with the fellow from Central who taught me a few basic principles about preparing a scene. I remember him stressing the necessity of reading the whole play through, not just my own part. He gave me three pieces to work on over a few weeks and seemed pleased with the results. Then I simply returned to my world of gigs and singing.

   Raiders came out the following year and, of course, became a huge success spawning sequels and what Hollywood would eventually come to call a franchise. 

   It was at least two years later that I got the phone call from Vosburgh but had I not taken those classes, my Windy City audition would have been a total disaster.

   As it happened I received a recall, again at the Lane. This time I brought sheet music with me. Instead of two American voices out in the stalls there were about thirty, some of whom asked me questions but, again, Burt Shevelove walked down to the front and said: "Tell me about yourself."

   My life as a crooner was a fairly hectic grind in those days with gigs most nights of the week and a good deal of travelling so I didn't spend too much time thinking about the audition for this show. It was, therefore, a very pleasant surprise when I received a phone call from Celestia Fox, the show's casting director.

   She told me that they would like to offer me a small part and an understudy role and that the director felt that I would come out the other side an actor.

   This did present me with a dilemma. Signing a year's contract for the show would definitely mean I'd have to vacate my position as vocalist and front man for the Midnite Follies Orchestra. But I had to ask myself how many more times in my life such an opportunity might come along. The answer was almost certainly never.

   There were other considerations as well. My singing name was 'Johnny M' and under that moniker I had established myself within the jazz world as a gigging performer. One celebrity I had become friendly with was Barry Humphries and when I told him of the offer he wondered if I should negotiate for billing but they were not offering me a role of substance so I had to accept that I was going into this show without any of the status of my singing career. "Coming out the other side an actor," was the phrase which reverberated.

   Keith Nichols was quite understandably upset. Not only would he be losing a singer and front man but my background in graphic design and promotion meant that I did all the Midnite Follies publicity. For this I was paid a bit more than the musicians.

   My inner debate didn't last long. I decided to accept the offer in early April 1982 and rehearsals were scheduled to begin sometime in May.

   As was my habit of many years, I always began each day by reading The Times as it was, at that time, an excellent newspaper. I flipped through the pages losing myself in a few news stories and glancing at the editorials. I then turned over to the obituary page. There in bold type at the top of the obiturary column was the name: Burt Shevelove.

To be continued.