Mr musicals

AWARD-WINNING director Nikolai Foster had been asked to take a workshop for students at a Harrogate secondary school aiming for drama training. Would he try to dissuade them from taking up a profession where the majority of people are out of work? No, he says. “I will be honest, which is what I think you should always be in this business.”

That business is show business. North Yorkshire-raised Foster turned his back on acting after drama training and became one of the country’s top theatre directors in the process. He's also one of the busiest, directing White Christmas in Leeds as well as Calamity Jane starring Jodie Prenger, which tours to Darlington, Sunderland and York, and a revival of Annie with Strictly judge Craig Revel Horwood as Miss Hannigan opening in Newcastle next year.

The link between the shows is that they’re all musicals. That fits in nicely with Foster taking up the post of artistic director at Curve Theatre, in Leicester, where he’ll specialise in producing musicals, both old and new. It’s curious, he says, that musicals generally get a bad rap in this country. “People often think of them as second best in some areas of culture and that more populist things are lower down the scale,” he says.

He doesn’t agree with that view, but understands why some think like that as sometimes the focus on the book can be less than on the music and choreography. “What sometimes happens is you get something that’s all about flash, an extravaganza but it lacks real integrity and guts and truth and heart,” he says.

Foster is the man who made Annie, the musical with the irritatingly unforgettable song Tomorrow and an orphanage of kids, bearable for cold-hearted reviewers like myself who were dreading the usual sickly sweet schmaltz-fest only to find themselves in love with the West Yorkshire Playhouse show. He’s now adopting a similar approach to Irving Berlin’s White Christmas in the first original UK production of the stage version of the 1954 film, starring Bing Crosby. Darren Day and Oliver Tompsett play a song and dance duo, who’ve gone from entertaining the troops to Broadway stars, but help their old army general to save his hotel in wintry Vermont.

There is another version of White Christmas – a replica of the Broadway show – playing in London, but Foster promises something different. “People tend to associate the film and the Broadway musical as being the same, but the film was shot in the 1950s and the musical wasn’t written until the mid-1990s. Obviously there are similar songs and the story’s the same, but in terms of structure and atmosphere the two pieces are completely different.

“Our approach on Annie wasn’t radical and I don’t think it is on White Christmas. All we’re doing as a creative team and the actors is making sure there is integrity, truth, heart and a psychological through-line for the piece. So the scenes are given as much time as the choreography and music. You have to come at everything with a real truth and integrity.

“We were staging Annie in the middle or towards the end of the big recession so looking at a play set at the end of the Great Depression at the end of the 1930s in a modern context gave it a relevance and was capturing a zeitgeist. Annie gets tarred with this brush of saccharine and brats but we got kids who had grit and a visceral truth about them and put them in this production that had a dark underbelly so when it did become big and fantastical it was earned.”

He sees White Christmas being about what it means to return to your homeland after fighting in a conflict and how as a serviceman or woman you adapt and cope and find a purpose in life after fighting for your country. “This immediately gives us something very real and relevant that we can tap into and provide the production with a gravitas and a reality.”

Similarly, Calamity Jane has been given a new coat of paint. He admits his heart sank when a revival was suggested as he remembered it as an “old warhorse” or “an old potboiler of a thing”. After looking at the script, he decided “if I’m allowed to have a go retooling this we could do something exciting”. With a star like Jodie Prenger and a cast of actor-musicians, he felt he could serve the original material while breathing new life into it.

“It’s so moving when it starts and people are singing along, and at the end people are dancing in the aisles. I’ve done shows like Flashdance and they don’t do that. We’re doing a show written in the previous century and people are dancing in the aisles,” he says.

He’s excited too about Craig Revel Horwood in Annie. “Obviously we’ve talked about the approach to Hannigan. It’s not about a man dragging up or a man impersonating a woman, it’s playing the character for real – and he’s very much up for that,” says Foster.

The first thing he saw in the theatre was a musical at Bradford Alhambra and although he wasn’t keen on the production (“which shall remain nameless”) he loved the experience of being in the theatre. After that he was a regular theatregoer to both plays and musicals. “I was very badly bullied at school and remember the theatre club on an evening was a sort of way to escape that and be in a safer environment. So my interest in theatre grew out of that,” he says.

“I loved that musicals felt so egalitarian with a mix of young people, older people and really seemed to bring people together. It clearly had a profound effect on me during those formative years. Then I went off to a very serious drama centre and it so happened that after my training the very first thing I directed was a musical. It seems I had a certain skill and aptitude for that and then, of course, you’re offered more musicals on the back of that.”

“I love doing musicals, I love doing new plays, I love doing Shakespeare but I love musicals. They’re the sort of theatre that’s so accessible to so many people..”

But would Foster want to do nothing but musicals? “I don’t know that’s such a bad thing,” he replies. “Hopefully I’ll have a bit more control over my destiny as the leader of the building in Leicester and there will be as many plays programmed as musicals. If people are small-minded or unimaginative and can’t see that a director can move effortlessly between musicals and plays that’s their problem not mine.”

White Christmas

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, Nov 24-Jan 17. Box office: 0113-2137700 and wyp.org.uk

Calamity Jane

York Grand Opera House, Feb 10-14. 0844-8713024 and atgtickets.com/York

Sunderland Empire, March 3-7. 0844-8713022 and atgtickets.com/sunderland

Darlington Civic Theatre, May 12-16. 01325-486555 and darlingtoncivic.co.uk

Annie

Newcastle Theatre Royal, July 11-18. 08448-112121 and theatreroyal.co.uk