Hello everybody. 

First of all, huge, huge apologies for being so lax at keeping up with my diary entries.  I had a look on the website recently and found that my last diary was actually in January, which is really not good enough, so apologies to everybody.

Well, 2007’s been a funny old year so far.  I’ve just had a very good break from work which was much needed.  A chance to recharge my batteries and get back to some sort of normality, well, I hope to normality but more about that later.

It’s been a very busy year for me but odd.  It’s funny, when you’re a freelance performer some times you have great years of work, work, work, work, and you get carried away with it all and you thrive on it. Other years you don’t have so much work but the work that you do have is top-notch and then other years, like this year, you have quite a lot of work and it all feels a bit strange and not quite … well, I think I’m actually a bit sour because of my last working experience so let’s go back to the beginning of the year. 

I started the beginning of the year with a workshop.  It was a workshop for “Imagine This” which was the musical I was doing in Plymouth.  It was a massive undertaking, but I did the workshop in London for about three weeks.  It wasn’t particularly fruitful for me for various reasons but I met some lovely people but, moving swiftly on.  I thought I’d have a bit of time off before we started, actually what happened was almost straight away we went into auditions for the proper run of “Imagine This”, so “Imagine This” has pretty much been taking up a lot of my time between about November/December last year right the way through to 21st July when we finished it. 

So anyway, we had auditions straight after we finished the workshop, so no rest there, and then I got a surprise call from my agent saying, could I meet up with a director called Hannah Chissick and a producer called Neil Laidlaw who were putting on a production of “Side by Side by Sondheim” at the Venue in Leicester Square.  There were about 4 or 5 weeks until it was on, so it was very very short notice.  We had something like 2 weeks to get the cast together.  I met up with them, got on with them really really well, Hannah Chissick is a fantastic director and a great person and actually gave me one of my richest experiences as a choreographer.  We had such a great working relationship and the period of working on “Side by Side” has been one of my fondest memories I think ever choreographing so thank you, Hannah, for that.  As I say we had about 5 weeks until we opened so 2 weeks to find the cast, and we found a fantastic cast. There are only 3 people in the show, 3 singers: Josie Walker, Alasdair Harvey and Abbie Osmon, all fantastic and great people to work with.  We had such fun, the whole show was great and as I said before, great experience doing it.  Sadly, that all came to an end too soon.  It ran for about, I think, 8 or 10 weeks in London and ended pretty well. Every time I went to see it I got so excited, it was the sort of show I could sit and watch every single night and see something different in.  The performances were top-notch and Hannah and I were so proud of the show and who knows, something may happen to it.  I hope I get to work with Hannah again.

Back to “Imagine This”:  we went into rehearsals finally after weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of auditions.  It’s a funny old show, “Imagine This”: very tricky subject, anything to do with the Holocaust is tricky, but I think the writer Glenn (Berenbeim) handled it very well.  I had a difficult time on this project.  At the end of the day, I didn’t really enjoy it.  It was very testing for me, and I don’t really want to say too much about it other than I’ve decided that if it does go on somewhere else, I won’t be a part of it.  That happens sometimes in this business, you know, you can’t guarantee that everybody’s going to get on and you can’t guarantee that you’ll going to get out of it what you’d hoped you’d get out of it.  You just don’t know until you try, and I tried with this one and failed, but I had a great time working with the cast, wonderful people again.  I always get on very well with the cast.  Five weeks in Plymouth, well I was only there for about three and a half in the end but it felt a long time.  Yeah, on to bigger and better things.

More recent news, workwise: I’m about to go into doing a workshop, a project I’ve been working on with the impresario Raymond Gubbay.  He came to me probably in about October last year.  He’d had an idea about doing a show using the music of Richard Rodgers.  Richard Rodgers was the music part of Rodgers and Hart and later Rodgers and Hammerstein, and he also wrote music on his own.  Amazing composer composed so many great hits with both sets of partners.  I’ve been studying his music for the last few months and trying to piece together a show.  Very early stages, but very exciting so I go into a workshop for that in about 2 weeks time which I’m very excited about.  It’ll be a dance show, completely dance, no singing I think (so far).  I’ll have a rather large cast, hopefully.  It’ll probably tour before coming into London either next year or the year afterwards, so I’m very excited about that.  I’ve put a lot of hours into it and yeah, I can’t wait to get going on it.

Other news: “Liaisons” is still ongoing, I’m still chasing it, still trying to get it off the ground again.  It seems like the never-ending saga but I won’t give up on it because I believe so much in it and I hope there’ll be an audience for it when we do finally get it off the ground again.  It’s been an uphill struggle, going to various producers and so on, but fingers crossed this time it’ll work.

That’s kind of it, workwise.  Again, it’s a funny old business, this business.  You know, you can be chock-a-block, for months and months and months or even years and then suddenly you have a lean spell, and you feel like, lost and kind of, not quite sure what you should be doing which is kind of what I’m going through at the moment. As I say, I might be affected by the whole “Imagine This” experience but at least I’ve got this workshop to get my teeth into which’ll be great.

Other than that, it’s been not a very nice summer in so far as about a month ago, my beloved Nan died.  She was 92, amazingly, she’d had a wonderful life but she’s much missed.  I loved her a lot, and then 2 weeks ago my godmother also died.  She was diagnosed with cancer about a year and a half, maybe 2 years ago.  She’d fought it pretty well but then it got the better of her in the end.  She’s actually the reason I gave up smoking when she was diagnosed with cancer, so I have her to thank and also so many wonderful memories.  She was a great person, wickedly funny, very talented, very sweet, very supportive of me throughout my career, great friend to my mum and she’ll also be much missed.

Finally, actually two things:  one, I want to say hello to my family living in Holland: my Uncle Terry and my Aunt Ellie, and Kim. I met them again after a few years at my Nan’s funeral.  That was the one thing that was nice about coming up for it, was meeting family I hadn’t seen for a while because of, you know, geography, and they told me they followed my career reading the website, so thank you Karen and Jane for that, and thanks guys for following.  A big up to Susan and Chris as well.

And I’d like to thank all of you for continuing to be interested in what I’m doing in my life and also, Karen and Jane for continuing to plug me despite my unwillingness to do anything if I’m feeling a bit down so thanks guys and I hope you understand that it’s been difficult this year.

So here’s to a fantastic end of the year and a great 2008, but you will be hearing from me before then I promise!

Okay guys, take care of yourselves and yeah, I hope to see you from a stage very soon.

Okay, bye,

Adam x