The first part of the diary took us from
Grand Hotel to the beginning of work on
Liaisons. Now read on:

The rehearsal period was great and the dancers right from the word go were very into what I was trying to do. Everybody was forth-coming with ideas and really everyone was greatly involved in the creation of it. Lez was in the rehearsals a lot, which was fantastic for me because his eye is very good and that’s why I wanted him to co-direct it with me because he has such a good theatrical eye. He could tell me when he thought things were working and when things weren’t, and I was lucky because I had my brother Simon who, not only was playing the part of Prevan, but was also my second cast Valmont, so that it meant that I could put him into the role and could sit back and watch it, which was great. Again, something that normally when I’ve done musicals which I’ve choreographed and been in I haven’t had the opportunity of doing. I’ve just been watching videos back which isn’t very easy so it was nice to be able to sit and watch and really get to know this piece that I was creating.

About some of the cast now: obviously I was thrilled that the lovely Sarah Wildor, my beautiful wife, had agreed to do it. Somebody like her is unique in her talent of being able to create roles on stage whether it be in dancing or in acting, and she brings so much to the creation of a piece, not just her role but the overall creation, so I was thrilled that she was going to be doing it. I knew that would be a huge boost to the show. Sarah Barron was playing the Marquise de Merteuille, who is another fantastic performer who I’ve known from Swan Lake, she was in the original Swan Lake with me, and I was thrilled that she was doing it. Helen Dixon and Damian Jackson were Cecile and Danceny, two young dancers. Helen, who I’d worked with on Singin’ in the Rain, was a wonderful performer. Damian I hadn’t worked with before but another great actor and dancer. And then we managed to get a fantastic singer called Marilyn Cutts to play the role of the aunt, Madame de Rosemonde. Lez and I had decided we wanted a singer in it just to give the whole piece a more theatrical feel so that it wasn’t specifically dance but was a mixture of dance, acting and music and a singer, we thought, would add to that. Marilyn is a fantastically respected person in the business and we were absolutely thrilled to have her on board, she was just wonderful. We had Yolande Yorke-Edgell playing Madame de Volanges. I hadn’t worked with her before but she’s a wonderful dancer and choreographer. Richard Curto, Comte de Gercourt, I’ve worked with him a lot, he’s a great person to have involved in anything I do because he brings so much to it, he’s quite a performer! And I think that’s it. So we had a great cast, and we had a great second cast there as well, and oh, of course, my brother - I forgot my brother! He was playing Prevan and the priest. As I said before, it was great to have him on board because we never work together professionally, apart from this very small piece we did for Exeter two years ago, so it was great to have him involved in the whole creation of it, and have his input and watch him doing my part as well.

So the rehearsal period in London; we struggled through it. We had a few little distractions, like Japanese film crews with photographers in there, which is always difficult because obviously, the rehearsal room is your real safe space. It’s difficult to let people in to see when you’re creating because it’s a very delicate process and obviously you don’t want anybody to see it until you’re ready to show the finished product so it was quite difficult having those interruptions, but we did it as we knew it was very important for the Japanese publicity. Since Japan had taken on such a risk by producing this show solely on their own, which was a very big and expensive show, we had to give something back, but it was worth doing, definitely.

Anyway, we got to the New Year and suddenly, before we knew it, we were on a plane to Japan! We got out there, and had a week of rehearsals in a studio first of all, just to sort of acclimatise ourselves. I had a bit to finish off and once we’d done a week of rehearsals we were into the theatre, onto the stage and it all happened really quickly. Before we knew it we were in front of an audience doing this completely brand new show, and amazingly, it went pretty well! The audiences in Japan seemed to love the show which was a huge relief to me and the rest of the cast and Lez. We took a whole big crew out with us, from builders and painters to all the technical staff to run the show, and the production manager. The composer Philip Feeney came out to finish off the score and to oversee the rehearsals with the orchestra and hear the sound, we had a sound designer and two sound people, we had huge amounts of people with us to get the show up and running and the Japanese staff were incredible. They’re always incredible, they never cease to amaze me. How they can get a show up so quickly is unbelievable.

So we were on, and it was amazing that we got there, and I have to say that I’m extraordinarily proud of what we achieved. Looking back at it now, there are some things in the piece that I want to work on now that we’ve done it, but I think the fact that we got as far as we did in that space of time was quite incredible and I’m extremely proud of what we did achieve.

So we were in Japan, the usual fantastic fans were following us around, being incredible and being very generous, not only in the way they received the show, but the presents they were buying us and just being lovely. We were treated very well, TBS looked after us incredibly well for the whole trip. The company were having a great time, some of them had been to Japan before and others hadn’t. People had family coming out, partners. Sarah and I both had family coming out, which was lovely and we had a really good time. Oh, I forgot to say as well, Karen and Jane came out as some of you know, and it was lovely to see them in Japan with their families and it was great. Bizarre seeing them in Japan but it was lovely to have that support from them and from other people who flew in to see the show.

We were there in total for about seven weeks, one week of rehearsals followed by six weeks of performing, and we did pretty much four weeks in Tokyo and then we started touring round. The Tokyo bit was a joy, the touring round bit was very, very hard! We were going to places to do one or two performances, Osaka we did three performances. It was pretty tiring for everybody but the worst was for the Japanese crew who had to put that huge, enormous set up in no time at all – I don’t know how they did it, but they did, so I’m extremely grateful to them. And, yeah, we just had a fantastic time. Sarah and I did some site-seeing on our days off, I did lots of press work. One of the best trips we did, was a trip to Kyoto which was amazing, the whole thing was pretty incredible.

End of Part 2. In the final part of the diary Adam will bring us up to date……………coming soon.