Anything Goes (26 page)

The cast for the LA run included Susan Egan, Bronson Pinchot and Carol Burnett, the latter of whom I’d adored as a performer since I was a kid. When my family had settled in Joliet, Illinois, back in the early eighties, sometimes on Friday nights my mum and dad would go out to dinner or to a party with friends, and they’d ask if I’d stay home with Murn. Every time, I said I would. She always thought she was babysitting me on those nights. Even though by that time in her life she was in a diminished state following a series of strokes, Murn and I would have a blast together. After Murn went to bed, which was usually pretty early in the evening, my friends and I, with my parents’ full knowledge, would gather in the basement rec room and we’d have our own shindig.

On nights like this, Murn and I would eat loads of sweeties, drink lots of shandies, and watch reruns of
The Carol Burnett Show.
Murn would laugh at anything Carol did, while I loved watching the moments in the show when one of the other performers was clearly
about to crack up, but couldn’t and was trying desperately to hang on to his or her dignity in front of the live audience.
The Carol Burnett Show
was sketch comedy at its best. Some day, I plan to produce and perform in a similar format, a desire I’ve had since my youth.

The other cool thing about working with Carol was that I was able to meet the designer Bob Mackie, who has dressed Carol and a load of other glamorous performers, including Cher, for years. One afternoon, I dragged two boxes of my collectible Barbie dolls into my dressing room and asked Bob to sign them for me, which he did, and then we spent an hour or so talking dolls, clothes, fabulous dresses and the women who wear them.

The night we opened
Putting It Together
at the Mark Taper Forum in LA was one of the first times I experienced the Hollywood red-carpet treatment for a show in which I was one of the leads – and let me tell you, I could learn to love that glamorous sort of occasion. For the opening night, I flew my parents out to California. The show was a terrific success, and at the premiere party my mum and dad swapped family stories with
The Golden Girls
star Betty White and had a good laugh with Doris Roberts from
Everybody Loves Raymond.

I’ve since enjoyed a few other opening nights of this style. One of my particular favourites was the New York premiere of the film
De-Lovely
with Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, which took place in 2003. Scott was not able to join me for that event and so I invited Clare instead.

We flew first class to the Big Apple and walked the red carpet together. Who knew all those years of dressing up my niece at Barrowman holiday parties would pay off? She was a pro at walking in stiletto heels down the carpet and into the cinema. At the party after the premiere, I performed a couple of Cole Porter songs for all in attendance, while Clare and Ashley Judd compared stories about
Milwaukee, where Ashley’s husband, the racing-car driver Dario Franchitti, has spent many hours speeding round the track at the Milwaukee Mile.

In the hiatus between
Putting It Together
finishing its run in LA and its subsequent move to Broadway in 2000, I finally accepted a job with Disney, in the West End production of
Beauty and the Beast.
The show itself was a treat to be in, and Clare and Turner (Andrew’s children weren’t old enough) flew over to see the production and hang out for a while with their Beast of an uncle.

When the Broadway production of
Putting It Together
eventually went into rehearsals in New York, because most of the cast and crew knew each other, it was like a family reunion. There were a couple of cast changes for the transfer. The legendary Broadway actor of Sondheim’s
Sweeney Todd
and Jerry Herman’s
La Cage aux Folles
fame, George Hearn, came in to play the husband of Carol Burnett’s character, and because Susan Egan had other commitments, Cameron recommended Ruthie Henshall for the part of ‘The Younger Woman’. Together again, Ruthie and I had a blast. We called ourselves the ‘Two Brits on Broadway’. In fact, many of us involved in the show had worked together before.

The theatre world is small. Loyalty and family are important. If you play well with others, they ask you to come back and play again. For example, Eric Schaeffer, who made his Broadway directorial debut with this production of
Putting It Together,
and I later worked together. Eric went on to be the Artistic Director of the Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center in 2002, of which I was also a part with my role in
Company,
and which was the first retrospective of Sondheim’s work at the Kennedy Center and a singular event.

During
Putting It Together’s
run on Broadway, I lived in a brownstone owned by Cameron Mackintosh in the centre of
Manhattan, about three blocks from the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where the show was running, and next door to the Actor’s Studio.
²    
If London was my ‘moveable feast’, New York was a delicious dessert: decadent, not always good for you, but filled with everything I love about a city: theatres, good restaurants, and loads of fabulous shops.

For my second time
³    
working with Sondheim, in
Company,
many of the same crew were putting it together again. However, the director of this show was Sean Mathias, a talented playwright and actor, who also happens to be Ian McKellen’s ex. I tell you, play well together …

Company,
unlike
Putting It Together,
is a fully realized musical, but the two shows share similar themes.
Company
depicts five couples at various stages of love and lust, as seen through the eyes of their single man-about-town friend Robert or ‘Bobby’, whom I played. The relationships are complicated and cynical, and the show can leave audiences not only with a melody or two in their heads, but also an idea or a question that merrily rolls around for days.

After the opening performance of
Company,
Stephen Sondheim came down to my dressing room. What he said to me that evening I consider to be one of the seminal moments of my entire career. Another such occasion was seeing my name in the opening credits of the third series of
Doctor Who
for the first time; my name spins on screen just after the spiralling TARDIS appears.

‘John,’ Stephen said to me, on the
Company
opening night, ‘of all the years I’ve seen this show, you’ve shown me who Bobby really is. You brought tears to my eyes.’

In this business, you don’t often get compliments like this from inside the house and I was appropriately stunned. Man, this was Stephen Sondheim speaking these words to me. His assessment of how I’d performed Bobby was incredibly affirming and I like to think that my success was partly the result of a little of my own tenacity. I’d pushed Stephen at lunch one day to talk to me about Bobby. Normally, I’m not the kind of actor who requires a lot of subtext. I don’t need to know what a character is like beyond the page when I’m acting. This is my profession, and if I’m good and the writing is strong then I don’t need anything else. Having a genius like Stephen on hand is not to be sniffed at, though, so I took every chance I could to learn from him.

During rehearsals for the show, he and I used to head to a local restaurant and eat oysters, platters and platters of fresh raw oysters. Although I loved them, we ate so many at each sitting that I think my greed triggered the shellfish allergy I mentioned earlier. To this day, I can’t so much as look at a prawn without going into cold sweats and my throat swelling shut.

On this particular day, we were taking a rest before hoovering up the next plate when I asked Stephen directly about Bobby’s character.

‘Is Bobby gay?’

‘Definitely not,’ he adamantly replied.

I took this answer to heart and I played Bobby as a kind of Peter Pan, a man refusing to grow up, afraid to embrace the responsibilities of being an adult, of being alive.

Company
happened to be the first show that my nephew Andrew saw me perform on stage. At four years old, he sat through the
entire performance – didn’t move a muscle, didn’t blink, and didn’t open a sweetie wrapper once.

During our run in Washington, DC, I lived in an extended-stay hotel overlooking the famous Second World War monument to Iwo Jima. Working on
Company,
which was part of the Sondheim Celebration, felt like being at a summer camp. The atmosphere in and around the Kennedy Center was electric because nothing of this magnitude, a run of Sondheim’s most renowned musicals showing in repertory, had ever been done before. I loved being on stage with my co-star Alice Ripley, who played Amy, and whose version of ‘I’m Not Getting Married Today’ still makes me breathless. I can’t compliment Alice enough for her sheer talent. Matt Bogart played David and was one of the sexiest guys I’ve shared a stage with. His real girlfriend let me flirt shamelessly with him. Working with this company of talented men and women proved something to me that I’d learned years ago at Opryland: if your company gets along, your show will too.

As it turned out, working on
Company
was a remarkable achievement in my career not just because of the wonderful cast, nor even because it was another opportunity to work with Stephen, but because playing Bobby was a role that adjusted my outlook on life. After seventeen performances, I realized that I was a lot like Bobby. Despite my self-confidence, my professional successes, my outspokenness and my sense of humour, at that time I still relied too much on people and on the opinions of others. Sometimes, this stopped me from taking more public risks in particular areas of my life. Playing the character of Bobby made me realize my responsibility to those beyond my immediate orbit.

Bobby is morally frozen, and this coolness affects his personal happiness. At that time in my life, I was politically frozen. I realized that my reticence to speak out about issues that concerned me
might be affecting someone else’s personal happiness. I had to be more confident and clear in who I was as a gay man, and I needed to become more of an activist in areas where I could make a difference.

Sir Ian McKellen also played a role in helping me foster this side of myself. Ian has been unflinchingly loud and proud about this aspect of his own life, and he has had a brilliant career in theatre and film. Ian’s smart and sure of himself, and over the years I’ve watched and admired how his support and activism for gay rights has made a difference.

Ian and I have been friends for a number of years, and he would often come up to my dressing room for a visit if he was in the West End and I was in a show. In fact, one of my favourite visits of his took place one night during the Christmas holidays of 2004, when I was performing in
Anything Goes.
Ian was the invited guest judge for the company’s Dressing Room Holiday Decorating Contest. A Christmas tradition in many theatres, everyone decorates their dressing room and puts on a tableaux. John Fahey and I dressed up from a scene in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
I was Joan Crawford in a wheelchair strung with holiday lights and other festive frivolities; John was a pretty scary Bette Davis. Ian wandered round all the dressing rooms, taking notes, and probably a few bribes – kidding – until he came to the Bullpen, the dressing room belonging to many of the show’s sailors. Those boys had designed an old-fashioned peep show, where Santa was doing all sorts of very naughty things to a reindeer. They charged a pound to get in, and from Ian and my parents that night they made a bunch of money for the charity West End Cares.

Later that evening, I’m proud to say we also helped Ian make history. Despite all the shows and plays he’d performed in over the years, he had never been in a West End musical. During the ‘Blow
Gabriel Blow’ number, we got him into a costume and snuck him on stage for his West End musical debut.

In 2006, Ian, who is one of Stonewall’s founders, accepted their Entertainer of the Year Award on my behalf, which I won for being a positive cultural role model, an honour I was incredibly proud to receive. I was delighted to be acknowledged by my community, and I believe I can trace that achievement back to the epiphany I experienced while playing Bobby.

I remember a conversation I had with Ian once, in which he suggested that he and I should plan a dinner party and invite all the actors who are gay and afraid to come out. We’d make them stay at the table until they realized that they
can
be successful and gay at the same time.

Who would be at this dinner party? Sadly, too many.

When I was eighteen, I found myself in a compromising position on a bed in a New York loft with a man whom I would consider to be one of the finest actors of my generation. Nothing ended up happening, but over the years our paths have crossed at a distance, and I think this man would be a prime candidate for an invite to Ian’s imagined dinner party.

One of the many lessons I’ve carried with me over the years from S. E. Hinton’s novel
The Outsiders
is that our identities are complex and changing. With the help of a number of real friends, and a couple of fictional ones such as Bobby and Ponyboy, I’ve come to terms with all aspects of mine.

‘Together Wherever We Go’

G
uns drawn, torches on, Eve, Burn, Naoko and I stand in
Torchwood
team formation outside an empty industrial building in early July 2007. No. Stop. That’s not quite right. Let me start again. Guns drawn, torches on, Gwen, Owen, Toshiko and Captain Jack stand alert and poised to enter a suspicious warehouse, where, a few moments earlier, Rhys, Gwen’s boyfriend, disappeared and Ianto followed him into the darkness.

‘Quiet on the set.’

‘Sound rolling.’

‘And, action!’