The making of a musical thriller

The Scotsman

Sat 28 Aug 2004

The making of a musical thriller

CHARLOTTE JONES

THE CALL CAME THROUGH MY AGENT. The producer Sonia Friedman was eager for me to meet Andrew Lloyd Webber to discuss a musical version of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. I thought: "Will I really have to read another Penguin Classic?" Since completing my English degree I have had an aversion to anything longer than 400 pages that comes with an introduction. So it was with some trepidation that I came to read the novel two days before I was to meet Andrew.

I needn’t have worried. An international bestseller at the time of publication in 1860, it still makes a thrilling and breathless read. It works as a murder mystery, a psychological thriller, a detective novel and a domestic love story. I told Andrew: "You know, I’ve no idea how to write the book to a musical." He said not to worry. When he, Don Black and Christopher Hampton were writing Sunset Boulevard he had three houses in the South of France; each collaborator had a house to himself and they would meet up for lunch. I thought, "That doesn’t sound too bad."

WEEK ONE

Eighteen months later, after various "working" trips to Andrew’s homes in New York, Ireland and Majorca, the script and the score of The Woman in White exist and it is time to hand it over to the actors.

The principals and creative team meet at the Jerwood Space, near Waterloo. I’m told that musical theatre actors are a different breed. "Twirlies" they call them. On first impression they all just look slightly slimmer, prettier and can sing as well as act. Some things aren’t fair in this life. I have just discovered that I am pregnant. I am suffering much worse nausea than I did with my first child. It’s all very bad timing. I’ve already put on half a stone and suddenly I am living in the land of the sylph.

The Woman in White is played by an American actress, Angela Christian. She is whippet-thin with freckles and fierce red hair. She moves like a thoroughbred horse who might kick at any point. Perfect for our "is she mad or isn’t she?" heroine. Our "juve lead" Laura (Jill Paice) looks like Meg Ryan, but taller and more attractive. The hero, Walter Hartright, a drawing master, is played by Australian hunk Martin Crewes. He smoulders quietly in a corner of the room.

There have already been two workshop performances and Trevor Nunn, the director, has delivered a talk on the subject of Wilkie Collins that encompasses the novelist and his relationship with Charles Dickens (friendly), his love life (bigamous) and the differences between our adaptation and the novel (fairly extensive).

The story begins in a remote railway cutting in Cumbria in 1870. A mysterious woman dressed in white appears "out of the night" and accosts young Hartright, as he is on his way to give lessons to two sisters. She tells him that she has a secret and then runs away.

WEEK TWO

WE have the meet-and-greet with hundreds of people in the room. We go around introducing ourselves. Andrew finishes with: "I’m Andrew and I’m the composer." Everyone laughs. He sits on the nearest available chair, which resembles a throne. Bill Dudley reveals his set design. He has used video projections before but never on this scale. In one scene we move from a country house to a formal garden, to wilder countryside, to a waterfall, to a Cumbrian village.

WEEK THREE

Everyone said Michael Crawford would be difficult, but he is charming and giggly. He plays the scheming Count Fosco exactly as written by Collins: immensely fat, with a penchant for bonbons and white mice. In the show he will wear a fat suit. But such is his skill as an actor that within a week you see him piling on metaphorical weight, jowls descending, gait slowing.

WEEK FOUR

We move to Alford House in Kennington as the room at Jerwood is not big enough to accommodate our stage. The show has six stage managers and they are working their socks off. Every night after rehearsals there is a dry technical run at the theatre. By the time we open, the show will have had eight weeks of technical rehearsals, so demanding is the set design.

I find an ally in our associate director, Daniel Kramer. His incisive comments about The Woman in White’s secret lead to rewrites.

After rehearsals we have a script meeting to discuss rewrites. It gets a bit edgy. I am reminded that I am working with two of the titans of musical theatre. Andrew has been for the most part a courteous and sweet collaborator and Trevor Nunn is a wonderful dramaturg and diplomacy itself. But as experienced as they are, the heat is getting to them.

WEEK FIVE

Sonia Friedman is making her presence felt. We call her Sonia Jessica Parker, in homage to her enviable sense of style. She is the most glamorous producer in the West End, and one of the most powerful. She has the requisite Jekyll and Hyde personality of the producer - lovely one moment, tough and uncompromising the next.

She appears never to eat, or indeed sleep. She tells me that Rigby and Peller are making her a corset for the first night on 15 September. I am jealous. I will be 18 weeks pregnant so at that "is she pregnant or simply fat?" stage. It will be my first real red-carpet event.

Trevor, who is another workaholic, has broken away from his customary denim uniform today and in the stifling, fan-less heat has resorted to wearing a (denim-coloured) linen shirt. I tell him he looks nice. He laughs for a long time. So long I get nervous.

In rehearsals, however, he’s extraordinary to watch. He very much shapes the action, doesn’t leave the actors much space while giving them the impression that they are making all their own decisions. Actors, like toddlers, need their boundaries. He knows his stuff.

We have our final run-through. Michael Crawford uses a rat and a mouse for the first time - he sings, pirouettes and makes the rat travel up and down his outstretched arms. He is a class act.

The piece really seems to work as both a thriller and a romance. The score is clever and varied: lush, melodic one minute, dark and edgy the next. Two women who work in marketing are in tears by the end. All this before costumes and an orchestra. If I can only find a slimming kaftan for the opening night, things are looking good.

• The Woman in White previews at Palace Theatre, London (0870 8955579) from today.

The woman in demand

THE Woman in White is likely to be "rediscovered" with the launch of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical but the truth is that Wilkie Collins’s story was a success from the publication of the first instalment.

Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens, who published the story in his weekly magazine, All Year Round. The serialisation was so popular that readers queued up for the final instalment, published in August 1860.

Once the novel was published, shortly after the magazine’s final instalment, it spawned a host of Woman in White paraphernalia - bonnets, perfumes, even a Woman in White waltz. Since then, the book has never been out of print.

The story was written by Collins after a strange encounter when he and his brother Charles were seeing a guest - the artist John Everett Millais - home along the dark and semi-rural roads near their north London home after a party.

The men heard a terrifying scream followed by the appearance of a young and beautiful woman in white robes who quickly vanished into the shadows.

It transpired that she had fallen into the hands of a brute who had held her prisoner in a house in Regent’s Park for several months until she escaped.

The Victorian "sensation" was suggested to Lloyd Webber as a suitable subject after he admitted on TV that he was without an ongoing project almost two years ago. The Woman in White opens in the newly renovated Palace Theatre, the Victorian theatre Lloyd Webber originally intended for The Phantom of the Opera.

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http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=991722004

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