19

THE QUEST FOR A MUSICAL

When I was young I was taken to see D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. When he died, Pop left me full recordings on ancient 78s of my two favorites, The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. As a teenager, I had seen performances of both at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and now it occurred to me that Pirates would make a very good musical film. We ostensibly had a film company, so I stayed on in Tunisia after the end of shooting Brian to put the finishing touches to a Victorian screenplay, which opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in modern-day London, where workmen stumble across a vault filled with cans of Victorian film. This turns out to be the first film ever made. I liked the idea of the first-ever movie being a Victorian musical, and it would all be shot like Pre-Raphaelite paintings on location in genuine Victorian settings.

After the modern-day documentary opening, we cut to the gala opening in front of Queen Victoria in a crowded Royal Opera House, the boxes packed with Victorian celebrities like W. S. Gilbert and Oscar Wilde. There is a big steam-operated film projector at the back of the auditorium with a grimy stoker shoveling coal into its furnace. Sir Arthur Sullivan himself is conducting the overture and when the curtain rises, it reveals not a stage but a movie screen with a sailing ship at sea, and pirates singing and dancing on deck.

My assistant Christine Miller and I scoured Cornwall and Devon for the perfect settings. We found our pirate ship in Torbay, and I got permission from Lord St. Leven, who owned St. Michael’s Mount, opposite Penzance, to film there. My aim was to open the movie on the one hundredth anniversary of the operetta opening on Broadway, where it first ran, before London. This was to establish copyright in America, to avoid the piracy Gilbert and Sullivan had suffered from H.M.S. Pinafore. At one point, there were seven productions of Pinafore on Broadway, none of which paid a penny in royalties. They rehearsed The Pirates of Penzance in the U.K., gave one performance in Torquay to establish copyright, and then rushed the entire cast over by boat to open on Broadway, where it was a smash hit. I believe those are the roots of musical theater in New York.

I had become friendly with some cavalry officers of the Queen’s Troop, a brigade of hussars garrisoned in St. John’s Wood. After visiting their barracks, and discovering they were Python fans and loved Gilbert and Sullivan, I gained permission to film them bringing their horse-drawn Victorian field guns into action in Hyde Park, firing off a twenty-one-gun salute for the Queen’s birthday. Better yet, they gave me permission to take a camera crew onto the Victoria Memorial, an ornate edifice on a traffic island directly in front of Buckingham Palace. Here I could get an unbelievable shot of the entire British Army marching down the Mall. Now, the British Army in full dress uniform is not all that different from a century before, so all I had to do was to avoid shooting anything that was not in period and I would have the most superb footage. I could shoot any part of this event, with the single exception of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh sitting on their horses taking the salute. Everything else would be perfect.

So, there I was on the Victoria Memorial with my shoulder-length hair, baseball cap, tank top, shorts, and a tiny crew. It was a blazing June day as we shot rank after rank of the British Army advancing directly down the Mall in wide-screen. In their red coats and their bearskins, the flanks of their horses gleaming, their brasses glinting, their sabers drawn, their bright breastplates flashing in the summer sunlight, it was a million-dollar shot. As the front ranks wheeled around us, we scrambled to the Buckingham Palace side of the monument to catch them marching directly in front of us. I directed my cameraman to close in on the horses’ hooves, the glistening buckles, the glinting helmets, the gleaming swords, all tight shots I could use later.

I was running around enthusiastically pointing and jumping about with glee when I became aware I was being watched. Two pairs of gimlet eyes were staring at me: the Queen’s and the Duke of Edinburgh’s. They were both on horseback and they had become riveted by our activity. You have to understand that this was their show; the eyes of the entire world were on them; thousands of people had turned out to see them, lining the London streets for hours, TV cameras were broadcasting their image live round the world, while this loony ran around directly in front of them, not fifteen yards away, totally ignoring them. What was he doing? It must have seemed incomprehensible to them. Not once did I even turn my camera in their direction. They were the stars of the show and I was shooting the extras. They stared at me in mute incomprehension, this hippie ragamuffin, right on their patch, outside the gates of their palace, deliberately ignoring them! What was going on? What the hell was I doing? I could feel their eyes boring into me. I stopped and turned to look at them. I was watching the Queen watching me. Her hand raised to her hat in salute. The Duke next to her in utter disbelief. They stared at me while I froze. What to do? Impossible to explain in a look or a gesture that I meant no offense, that they simply couldn’t be in my Victorian film. There was no way to convey anything at all. I smiled at them, shrugged, nodded in a vaguely reassuring way, and went back to shooting my inserts. They never stopped watching me. Two completely different worlds passed by, each utterly inexplicable to the other.

I had my finale of the entire British Army marching down the Mall, in their red coats and their bearskins for the Trooping the Colour ceremony; now all I needed was the finance. Handmade Films weren’t remotely interested. Out of the blue, Joe Papp mounted a stage version of The Pirates of Penzance in the outdoor Public Theater in New York’s Central Park. Kevin Kline was magnificent as a very athletic Pirate King, and Linda Ronstadt delightful as Mabel. (Three years ago, I got to play the Sergeant of Police on that very same stage with Martin Short as the Major-General and Kevin Kline repeating his amazing role in a gala performance to raise money for the theater.) It was a huge hit and would soon move from the park to Broadway, where it would play for years. Learning of my film script, a Hollywood producer flew me in on Concorde to see it. Unfortunately, a word I came to associate with the movie business, I got shafted by the producer, who bought the Papp show; but because I had written my screenplay specifically for locations in the U.K., he was forced to shoot his film inside a studio on a soundstage, thereby losing all the fun of a movie. A pity. No surprise it was a total flop.

I thought that was it for Gilbert and Sullivan, but one day, out of the blue, in July 1986, I got a call from Jonathan Miller. Would I be interested in playing Ko-Ko in his forthcoming production of The Mikado at the English National Opera? I hadn’t foreseen becoming a diva. I asked him what on earth he was going to do with The Mikado.

“Well, I’m going to get rid of all that campy Japanese nonsense for a start.”

“Chop it off, Ko-Ko.”

This I had to see. That’s like removing the Japanese from sushi.

“I’m not having any of those silly knitting-needles-in-the-hair rubbish,” he said.

Did I say I adore Jonathan Miller? Of course, I said yes, and soon we were rehearsing in the freezing rain of a London summer. They made a documentary of this process called A Source of Innocent Merriment, and I got to make one of my comic heroes laugh. It’s on-screen, too. Jonathan rolled about in hysterics when I began to grovel…

Instead of Japan, Jonathan had set the production in Freedonia, the location of the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, and the whole design, costumes and set, was in black and white. It was a massive hit and I was invited to repeat my role for a second season. I had never actually seen myself as appearing in opera before, but standing onstage at the London Coliseum with the chorus turned toward me expectantly, and the orchestra sitting up and paying attention, I really enjoyed myself. It went over so well that one night a member of the orchestra said to me, “Tell me, are you Jewish, or are you just very talented…?”

There is a tradition that the words to the “Little List” song can be rewritten, so each night I delivered a new set of lyrics with lines pulled straight from the headlines. The huge laughs and the sheer fun of singing live was very exciting. I got to do The Mikado again a few years later at the Houston Grand Opera, where Jonathan revealed a surprising love for sentimental Mexican songs and baseball. We were watching the World Series live from San Francisco when the screen suddenly went blank. The earthquake had hit. Fergie, still then the Duchess of York, came to the opening, and we loved Houston and made good friends there. In fact, we had such a good time that when we left Texas, Tania was pregnant.

The experience of The Mikado excited me to search for a musical to write and perform for myself. I approached Mel Brooks in Hollywood with the suggestion we appear together onstage in a musical version of The Producers, he as Bialystok, me as Bloom, directed by Jonathan Miller, who was about to take over the Old Vic. Mel, though incredibly flattering about Python, was not persuaded: “I’m happy directing films,” he said, not unreasonably. Many years later, at the Broadway opening of The Producers, I was very glad he’d waited, as he single-handedly revived musical comedy and I knew that night I would now be able to find people willing to put on Spamalot.

I was still searching around for a subject for a musical when I found myself in the West Indies with Mick Jagger watching England play cricket. I was shocked to witness the News of the World setting not one but two honey traps for Ian Botham, the team’s biggest star. Mick warned him of the first lady, but sadly he was entrapped by the second, a former Miss Barbados whom I knew, called Lindy Field, who was dropped right in it by the vultures, and the next day poor Ian Botham was faced with screaming headlines and forced to cancel his lawsuit against them. I was shocked by this blatant entrapment, and I didn’t know what to do with this information, so, naturally, I wrote a musical. I created Behind the Crease with John Du Prez. It was about a shoddy journalist, played by me, pursuing an English touring team in search of scandal. My former Katisha, the late, great Ann Howard, played Princess Joan, a slightly tipsy Royal lady who had a home on the Isle of St. Jonas, where it was set. We recorded it before a live audience. It is a lot cheaper doing a musical on the radio because you don’t need sets and costumes and dancing, and it was duly broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Working with John Du Prez inspired me. He was the perfect partner. In 1982, I had written a lyric for The Meaning of Life placing ourselves in the Universe, a pulling-back of perspective which shows how truly inconsequential we are:

Just remember that you’re traveling

On a planet that’s evolving and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.

I had written a fairly simple tune for it, but when I played it to John he said, “That’s not how this song goes, this is how this song goes,” and laid down a wonderful melody.

The hit from Spamalot, “The Song That Goes Like This,” began with John playing around with some chords while I was on my way to the bathroom.

“Wait, that’s it,” I said, running back in and clicking on the tape machine. I began ad-libbing an overacting Broadway singer.

“Once in every show, there comes a song like this, that starts off soft and low and ends up with a kiss. Oh where is the song that goes like this? Where is it? Where, where?”

We improvised the whole song.

So, we had done a radio musical, and for a time London Weekend Television played with the idea of doing it on TV, but now we needed another subject. We found it in Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat.” We adapted this as an animated movie, since we realized they were the only musicals being made by Hollywood. I pitched it to Steven Spielberg. He looked puzzled, and when he kept talking about Barbra Streisand, I realized that Americans had no knowledge at all of the Edward Lear poem. So I adapted it as a children’s book for my five-year-old daughter, Lily, and we recorded the tale with ten songs for Dove Audio as The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat. I even got a Grammy nomination for it. But we were no nearer our Quest to make a musical.

Meanwhile, I continued working as an actor. I told you bad films were more fun, and I should know, I was in quite a few. I will spare you the full list, though sadly, IMDb never forgets. Burn Hollywood Burn won five awards, including Worst Picture, at the 1998 Golden Raspberry Awards, though I got nothing, not even a nomination. It was originally titled An Alan Smithee Film, and I played the eponymous Alan Smithee, the name the Directors Guild puts on a movie when the director takes his off. Irony of ironies, then, when Arthur Hiller removed his name from the final cut and the Alan Smithee film ended up being directed by Alan Smithee. However, it was quite fun filming with Sylvester Stallone, Ryan O’Neal, and Jackie Chan, to name-drop but three.

Dudley Do-Right was filmed in a monsoon in Vancouver, and it rained so much that I turned a screenplay into a novel (The Road to Mars) in the hotel in which I was holed up for several weeks. Too Much Sun was a low-budget caper directed by Robert Downey Sr., starring his son, Robert Downey Jr. Junior was quite young and very funny. One day Senior asked him, “Robert, when do you learn your lines?” Robert replied, “Oh, usually by the third take…”

Robin visiting me on the set of Too Much Sun.

I did, however, have a hit movie, and oddly it was funded by Denis O’Brien. He had approached me at Cannes to make something for Handmade Films. “How appropriate,” I said. “I made the first Handmade Film, now I can make the last.” He looked pained, but it was! Johnny Lynn, my old friend from Cambridge and the director of my play Pass the Butler in the West End, had written a funny script about two West End gangsters hiding out in a nunnery. He wanted me to play it with Michael Palin, and when Mike turned it down I suggested Robbie Coltrane. It was a wonderful partnership. Robbie was hilarious as Sister Euphemia, while I played Sister Inviolata, and it was even fun to film. Once, Robbie sat dressed as a nun, smoking a cigarette with his habit up to his knees, when a lady came up and asked him for spiritual advice. Oops.

There were never such devoted Sisters. With Robbie Coltrane.

Nuns on the Run was a big hit in the U.K. and made a lot of money, but here is the magic of cinema: the movie took three and a half million pounds at the box office in England, and not a single penny found its way into my pocket. Two of the distributors, whose names I have kindly removed so that their wives and children may live without shame, had been screwed by Denis O’Brien on another deal, so they refused to turn over any money to him. We made not a cent. Maybe we made God laugh. We certainly didn’t make Siskel and Ebert laugh, who pronounced our film utterly unfunny and went out of their way to abuse us in print and on television. Well, at least we had a good time. And I always thought Ebert looked like an old nun.

“But sir, zis is a silly French accent.” With Pierce Brosnan.

One of the best times of the Eighties was filming Passepartout alongside Pierce Brosnan’s Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days, which NBC made as a miniseries in England, Hong Kong, Macao, Thailand, and Yugoslavia. Pierce is a hilarious man and we had a lot of fun. Often, Tania and I would join him for dinner at his request, as he was literally hounded by females. They would look very disappointed as we turned up yet again.

With Sarah Polley on Munchausen. Worse than boarding school…

There are only two rules in show business for actors: never appear in a Stanley Kubrick movie, and never appear in a Terry Gilliam movie. I broke this rule when Terry invited me to appear in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which he was shooting at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Summer in Italy, at Fellini’s studio, with further locations in Spain, what could possibly go wrong? Well, actually, everything. I shall draw a veil over nine months of torture, but it would have taken a crate of Boukha to numb the senses. Of course, there were many fine times, but how no one died I have no idea. I would often find myself having to stand in front of Sarah Polley, the sweetest little eight-year-old girl, when things got rough.

Once I was with Sarah and Jack Purvis at the back of a small boat, and directly in front of us was a stunt double on a huge white horse. Suddenly explosions went off, the horse panicked, reared up, and began backing into us on its hind legs. I thought we were done for but the rider, brilliantly, tugged the reins and took the horse overboard. I recently had some correspondence with Sarah, now a very fine film director, and she said she still had anxieties from those times. When she read a tweet of mine about the dangers we underwent, she wrote to me:

It was one of the only times I’ve had someone validate my feelings and memories of the experience of being on that set. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to read it.

I’d love to hear your take on the whole experience.

You were always so so kind to me. I remember you creating so many moments for me to feel like a child, playing music, buying me a synthesizer, taking me on walks, making sure I stayed warm. I’ve always been incredibly grateful and think back often to your care for me when I really needed it and my children know every word to “just remember that you’re standing on a planet.”