BEHIND THE CURTAIN

WHEN THE RED DEATH NEARLY MISSED HIS MARK

WHEN THE RED DEATH NEARLY MISSED HIS MARK
In The Phantom of the Opera, the Masquerade scene is one of the most visually striking moments in musical theatre. At its peak, the Red Death appears—towering, ominous, and unforgettable.
To the audience, it looks effortless. To those on stage, it’s a tightly choreographed sequence where timing, technology, and performer precision must align perfectly.
The Red Death entrance is a masterclass in stagecraft. The performer is already dealing with multiple layers: facial prosthetics, a wig, and an imposing Red Death headdress featuring a skull mask, feathers, and heavy structure. Vision is limited—mostly straight ahead through black gauze. Looking down at the floor is difficult. Peripheral awareness is minimal.
The sequence unfolds in rapid, exacting steps:
The performer rises into view on a hydraulic lift.
A Harlequin character masks the reveal with a sweeping cape.
On a dramatic musical chord, the Harlequin steps aside.
The Red Death stands at the top of the Masquerade staircase.
He descends with measured authority.
A pre-recorded vocal plays as he crosses the stage.
He reaches a precise floor mark.
Smoke hits.
He disappears instantly through a STAR TRAP in the stage floor.
Every beat is timed. Every step matters.
On one particular night, the moment took a dangerous turn.
The pre-recorded vocal—originally operated using reel-to-reel playback in earlier productions—malfunctioned. As the Red Death began his descent, the vocal track slowed dramatically, dragging into an eerie, distorted slur. Then, without warning, it sped back up, racing to catch its place.
From the audience’s perspective, it was strange and unsettling—almost surreal.
On stage, it was pure tension.
The performer had no live microphone to compensate. He could not adjust vocally or musically. He could only stay in character and maintain composure. Meanwhile, the orchestra was playing live. The Musical Director had to react instantly, attempting to realign the orchestra with a track that had suddenly lost all stability.
But the greatest pressure was still to come.
After descending the staircase, the performer had only a couple of seconds to locate and stand precisely on his mark for the STAR TRAP. With restricted vision, a bulky costume, and disrupted musical timing, this was not just a theatrical challenge—it was a safety-critical moment.
If he misjudged his position, even slightly, the consequences could be serious. The STAR TRAP opens and closes rapidly. Being off-centre could result in striking the edge of the opening during descent. There’s no time to hesitate. No visible cues. No verbal guidance. Just instinct, spatial awareness, and absolute focus.
What felt like an eternity for the performer was likely around thirty seconds of intense, high-stakes concentration.
He adjusted. He trusted his training. He found the mark.
Smoke hit.The trap opened.The Red Death vanished exactly as intended.
Backstage and in the control areas, adrenaline was high. Stage management, sound, and the orchestra were all reacting in real time. The Musical Director, on headset, was prepared for emergency instructions if the sequence needed to be altered or halted. Contingency plans were always in place: if the performer felt unsafe or uncertain of his position, he could avoid the mark entirely and exit safely offstage. The trap would be secured immediately, and no other performers were ever positioned near that area during the effect.
But on this night, professionalism and composure carried the moment through.
The audience witnessed a slightly unusual musical distortion. Some may have been puzzled. Others may have assumed it was intentional or part of the spectacle.
What they didn’t see was the surge of focus on stage, the rapid recalibration in the orchestra, and the silent coordination across departments to keep the moment safe and seamless.
This is the real illusion of theatre.
Not just the hydraulic lift, the towering costume, or the STAR TRAP—but the ability of an entire company to absorb an unexpected failure and continue as if nothing had happened.
The Red Death appeared.The Red Death vanished.
And the magic, against the odds, remained intact.
 
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THE SOUND YOU NEVER HEAR

THE SOUND YOU NEVER HEAR
When something goes wrong with a microphone in a West End show, the audience almost never knows.
The actors usually don’t either.
Unless it’s blindingly obvious — a pop, a crackle every time someone sings — no one on stage knows whose mic it is.
Only one person truly knows.
Sound No.1 at the desk.
They hear everything.
The moment something glitches, they’re already on headset to Sound 2 and 3, organising where that actor can exit and what needs to happen — full mic swap, pack change, or a temporary fix.
And that decision depends on one thing:
How quickly that person is back on stage.
If there’s time, you might get a full change.
If there isn’t, you project harder and hope the desk compensates.
No one runs on to rescue you.
You just get louder.
Which, realistically, doesn’t help as much as you’d like.
Most mic failures come down to heat and sweat. You’re under lights, in layers, moving constantly. Packs are usually worn at the waist, tucked into the lower back — but that depends on costume. Sometimes you wear them higher on the chest if you’re lying down a lot and don’t want it digging into your spine.
The head mic itself can get damp.
Even when placed perfectly, sweat finds it.
When it goes, you feel it immediately.
Not silence — just absence.
The sound doesn’t carry the same way.
And while you’re adjusting instinctively, the sound team is already solving it without the audience ever knowing.
What most people don’t realise is how controlled theatre sound actually is.
It’s not “turn it up and let them sing.”
If you have a strong voice, you’ll likely have compression on it — meaning no matter how hard you try to belt, you won’t exceed a programmed ceiling.
I used to hate that.
Then you realise there are thirty-two microphones open at once.
Without control, it would be chaos.
A lot of the mix is programmed now. Shows are plotted into computer systems. Cues are called from prompt corner. The engineer is there to intervene if necessary, but much of it runs on pre-built precision.
Sometimes prompt corner will message sound directly if something’s wrong with a mic.
It’s constant monitoring.
And then there’s the orchestra.
Most actors barely see them.
Unless you’re right at the front of the stage, you won’t see into the pit. They arrive at different times. You could pass half the orchestra on the street and not recognise them.
You see the conductor — sometimes live, sometimes on a monitor mounted somewhere visible.
But the relationship is distant.
Another surprise?
Click tracks.
Certain moments in certain shows run to track — not because someone can’t sing it, but because automation, staging or spectacle demands exact timing.
If something is moving at a precise angle, or scenery is travelling, the music locks to it.
The audience assumes everything is fluid and organic.
Sometimes it’s measured down to the beat.
In one show, there was even a separate two-person team responsible purely for live effects — punches, slaps, roars — watching monitors and executing cues manually, separate from the main desk.
Sound in theatre isn’t just amplification.
It’s architecture.
Designed by a sound designer.Placed strategically around the auditorium.Balanced for clarity, not volume.
When it works, no one notices it.
And that’s the point.
The best theatre sound is the sound you never think about.
 
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BECOMING SOMEONE ELSE

BECOMING SOMEONE ELSE
People think stage makeup is cosmetic.
A bit of foundation.A wig.Some contouring.
They don’t realise that in certain shows, it’s construction.
When I understudied the Beast, it wasn’t about looking different.
It was about becoming physically unrecognisable.
Facial pieces.Hair work.Layering.A head structure that altered my entire silhouette.Additional shape built into the back and shoulders.
You don’t just wear it.
You inhabit architecture.
Application took about an hour. The team were meticulous. They knew every line, every edge, every blend point. There was chatter in the chair — normal conversation — but underneath that was concentration. Placement has to survive heat, sweat, movement, singing.
The first time I saw myself fully finished in the mirror, it was a genuine pinch-me moment.
It’s an iconic costume.An iconic role.And suddenly it’s you inside it.
The excitement hits immediately.
So does the nervous energy.
Because once it’s on, there’s no hiding from the responsibility.
The entrance is a lighting trick. The audience sees the Prince… and then in a flash, it’s the Beast.
And you can feel it.
That intake of breath.That shift in the auditorium.
It’s not polite applause.
It’s impact.
Physically, it’s demanding but manageable.
The face feels slightly tighter.Eyebrows don’t quite rise the same.The jaw doesn’t open quite as freely.
You have to work harder with diction.
Heat can build — especially depending on the time of year. Theatres hold warmth. Layers trap it. Under stage lights, it amplifies.
Occasionally a piece might need adjusting, but that’s what your dresser is there for. They watch constantly. They know the weak spots. They re-secure things before you even register a problem.
You are never alone in it.
But you are separate in it.
There’s a strange focus that comes with being that transformed. You’re not milling around backstage. You’re not casually chatting. You’re concentrating on your track, your cues, your timing.
The character lives slightly apart.
And that’s appropriate.
What surprised me most was how freeing it felt.
Once the prosthetics were on, I wasn’t thinking about me anymore.
No self-consciousness.No vanity.No awareness of how I looked.
The character does the psychological work for you.
Your shoulders broaden naturally.Your movement lowers.Your energy deepens.
You feel powerful.
And because so much of the visual identity is already built around you, you can lean fully into the physicality without hesitation.
It’s not acting from scratch.
It’s responding to the structure around you.
From the audience side, they see the finished image — the animated version come to life.
What they don’t see is the weight.The layers.The density of what you’re carrying.The effort required to make it appear fluid.
At the end of the night, removal is almost ceremonial.
Piece by piece, the character disappears in the mirror.
There’s relief.Air feels different.Your face moves freely again.Your body resets.
You go from something enormous… back to yourself.
And that contrast — from towering fairytale creature to ordinary human in a dressing room — is one of the strangest, most grounding experiences theatre gives you.
Transformation isn’t about illusion alone.
It’s about how costume, prosthetics, lighting, and performance combine to make you believe you are something else entirely.
And for two and a half hours, you are.
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AUTHENTICITY VS CASTING POLITICS

AUTHENTICITY VS CASTING POLITICS
There is a difference between reinvention and revision.
Theatre has always reinvented itself. New stagings. New choreography. Radical design concepts. Gender-swapped productions. Minimalist revivals.
That isn’t controversial.
What feels new — and more divisive — is the quiet reshaping of historically defined roles in long-established works, without openly acknowledging that a reshaping is happening.
When a writer creates a musical, they don’t just write songs and dialogue. They build a world. Social structures. Cultural realities. Geography. Class systems. Political context. Era.
And sometimes, race is woven into that architecture.
In some shows, race is incidental. In others, it is embedded in the historical world the audience is being asked to believe.
If a production openly declares:“We are reimagining this.”Then it’s a concept.
Hamilton does that from the first note. It reframes history deliberately and unapologetically. It rebuilds the world around its casting choices. It doesn’t pretend nothing has changed.
But when a production presents itself as historically grounded — in costume, politics, social context — yet alters visible cultural elements without reframing the narrative world, the audience is being asked to silently adjust.
That’s where tension arises.
It isn’t outrage.It isn’t hostility toward performers.
It’s cognitive dissonance.
Your brain registers that the world looks historically specific — but not entirely consistent.
This isn’t about denying opportunity. The broader conversation about representation in theatre is real and necessary.
This is about authorship and integrity.
If a writer constructs a world in a particular time and place — Victorian London, 19th-century Paris, pre-Revolutionary France — that context is part of the text, even if it isn’t explicitly spelled out in every line.
Hypothetically, if a producer one day decided to radically alter a culturally specific Sondheim piece without reframing the entire production concept — not because the text demanded it, but because the climate encouraged it — would we call that reinvention? Or would we question the integrity of the adaptation?
That question isn’t about race.
It’s about ownership.
Once a work exists in the public domain of performance, who decides how far it can be stretched before it becomes something else entirely?
Reinterpretation can be powerful. But selective reinterpretation — where the script, the historical setting, and the social implications remain untouched while visible elements shift — creates a fracture.
If everything in a historical world is treated as flexible except the dialogue, then internal logic becomes negotiable.
And theatre depends on internal logic.
The audience doesn’t consciously analyse it. But they feel it.
If race, class, and power structures are embedded in a historical narrative, altering one element without reworking the rest can change the implications of the story — even unintentionally.
And that’s the uncomfortable territory.
Not inclusion.
Not diversity.
But coherence.
There is also something rarely spoken about openly within the industry: the reluctance to question these decisions at all.
Theatre is a small world. Careers are fragile. Reputation matters. It is easier to stay quiet than to risk being labelled regressive or difficult.
So conversations that should be nuanced often become polarised before they begin.
You either celebrate every reinterpretation — or you’re accused of resisting progress.
But perhaps the real question isn’t whether actors are capable of playing roles across lines of identity.
Perhaps the question is:
When does reinterpretation honour a piece… and when does it quietly rewrite it?
And if we are rewriting it — shouldn’t we at least admit that we are?
Because once internal logic becomes optional, we’re no longer simply staging the work.
We’re negotiating it.
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THE POLITICS OF WHO GETS TO STAY

THE POLITICS OF WHO GETS TO STAY
We like to pretend theatre is merit-based.
Work hard.Be reliable.Deliver every night.Be ready when your moment comes.
And when the opportunity appears — you’ll rise.
That’s the story.
But staying power in theatre often has less to do with upward movement… and more to do with being safe.
Long-standing ensemble members don’t stay by accident. They are reliable. They know the show inside out. Management trusts them. Company managers like working with them. They turn up, tow the line, don’t cause friction. You can call that professionalism. You can call it strategy. Sometimes it’s both.
And in long-running productions, reliability becomes gold.
If someone can deliver eight shows a week without complaint, without incident, without disruption — they become low risk. And low risk is valuable.
But here’s the uncomfortable part.
When someone stays for years — sometimes decades — they are, in effect, occupying space that never opens.
There is nothing wrong with loving your job. Nothing wrong with stability. Mortgages need paying. Rent needs covering. Life gets real as you get older.
But theatre was never meant to be just stable employment.
It’s supposed to be movement. Growth. Hunger. Evolution.
When stability becomes the goal rather than the by-product, something shifts.
And it leaves a slightly bitter taste.
Because at some point, staying stops being about love of the show and starts being about security.
Meanwhile, there are understudies doing everything right. Always ready. Always prepared. Applauded backstage. Told “You were magnificent tonight.” Told “Next recast, it’s yours.”
Well-meaning words.
But theatre is full of theatrical talk.
Praise is not promotion.Encouragement is not advancement.
You can be flawless in your cover role. You can never miss a show. You can be trusted implicitly. And still, when the recast comes, someone else is already in mind.
Not because you failed.
But because decisions are happening above your pay grade.
That’s when the illusion of meritocracy starts to crack.
You realise loyalty is valued day-to-day — but not strategically. Being a good employee keeps you in the building. It does not guarantee you climb within it.
And favouritism? It exists.
Not always in a sinister way. Sometimes it’s familiarity. Sometimes it’s relationships. Sometimes it’s simply that certain personalities fit comfortably with decision-makers.
You can work relentlessly and still know — quietly — that someone else is ahead of you before you even step into the room.
Theatre rewards predictability more than it rewards hunger.
Production offices likely operate on one simple rule: if someone is professional, reliable, and trouble-free, they can renew indefinitely.
From a business perspective, that makes sense.
From an artistic perspective, it creates stagnation.
I’ve felt that tension myself — the pull between stability and movement. Not because I fell out of love with theatre. Quite the opposite. I stepped away from the West End at a time when I felt progression had stalled and life outside the building was heavy. Sometimes you regroup. Sometimes you redirect. In my case, I stayed in entertainment, just on a different path.
But distance gives clarity.
And after decades, I’m looking to step back into it in some form — not because it’s safe, but because it still matters.
That’s the irony.
The system protects those who stay.But it rarely protects those who step away.
The real question isn’t who is talented enough to rise.
It’s who is permitted to.
And those are not always the same people.
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WHEN FLAME IS REAL

WHEN THE FLAME IS REAL
The mausoleum scene in The Phantom of the Opera is designed to feel dangerous.
Raoul below.The Phantom above — fifteen feet in the air — standing on top of the stone mausoleum.
Staff raised.
The music tightens and the cue lands.
A burst of flame shoots from the tip.
It isn’t theatrical sparkle. It’s a defined hit of pyro — fast, bright, hot. You feel it as much as you see it.
This was 1995.
We rehearsed it. We plotted distances. We trusted the cue. But we weren’t living in the hyper-safety culture of today. I certainly wasn’t having conversations about whether my wig was specifically treated for flame. You assumed everything had been thought through.
And to be fair — most of the time it had.
The stage management team were meticulous. The crew were disciplined. Pyro calls were not casual. They were measured, checked, cleared. There is a culture backstage that the audience never sees — everything is safety-led. Nothing fires unless it’s been signed off. Nothing moves unless someone has called it.
But you also develop your own internal safety system.
In rehearsals, your mind quietly works through scenarios you’re never formally told to consider.
If that fires early, I’ll step back.If it feels too close, I’ll give it distance.If something looks wrong, I clear the space.If it’s major, I’m off — no heroics.
That internal contingency planning sits in the background of every technical effect.
On one performance, while I was on as understudy, the cue went as normal.
The staff fired.
The confrontation continued.
The scene felt exactly as it always did — charged, dramatic, controlled.
I exited as normal.
Only when I came offstage did someone say, calmly:
“You were on fire for a few seconds.”
Not panic. Not chaos.
Just a fact.
Flame had caught the edge of my wig.
It burned briefly.
Then went out.
I hadn’t felt it.
That’s the strange part.
You’re focused on text, on rhythm, on timing. You’re not thinking about heat at the edge of your hairline. You trust the system, and the system — on that night — held.
But it doesn’t bear thinking about what might have happened if it hadn’t.
And that mausoleum had already shown how serious its mechanics were.
Before I joined the production, a principal Phantom was positioned inside the stone structure at the top.
The unit is pinned to the main set. It has to be. It’s elevated, weight-bearing, counterbalanced. There is no room for guesswork.
On one occasion, the pin was missed.
The entire unit fell backwards.
With him inside it.
Fifteen feet up.
He sustained back injuries and was off for a while. It could have been catastrophic. In a strange way, the mass of the structure may have shielded him from something worse.
But that’s the point.
The spectacle you see from the stalls — smoke, stone, flame, music swelling — sits on top of steel, height, pressure and human procedure.
The audience sees gothic romance.
We see clearances, pins, marks, cue lights and fail-safes.
And despite all of that discipline, you always carry a quiet awareness: this is real flame, real height, real weight.
You don’t dwell on it.
You don’t panic.
You trust your team. You trust your own instincts. You know that if something genuinely feels unsafe, you abandon the moment and clear the stage. No line of dialogue is worth injury.
Most nights, it runs perfectly.
And because it runs perfectly, the audience never questions it.
But every so often, a flicker reminds you that theatre isn’t just illusion.
The magic is engineered.
And the risk, however managed, is real.
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MISDIRECTION

MISDIRECTION
Theatre borrows heavily from magic.
Not because it hides rabbits in hats,but because it understands attention.
Misdirection isn’t deception for its own sake.
It’s choreography of focus.
An audience can only look in one place at a time.Designers, directors and performers decide where that place is.
A lighting shift.A musical swell.A burst of movement.A joke that lands at exactly the right second.A roar that pulls the eye upward.
All of it says:
“Look here.”
And while you look there, something else happens.
Sometimes misdirection exists purely for illusion — a transformation, a disappearance, a substitution that feels impossible.
Other times it’s necessity.
A performer needs seconds to reposition.Machinery needs to reset.A costume requires time.A sequence demands breathing space for safety reasons.
In large-scale, fantastical productions — especially Disney shows — misdirection becomes structural. It isn’t decorative. It’s built into the architecture of the scene.
You may think you’re watching escalation.Or peril.Or an emotional crescendo.
Often you’re also watching time being created.
Time for a performer to prepare.Time for an illusion to be engineered.Time for the next impossibility to become possible.
And there are always multiple ways to construct it.
A fight scene could end one way.The illusion could follow in reverse order.A double could take one responsibility, or the principal could.
You can’t have both at once.
So choices are made.
Not randomly.Not lazily.Deliberately.
The version you see is the one that best serves coherence, safety and impact.
Because coherence is everything.
The audience must never feel a handover.Never sense a relay.Never detect the seam.
They must believe they are watching one continuous thread.
In reality, theatre is often a series of precisely timed exchanges.
Energy passed.Position swapped.Responsibility shifted.
But the audience isn’t meant to study the mechanics.
They’re meant to feel inevitability.
That’s why misdirection isn’t a trick.
It’s structure.
It protects safety.It protects timing.It protects illusion.
And when it works properly, it doesn’t feel clever.
It feels effortless.
The audience thinks they’ve seen the moment.
They haven’t.
They’ve seen the version designed for them.
Misdirection isn’t about hiding incompetence.It’s about orchestrating excellence.
The best illusions don’t distract you.
They direct you.
And when you leave the theatre saying,“I’ve no idea how they did that,”that’s not mystery.
That’s control.
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THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL WEEK

THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL WEEK
Four days before the concert, my voice started to go.
At first it was manageable. Then it wasn’t. By the second day, it was clear it wasn’t improving — dryness, loss of tone, air instead of sound. I reported it.
A doctor was brought in immediately. He gave steroids. There was no noticeable improvement.
This wasn’t a normal week. This was the 10th Anniversary concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The current London cast were part of it, alongside previous company members. Some were selected for filmed sections. The rest of us formed the larger ensemble.
Missing it wasn’t an option.
I went to the office. The company manager was there, and the resident director happened to be in the room as well.
The question came back, indirectly but clearly:How are you going to sing in the concert?
There was no concern in it. It was an assessment.
The implication was straightforward — if the voice isn’t there, you don’t do it. Stay focused on the theatre run. Be ready for Monday.
I answered plainly.
“Did you just hear me on the barricade? Nothing came out. Just air. It was embarrassing. I need to go off sick and rest. I am doing the concert.”
I took the following day off. Not to avoid the show, but to give myself a chance of being fit enough to perform.
There were swings. Cover was in place. The show could continue without disruption.
On the day of the concert, my voice was about seventy percent. Not clear, not reliable, but usable. There was still dryness in the tone, so everything had to be controlled. From the outside, it passed. Internally, every line had to be managed.
That is the difference — what the audience hears versus what it takes to produce it.
The concert went ahead. I performed.
Nothing was said afterwards. No follow-up, no discussion.
It didn’t affect my position in the show. There was no consequence in that sense.
But the exchange in that office stayed with me.
Not because of what was said, but because of what sat behind it — the assumption that the problem might not be real, or not serious enough.
The system doesn’t see the condition. It sees the result.
So the decision sits with the performer.
You either stay in and struggle through it, or you step out briefly to make the performance possible.
That week, I stepped out.
And I did the concert.
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FROM NO.1 TOUR TO THE WEST END: SAME SHOW, DIFFERENT WORLD

Before we ever got to Manchester, before the reviews, before the audiences, before the barricade had rolled into the Palace Theatre, we learned one of the most important lessons in live theatre.
If the moment changes, somebody has to lead. And everybody else has to follow.
That sounds quite simple when you say it like that. But in rehearsal, it can be terrifying, thrilling, ridiculous, and sometimes, when I look back on it now, slightly dangerous.
We were rehearsing Les Miserables at the London Welsh Centre, which already felt rather apt, because there were several Welsh performers in the company. We were preparing the first ever No. 1 musical to venture out of London. That had never been done before. A major West End musical leaving London in that way was a risk. It had to work. It had to prove that the show could live beyond the West End and still carry the same weight.
And this was not a little version. It was not some polite copy. This was Les Mis. It was big, serious, expensive, ambitious, and everyone knew it mattered.
During that rehearsal period, we were working on the part of the show around Do You Hear the People Sing. The actor playing Enjolras, the leader of the students, had been told by the director to improvise the scene. The rest of us were told to do whatever he told us to do.
That was the instruction. Follow him.
I was not standing at the side watching this happen. I was one of the students. I was part of the scene, part of that ensemble body around him. And in Les Mis, that matters, because the students are not decoration. They are the force of the scene. It is an ensemble moment. Everyone is inside it.
So the scene began. Enjolras started circling the large hall we were rehearsing in, holding his period rifle. We followed him. Thirty-plus actors moving together, listening, watching, waiting for where he was going to take it.
Then suddenly, he left the hall.
No warning. No explanation. He just went.
And because he was leading the scene, we followed.
Out of the building, across a very busy road, him holding this period rifle up in the air, shouting and chanting, with this entire company of actors behind him. Traffic stopped. People must have wondered what on earth was happening. We crossed into this quiet garden park, did a couple of laps, then went back across the road and back into the rehearsal space.
Nobody could have pre-empted it. Nobody knew where he was going. Nobody knew what he was going to do next. We trusted him and followed with our lives, literally.
At the time, it was amazing. It was funny. It was exhilarating. When I look back now, I also think: that was bloody dangerous. If anyone had thought he was waving a real weapon in the air, who knows what could have happened? But afterwards, we laughed. We really laughed. Happy, happy memories.
And that exercise tells you a lot about why that tour felt the way it did. It was not just about learning the notes, the moves, the entrances, and the exits. It was about building a company that could trust each other. It was about learning that if something goes wrong, or if a moment suddenly changes, you cannot freeze. Someone leads, everyone follows, and together you rescue it.
That was the National Tour. That was the spirit of it before we had even opened.
The tour was not second best
I think people outside theatre often assume that the West End is always the ultimate version of a show. They hear London, and they think that must automatically be the best, the most important, the peak of the whole thing.
And of course, the West End has a kind of prestige that is difficult to explain until you have worked there. It is historical. It is solid. It has longevity. It has a global audience. People come from all over the world to see those shows. There is a feeling around a West End building that you are stepping into something established, something famous, something that has existed before you and will probably carry on after you have gone.
But the truth is, for me, the National Tour of Les Mis was the magic.
One hundred percent.
That is not me trying to diminish the West End. I went into the West End. I was proud of it. It mattered. But if people assume that London was the part I would point to as the great achievement, they would be wrong.
The tour was the part that stayed with me.
It was the first ever No. 1 musical to venture out of London. It had never been done before. That gave the whole thing an energy. It was not a safe little exercise. It was a statement. It was the show saying: this can live outside London. This can be huge outside London. This can carry the same power somewhere else.
And the cast was stellar. Every person in it brought magic to the show. That is not fluff. That is not nostalgia making everything golden. Manchester was having rave reviews. We were being hailed as the best cast yet. It was a very, very strong cast and production, and it genuinely gave London a run for its money.
There was a sense that this mattered not only because it was Les Mis, but because it was the next major step in the life of the show. It was being tested in a new way. It had to fit other buildings, other audiences, other rhythms. The Palace Theatre in Manchester was huge. In some ways, physically, it felt more generous than London. The side stage space in Manchester was way bigger than London. London, surprisingly, was tiny by comparison.
That is the sort of thing the public never really thinks about. From the auditorium, a show can look enormous. But backstage, every building has its own personality. Some theatres give you space. Some theatres squeeze you. Some make the show feel grand. Some make it feel like a military operation in a cupboard.
Manchester had scale. It had room. It had a sense of occasion. And because this was such an important venture, everyone came to inspect it. Producers, creatives, people connected to the original life of the show. They wanted it to be top notch. In some ways, there was a feeling that it had to be better than London, or at least strong enough that nobody could dismiss it as the lesser version.
And it was strong enough. It absolutely was.
The people who shaped it
Part of that came from the people leading it.
We had Ken Caswell, the great Ken Caswell, as associate director. Ken was an original cast member from the Barbican beginnings of the show, so he was not coming to it as someone who only knew Les Mis from the outside. He carried the original bloodline of it. He knew where it had come from. He knew the shape of it, the seriousness of it, and the humanity of it.
We had David White as musical supervisor, and Stephen Hill as musical director. Those names matter because these were not people treating the tour as a lower-tier job. The standard was drilled into us. The importance of it was drilled into us. The sense of responsibility was always there.
And the company itself was unusual.
It was a mix of seasoned professionals, gifted amateurs making their professional debuts, people who were totally green and had never done a musical before, actors who sang, singers who acted, dancers who sang. That mix could have gone wrong. It could have been uneven. But in this case, it created something very special.
There was freshness in it. There was experience in it. There was hunger in it. There were people who knew exactly what they were doing and people discovering the scale of professional theatre for the first time. And somehow, all of that came together.
Every person brought something.
That is why I say it was stellar. Not because everyone was famous. Not because everyone arrived with a grand biography. But because the company had life in it. It had colour. It had danger. It had warmth. It had people who were fully inside the show, not just standing in the right place and singing the right note.
And when a cast has that, you can feel it. The audience can feel it, even if they do not know what they are feeling. They just know something is alive.
Touring creates a different kind of company
The other thing about touring is that it creates a company in a way London often does not.
This was not a week here and a week there. That kind of touring is hard work in a very different way, because you are constantly moving, constantly finding digs, constantly adjusting to new theatres and new towns. Our Les Mis tour was a long tour. A year in Manchester, several months in Dublin, several months in Edinburgh. That gives you time to settle, but you are still away from your normal home life.
You are in digs. You are near the theatre. You finish the show and people go out. You have a drink. You talk. You laugh. You make plans. You spend time together because, in a very real sense, the company becomes your world.
Touring can feel like being on holiday with a show. Not because the work is easy. The work is not easy. But because your life is wrapped around the production in a different way. You are not rushing for the tube, thinking about the last train, or calculating how long it will take to get home. You are not doing the show and then disappearing into the machinery of London.
In London, for me, it often felt more like an office job. You came in, did your work, and went home. And going home could be a long, hard slog. London is busy. It can take over an hour to get back. After a show, unless it is a special occasion, you rarely want to stay for a drink. You just want to get home.
That changes the atmosphere.
On tour, you naturally do more together. On stage and off stage. You develop friendships in a way that is much harder in London. Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh — that was over thirty years ago, and I still have friends from that time.
London, for me, did not give me that.
That is a very plain truth. London gave me prestige. London gave me the West End. London gave me the famous address and the global audience and the sense that I was part of something people around the world wanted to see.
But the tour gave me people.
The tour gave me laughter. The tour gave me nights out, shared digs, shared discoveries, shared pressure, shared stupidity, shared danger, shared triumph. It gave me the feeling of a company living together inside the same adventure.
And I think that is why it still feels warmer in my memory.
The West End machine
The West End is its own beast.
When you first arrive, it is magical. Of course it is. You walk into a West End theatre and there is a charge to it. You know what it means. You know what it says on your CV. You know people outside the industry understand it in a way they may not understand anything else. If you say you have worked in the West End, people know that means something.
But once you are inside it, you quickly realise it is also a huge machine.
There are lots of cogs. Lots of pitfalls. Lots of quiet rules. You have to navigate it carefully if you want to succeed there. The show is not built around your personal experience. It is bigger than you. It has to run eight times a week, with or without your mood, your tiredness, your ambition, your disappointment, your excitement, or your private life.
After a while, if you are seasoned, it becomes work. My work. Not in a negative way, necessarily. That is just what happens when something extraordinary becomes your job.
The West End version of a show can feel solid, historical, established. It can feel like you are stepping into a building that already knows what it is. The audience is global. The reputation is already there. There is a sense of being part of something that has longevity.
But that solidity can also make it feel colder.
The tour had risk. The tour had discovery. The tour had the feeling that we were proving something. London had the feeling that the thing had already been proved, and now you had to fit into it.
That is a very different energy.
And I think this is where the public assumption can be wrong. The West End is often billed as the creme de la creme. But it is not automatically better. It is different. Sometimes the strongest version of a show is not the one sitting in London with the famous address. Sometimes the strongest version is the one where the company, the building, the creative pressure, and the moment in time all come together.
For me, Manchester was that.
Manchester gave London a run for its money
Manchester was not playing at being London. Manchester was a major production in its own right.
The reviews were strong. The audience response was strong. The company was strong. And the production genuinely gave London a run for its money.
That is important because there is sometimes a strange snobbery around theatre geography. London is treated as the centre, and everything else is somehow a version of it. But anyone who has worked properly outside London knows that audiences outside London are not lesser audiences, and productions outside London are not automatically lesser productions.
In this case, the tour had to be excellent because the whole idea was new. Taking a No. 1 musical out of London was a major step. If it had failed, people would have noticed. If it had looked cheap, people would have noticed. If it had felt like a diluted version, people would have noticed.
So it could not be diluted.
It had to arrive with force.
And it did.
That first rehearsal period at the London Welsh Centre tells you that. We did not simply walk into a room and get told where to stand. We spent time improvising, bonding, getting comfortable with each other, building the company before we properly moved into the text, the blocking, and the singing. There was a whole week of that kind of work before the formal structure of the show took over.
Then, toward the end, we rehearsed a few scenes on the London set. And I remember the comparison being made that our Manchester set was double the size of that set. That says everything about how assumptions can be wrong.
People imagine London as bigger. But physically, backstage, practically, technically, that is not always the case. Some provincial theatres can offer enormous space. Some West End theatres are tiny backstage. The glamour is often front of house. Behind the curtain, it can be cramped, awkward, and very far from glamorous.
That is one of the strange truths of theatre. The audience sees the picture. The actor lives inside the mechanics.
The show keeps changing
There is another thing the public may not realise about long-running shows. They are not frozen in time.
People talk about seeing the original production, or the original show, but with something like Les Mis, that becomes complicated. Over the years, it has been reinvented several times, with new scenery, new staging, new casts, new interpretations, new technical approaches. London is not the original show anymore. In truth, there is not really an original show anymore.
The show has a history, but it also keeps changing.
Even casting changes the feeling of it. In Les Mis, there are different age ranges of characters. In Manchester, there was a mixture of ages playing those roles. These days, you often see much younger performers being asked to cover older roles. That changes the texture. It changes the world on stage. It changes how the relationships read.
A show is not only its music and script. It is the people inside it. It is the building. It is the director. It is the musical director. It is the resident team. It is the audience. It is the period of time in which that version exists.
Each variation can make the same show feel different.
That is why I do not think of Les Mis as one fixed thing. I think of it as a show that has had many lives. The tour was one of those lives. The West End was another. Phantom was another chapter again, because I moved from the Les Mis tour back to Manchester into the Phantom tour, then from there to London, back into Les Mis, and then into the London show of Phantom. So there was a lot of movement between tour and West End, between one major production and another.
But the tours came first. And that matters.
Because by the time I arrived in the West End, I already knew what a major show could feel like when it was built as a company adventure. I already knew what it was like for a cast to be bonded in that way. I already knew what it was like for a production outside London to have scale, pressure, excellence, and magic.
So when people ask about the West End, or assume that must have been the great mountain top, I understand why they think that. But my own experience was more complicated than that.
What stayed with me
The West End mattered.
I would never pretend it did not. It is a major thing to have worked there. It is part of my history, and I am proud of it. But if I am telling the truth, the National Tour of Les Mis was the best part.
Not because it was easier. Not because it was less pressured. In some ways, it was carrying enormous pressure, because it was breaking ground. It was taking something that had belonged to London and proving it could live elsewhere.
But it had warmth.
It had a cast that brought magic to the show. It had a rehearsal process that gave us trust. It had Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh. It had the feeling of being inside something new, even though the show itself was already famous. It had the madness of following Enjolras across a busy road with a period rifle in the air because, in that moment, he was leading and we were the students and that was the exercise.
It had laughter afterwards. Real laughter. The kind that stays with you thirty years later.
The West End gives you a different lesson. It teaches you how to belong inside a machine. It teaches you how to understand hierarchy, reputation, routine, pressure, and survival inside something that is already established.
The tour taught me something else.
It taught me how to enjoy and survive the show at the same time.
It taught me that a company can become a family, not in a sentimental way, but in the practical way of people sharing a life for a period of time. It taught me that the best version of a show is not always the one people assume. It taught me that a building outside London can hold just as much magic, and sometimes more.
And it taught me that when the moment changes, someone leads, everyone follows, and the company survives it together.
So yes, I worked in the West End. Yes, that means something. But if you ask me where the real magic was, I know the answer.
It was the tour.
A No. 1 tour teaches you how to enjoy and survive the show. The West End teaches you how to belong inside its machinery.
If this spoke to you, feel free to share it and leave a thought.

WHY LONG RUNNING SHOWS CREATE THEIR OWN SOCIETY

When people go to see a long-running West End musical, what they’re looking at feels settled.
It looks like something that’s always been there.
Everyone knows where they’re going.Everything lands where it should.It feels fixed.
What you don’t see… is that behind it, there’s a fully formed society.
And when you join one of those shows halfway through its life, you don’t arrive into something neutral.
You arrive into something that already exists without you.
People already know each other.
They’ve worked together for months… sometimes years.
They’ve built their own understanding of the room.
Who they like.Who they don’t.Who they trust.Who they avoid.
And then you walk in.
And before you’ve really said anything… you’re being read.
Not formally.No one pulls you aside.
But it’s happening.
How you enter the room.How you hold yourself.How you speak to people.How quickly you relax… or don’t.
Decisions get made very quickly.
And what’s strange is… those decisions can travel faster than you can correct them.
You can have a version of yourself circulating in that company before you’ve even had a proper conversation with half of them.
That’s the first thing you learn.
That this isn’t just about doing the job.
There’s a social structure already in place, and you’ve walked straight into the middle of it.
You hear this phrase a lot — “the company’s like a family.”
And sometimes it is.
But when you join late, it’s not your family yet.
It’s something you’re stepping into.
So you try to do the right things.
Be open.Be easy to work with.Be friendly.
And sometimes, someone will be exactly that with you.
Warm.Engaging.Funny.
You think — great.
That’s someone I can rely on.
And then, without anything obvious happening, something shifts.
Nothing you can point at.
No moment you can replay.
Just small changes.
A tone.A look.A remark that technically means nothing… but doesn’t feel like nothing.
And you realise you’ve been placed somewhere.
Not by the whole company.
But by someone who has reach.
And in those environments, it doesn’t take much.
Because there are always a few people who keep things moving underneath the surface.
They don’t need to be loud.
They just need to say the right thing, to the right person, at the right time.
And suddenly there’s a narrative.
About you.
And you’re aware of it.
But you can’t challenge it, because it’s never been said to your face.
So instead, you adapt.
You stop trying to win the room.
You start working smaller.
You find the people who just get on with it.
Who don’t play games.Who don’t feed into it.
And you build something there.
Slowly.
Because that’s the only way it sticks.
The structure of theatre doesn’t help you either.
You don’t go up to another actor and say, “Can you change that?”
You go through the company manager.
And then it comes back later, dressed up as a note.
“Apparently you’re doing this…”“Can you just adjust slightly…”
It’s polite.
It’s controlled.
But it’s never neutral.
And you very quickly understand who that’s come from.
Which tells you everything you need to know.
Some people stay completely clear of all of it.
They turn up.They do the work.They leave.
No involvement.
No commentary.
And they’re solid.
Others… can’t resist it.
There always has to be something.
Someone to talk about.Something to pick at.
And when a new person arrives, it gives that energy somewhere to go.
That’s when you start to see it properly.
Not in one big moment.
In patterns.
In repetition.
In the same type of interaction happening in slightly different ways.
And once you’ve seen it, you stop expecting it to change.
You just learn where you stand.
And more importantly, where not to stand.
Because in those spaces, warmth isn’t always what it looks like.
And silence isn’t always what it means.
The longer a show runs, the more this builds.
People settle in.
They get comfortable.
Protective.
Sometimes territorial.
It becomes their space.
Their version of the show.
Their way of doing things.
And you’re entering that mid-flow.
So you don’t just learn the track.
You learn the people.
And once you’ve been through it a few times, you start to recognise it straight away.
You can walk into a room and feel where everything sits without anyone saying a word.
You know who’s aligned with who.
You know who’s safe.
You know where the edges are.
And that’s the point most people never see.
They see the result.
They don’t see the system that holds it together.
Or the one that occasionally works against itself.
Because a long-running show doesn’t stay alive just because it’s well made.
It stays alive because the people inside it learn how to exist around each other…
whether they mean to or not.
 
If this spoke to you, feel free to share it and leave a thought.