'everybody Wants A Beautiful Love Story Once In Their Life'
Sun Herald
Sunday January 27, 2008
For Gillian Lynne the joy of hoofing it began at an early age and is still going strong, writes JACQUELINE MALEY.
WHEN Gillian Lynne, dancer, choreographer and BAFTA winner, was five her mother thought something was wrong with her. She would not sit still in class and had difficulty concentrating. "I was always up and down. I had too much energy and I was a bit of a pain in the neck, to be honest."It was so bad that she took me to the doctor. I think mummy's probable conversation with him was, 'Is this normal?"' The doctor decided to observe his patient, so he turned the radio on in his surgery and took Lynne's mother into the next room, leaving the five-year-old alone with the music. "As soon as they went, of course I got up and danced, all over the desk, all over the room," she recounts. "Mummy was told: 'There's absolutely nothing wrong with this child, she just longs to dance. Take her, now'."Lynne is now 81 and still has trouble sitting still. Throughout our interview, she gets up to physically demonstrate particular dance techniques, leans forward to coo at Bessie, her English fox terrier, and gesticulates at the photographs, awards and statues that crowd her cosy English drawing room - knick-knacks which tell the story of a busy lifetime in the British arts.We are here to discuss The Phantom Of The Opera, the musical juggernaut for which Lynne did the choreography, but she talks about much else besides - the joy of dance, her long and varied career, and why she prefers broccoli to curly kale. Lynne likes to talk.She is particularly effusive when it comes to Phantom, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2006. The dramatic show, based on a story by 19th-century French author Gaston Leroux, is travelling to Sydney in May for the first time in 11 years. Anthony Warlow will star as the Phantom, and newcomer Ana Marina will play the beautiful and doomed Christine Daae. Arthur Masella will direct. These days Phantom, the story of a tortured recluse who haunts a Parisian opera house and falls in love with its most beautiful singer, is a phenomenon as much as it is a musical. It has overtaken Cats as the longest-running on Broadway, has been seen by more than 80 million people in 124 cities around the world and has won numerous theatre prizes, including seven Tony awards. Lynne - who worked on Phantom just after finishing the choreography for Cats, Lloyd Webber's other enormously famous musical - is responsible for much of the show's dynamism. She plotted the staging of the Manager's famous sextets and the elegant ballets that dot the action, and injected movement and drama into the great Masquerade Ball in act two. "It's romantic," Lynne says simply, when asked to explain the musical's extraordinarily long stage reign. "Even though everyone's busy being so modern and loving films where everybody gets killed and is tortured and all of that, I think that at the end of the day everybody, in their heart of hearts, does want romance."Everybody wants a beautiful love story once in their life. And Phantom is the epitome of romance."It helped that the team of creators was very talented, Lynne says, not least of all herself. "You've got a wonderful set, a very talented director, you had a choreographer who knew exactly what she was doing because she grew up in an opera house and you had a very clever star."But basically Andrew wrote a bit of a masterpiece." Lynne was used to choreographing shows in conjunction with a composer, but in the case of Phantom, Lloyd Webber had the music, narrative and characters all mapped out - but it was up to Lynne to make them move. "Cats was a just series of poems which [Lloyd Webber] had done brilliant music for, but a show it wasn't. We had to knit that together," Lynne explains. "But Phantom was entirely in his brain. It was there. Bang. All of it. Partly I think because he'd written it for the woman he loved at that time."That woman was Sarah Brightman, Lloyd Webber's then-wife, who played the lead role of opera singer Daae when the musical opened in London in 1986. Lloyd Webber's labour of love lasted longer than his marriage, which ended in 1990. Still nimble despite two hip replacements and a foot reconstruction - necessary maintenance work after 50-odd years of dancing - Lynne is actively involved in some of the productions of Phantom still put on all over the world, from Osaka to Las Vegas.When we meet, she has just been to sit in on rehearsals of the London production in the West End, to make sure the dancers are staying true to her original choreography. "Often they've forgotten why they're doing something," she says. "They're doing the actions but nothing's happening behind the eyes. Sometimes the line of the body gets blunted, and the positions, and it just needs bringing back to base."Lynne charms, cajoles and talks the dancers back into line. For such a long-running musical, she admits it can be difficult to maintain focus night after night, but she remembers enough about performing to be able to motivate her dancers. Lynne began dancing professionally aged 15, and went on to become a leading soloist with the prestigious Sadler's Wells ballet. From there she moved to the Royal Ballet, then on to the London Palladium. She danced on Broadway and in films, even starring opposite Errol Flynn in The Master Of Ballantrae in 1953.She had classical training but later learnt the basics of jazz dance, and was instrumental in bringing the modern form to Britain in the 1960s."Everybody was saying, 'The English can't do it like the Americans, they don't have the energy or the pizazz of the Americans'," she says. "That's true, most of them didn't, but I actually did." A classically trained dancer with a feel for jazz moves was a rare thing, and Lynne found herself much in demand, as a dancer and later, as a choreographer. Her choreography credits include A Simple Man, a ballet starring Moira Shearer, for which she won her BAFTA in 1987. She has also worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company and even the ABC - in 1975 she choreographed Fool On The Hill, a special television production featuring the Australian Ballet, starring Robert Helpmann."For me dancing has always been the ultimate joy," she says. "When you're right on your form and you're doing a role you love, especially if you're doing it somewhere like the Met or Covent Garden, it beats everything. It even beats making love. Usually lasts longer anyway."Lynne, who says it's "embarrassing" to be called a showbiz legend, confides one of the secrets of her success, passed on to her by John Barton, long-standing director of the Royal Shakespeare Company: never read reviews."You know in your heart whether what you've done is any good, and nobody saying, 'Well done!' or "That's a pile of s***' is going to change that," she says with aplomb.The Phantom Of The Opera opens on May 11 at the Lyric Theatre, Star City. See www.thephantomoftheopera.com.au or phone Ticketmaster 1300 795 267.
© 2008 Sun Herald