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.