Key Career Productions

Cats

Cats burst onto the London stage on 11 May 1981 and completely changed the face of musical history. Opening to rave reviews it went on to win a record-breaking number of awards world-wide.

The show opened on Broadway on 7 October 1982 and for a long time held the unique position of being the longest running musical in both West End and Broadway history. Cats closed on Broadway in September 2000, but continues to wow audiences around the world.

GILLIAN'S VIEW

To borrow from TS Eliot: "The choreographing of CATS is a difficult matter, it isn't just one of your every day games." In this case, there had to be certain limitations and peculiarities for my choreography as one of its duties was to tell clearly the story of each song and not interpret it at will, because the book of the show must live within the songs and dances. The range necessary to satisfy the eye and the mind yet remain true to the titled characters had to be conjured up. I watched my own cats for hours and used what I saw to put a feline wash over known and accepted dance forms. I thus used them in a different way, adapting them to a style and energy that is entirely the show's own.

However, as my observation of my own cats proved to me that cats are at once aloof, hypersensual, cold, warm, completely elastic and very very mysterious, we found the goals I had set the dancers were physically daunting. This meant vigorous exercises of an unusual nature, leading eventually to total freedom of what we could attempt physically.

Of course, when a choreographer works out the numbers for a new musical, there is only a skeleton crew, which usually consists of an assistant, a boy and girl dancer, the dance captain and a pianist. It is meticulous and nerve-wracking process while you hope and pray that the ideas will come, and it is also tiring work physically, for this is the time when all the movement styles for each character have to be discovered.

Imagine the day when my small crew and I danced the whole thing for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn, playing all the parts, trying to show the total excitement and mystery we were hoping to create, indicating all the acrobatic tricks which we couldn't do. A totally new concept for musical theatre, and five of us trying to be an entire production! But Andrew and Trevor embraced what we were doing wholeheartedly, a wonderful moment, and we went on to cast and rehearse a series of brilliant performers, and the rest, as they say, is history!

Phantom of the Opera

The wonderful story of the disfigured, tragic figure who haunts the Paris Opera House has been told many times since Gaston Leroux first published his novel in 1911. Most notably, Universal Pictures saw it as a vehicle for the singular talents of Lon Chaney (Snr), and then later Claude Rains depicted the Phantom as a famous composer, disfigured by acid and forced to hide in the theatre which had pirated his music. These versions depart wildly from the original novel; but Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charles Hart went back to the original for their telling of the tale, and it adheres closely to the spirit of Gaston Leroux.

In 2006 Phantom of the Opera overtook Cats as the longest running show on Broadway.

GILLIAN'S VIEW

Working on PHANTOM was like returning home for me. I was lucky to grow up in one great Opera House, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and here we were telling a story set in another magnificent theatre, the fabled Paris Opera.

The fabric of that Opera House was composed of ordinary people like stagehands, dressers, repetiteurs and the ever willing petits rats, the corps de ballet. Over them were the fanatical ballet mistresses, the divas, the tenors and lastly, the all-powerful enigmatic mangers. These were the characters with which I staged the ballets, the great Masquerade Ball and the Managers' sextets.

The dance styles of the era were very different from those of today. Nowadays the excessively opened, arrogant backs of the Russians and high legs are de rigeur, whereas in the era of PHANTOM all the arms were carried in front of the body and the torso was tilted and pushed forward with no excessively high legs. The "hard block" pointe show of today was unknown. A version of it was just coming into being and so the petits rats darned the ends of their shoes and inserted a little wadding to help them execute the fast footwork the choreographers of their time wanted.

We tried very hard to give our audiences a flavour of the varied energies and personalities of over a hundred years ago.

Comedy of Errors

The Royal Shakespeare Company's innovative production directed by Trevor Nunn. Set in the style of a musical, Gillian created hugely comedic musical staging and choreography for a cast that featured Judi Dench, Roger Rees and Richard Griffiths.

GILLIAN'S VIEW

Working with people at the RSC who are fundamentally actors and not singers or dancers does of course make a difference and it makes the rehearsal period much tougher for them and for me. However, the result has been wonderful and the joy of working on this production will be a long treasured memory.

A Simple Man

Devised, directed and choreographed by Gillian, a dramatic ballet about the life of Salford artist LS Lowry and the characters in his paintings. It was commissioned by the BBC and the City of Salford as part of the Lowry Festival in 1987. This unique production premiered on BBC TV that year, followed by stage performances at the Palace Theatre, Manchester. The ballet has enjoyed huge success and won the Huw Weldon BAFTA Award for best TV Arts Programme of 1987, and was nominated in 1988 for an International Emmy.