Young, who previously worked on musical adaptions of Big (with McGuiness and Walsh) and Elf (with Walsh), said it became evident that “this wasn’t going to be a jazz-hands musical like Elf or Big. While both Walsh and McGuiness are singers who have proved themselves as talented dancers (both competed in Strictly Come Dancing, McGuiness winning the glitterball in 2015 and Walsh a runner-up in 2012), there will be more singing than dancing in this show. Just doing that is making me a more engaging actor.” “You have to use your voice in more exciting ways and your body language has to be much more animated. McGuiness says this way has its plus points from an actor’s point of view, too. ‘You have to use your voice in more exciting ways and your body language has to be much more animated’. I’m saying to bigger producers in the West End, ‘Open your shows’… or we won’t have an industry to go back to because so many people will have left it.” This can’t be a financially viable way forward but it addresses getting people back to work in some form. However, the outcry of despair and depression on social media from people within our industry was overwhelming. “I absolutely understand and admire that position. Rose was driven to the decision after Cameron Mackintosh’s announcement that he would be shutting his theatres until 2021. Creatively, its director, Morgan Young, has had to expunge one kiss and make sure that actors are not singing directly in front of each other. An additional £60,000 to £70,000 has been spent on safeguards, including the reduction of audience capacity from 1,200 to 400, alongside one-way channels around the building, temperature checks, socially distanced seating plans with additional corridors in the auditorium, and Perspex screens along the bar. I got this tattoo about five years ago and I was a week into rehearsals when I realised that ‘every moment’ is also a repeating phrase that the chorus and cast sing in this show.”īut it may well have stayed ill-fated and unmade, had it not been for the herculean efforts of its producer, Michael Rose, to ensure the show goes on. “This is something else that freaks me out. “It’s a sign!” says Walsh, while McGuiness rolls up his sleeve and shows me a tattoo with reads: “Every Moment”. Just as their characters’ destinies are written in the stars, so there is a certain serendipity at work in staging this show at this time, they say. One half of the cast never interacts with the other half and the stage here is so large that it would have led to a natural distance between actors, before it became a requirement. It is true that the romance has distance built into its storyline: Sam lives in Seattle while Annie is in Baltimore. “There’s no other movie I can think of, off the top of my head, where you genuinely believe that these two people are in love without any physical contact.” How does that work? “It’s a little bit as if the stars aligned for us,” says Walsh. The actors, whose tests have just come in negative, are now at the back of the room, reflecting on putting on a romance without any physical contact. Kimberley Walsh is given a test for Covid-19 on entering the venue, during a preview for Sleepless, A Musical Romance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |