Bidin' My Time

My move back to London is complete! I am now a resident of N20, some eight miles north of the West End and almost ready to return to Theatreland. In two weeks’ time, rehearsals begin for Crazy For You, with opens at the Gillian Lynne Theatre this summer, and should keep me nice and busy through until early next year.

The music of George Gershwin was sumptuously arranged 30 years ago into this monster of a show, and contains my favourite dance break of all time in the end-of-Act-One I Got Rhythm number, which skips through a myriad of Gershwin quotes on its way to a sure-fire ovation. The full musical contains many, many more dance arrangements and songs, and April has seen me effectively chained to my piano as I steadily get all 258 pages of the piano/vocal score under my fingers.

I studied Gershwin at university as part of my practical performance, emerging from Huddersfield with a first-class degree having performed Rhapsody in Blue with the in-house symphony orchestra. My prep for this show has really evoked those wonderful years studying music, getting back into the mindsets both of how I approach piano practice and that of the composer/pianist Gershwin himself. This production of Crazy For You has already completed a run at Chichester’s Festival Theatre, so for this transfer I am making sure I can hit the ground running on that first day of rehearsals!

Away from that, April was a mixture of spending time with my folks in Cheshire between trips down to London with the car full of boxes & clothes, and a brief but hugely welcome return to Edge Hill University to accompany the final-year Musical Theatre students at their Showcase. This is the cohort who started at the same time I did, when I was first an Associate Tutor there back in October 2020, so it has been wonderfully cathartic to see them through to this moment, and I wish them all every success in their degrees and careers beyond.

So the first part of May will of course involve more show prep, but I am looking forward to settling into my new flat, catching a handful of shows and enjoying Eurovision from Liverpool, before rehearsals take up pretty much all of my time!