Hello everyone and welcome
to the latest diary!

It’s been a while since I’ve done a diary so I do apologise for that. Needless to say the last year has been probably the busiest year I’ve ever had. It’s been incredibly tiring and stressful but now I feel relaxed enough to give you a little insight into what’s been happening since I last wrote.

Grand Hotel was where I was when I last did a diary. It was probably one of the greatest professional experiences I’ve had, mainly because I was working with actors in a very different style of musical to that which I was used to. I had a very good relationship with the director, Michael Grandage and loved working with all the actors. I was a bit scared of working with them, having never worked with actors before, but we had a few dancers and that helped me a lot. But it was quite a challenge to come up with a style that they could all use and which could become the theme for the whole show. We had quite a long rehearsal period, about six weeks, but it was intense because literally the whole show from beginning to end, pretty much, had to be choreographed, apart from a couple of sections. So it meant that my work was much bigger than it had been in previous musicals that I’ve choreographed, but it was great. It was actually lovely just to be able to choreograph, as opposed to perform and choreograph in a musical. It meant that I could see everything much more clearly. I could just concentrate on that, which was great. As I said, we had six weeks of rehearsal and I really did enjoy it. I came straight off doing Singin’ in the Rain in Leicester so didn’t have a huge amount of time to prepare. I had about a week which was good and it was a great experience, really wonderful.

The oddest thing about the whole thing was that once the first night came along I had to leave it because I started rehearsals for Liaisons on the day of the first night of Grand Hotel, so it was pretty much a straight over switch from Grand Hotel to Liaisons which again, was very hard but it sort of happened! I saw it onto the first night and suddenly my mind was taken off and my concentration was on something completely different, which was bizarre! Also it wasn’t great for Liaisons because obviously I wanted to have as big a build up to that as possible and lots of time to work on it before we started rehearsals, but that wasn’t possible because of my schedule for last year. So I sort of came at Liaisons straight away. Lez [Brotherston] and I had been away with Sarah for the weekend to talk about what we were going to do a couple of weeks before we started, so we were sort of geared up and ready to go. We had all the casting there, we got together a great cast. I was really happy with everybody we had. Liaisons was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’d never been almost solely in control of a whole evening’s work before and it was a hell of a lot of pressure, obviously a lot of work not just in the studio but out of the studio. Being choreographer, producer and dancer pretty much took its toll on me.

The rehearsal period in London was for about five weeks with a break over Christmas, so we did three and a half or four weeks before Christmas, and then had about five days off and then worked again for another week and a half with a couple of days off for New Year. It was really very intense, very stressful, very hard work and I was really looking forward actually to just getting on the plane to Japan because it would be nice to at least have 24 hours travel just to take my mind off everything!...............

End of Part One. In the next part of the diary Adam will tell us about the Japanese performances of Liaisons. Coming soon.