Henry Metcalfe, the Durham son of a bricklayer, is a mainstay of the UK’s best-loved musical.

DURHAM-BORN performer Henry Metcalfe feels he’s living his life backwards. At the age of 65, he has central roles on and off the stage with the ever-touring Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, having lectured in dance and drama for seven years at the start of his career.

The turning point was the rise of theatre impresario Bill Kenwright who used Metcalfe as a choreographer for a West End pantomime 16 years ago and now employs him as choreographer/associate director plus playing the roles of Jacob and Potophar in Joseph.

Best of all, Metcalfe is returning to his roots at the Sunderland Empire, where Joseph tours next week. “I was four years old in 1948 and I saw a pantomime starring Allan Jones – the father of singer Jack Jones – who sang Donkey Serenade. I think that’s what put the idea in my head of wanting to jump around on stage,” he says.

Metcalfe recalls that his career got under way with a song and dance appearance on Tyne Tees TV’s North East Roundabout presented by Tom Coyne, 50 years ago.

“That was my first contract and my schoolmates teased me that I had a great North-East accent so I immediately set to work to lose my Durham twang. My first home was in a whitewashed place called Riverside House which was next to Brown’s Boathouse.

“Now there is a BHS on the site and I feel the planners have completely wrecked that area of Durham. Maybe I’m biased because it was my first home, but there was a lovely lane called Paradise Lane and playing fields. Now there’s this big monument for commercialism which blocks the view when you boat down towards Elvet Bridge… but that’s not what the interview is about,” he jokes.

He feels it’s still a treat to return to his home town region and he recalls being interviewed at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal in 1998 when he and his 90-year-old mother had pictures taken on the stage together. But it was the Sunderland Empire and the sands of Seaburn which were his main treats, within an easy bus-ride, in his childhood.

“So it’s like coming back to my childhood at the Empire and I’m so pleased that the renovations have been in keeping with the original interior,” he adds.

Bricklayer’s son Metcalfe passed an audition for Surrey’s Laban Centre as a teenager but found he couldn’t get a grant from Durham County Council. “When the college heard that, it gave me a scholarship, which was wonderful,” he says and recalls moving from teaching to choreographing shows for “hand-tomouth producers who made enough from a production to pay everyone and then moved on to the next”.

He picks out Jess Conrad as his favourite, and first, Joseph he’s starred alongside. “Jess always kept himself in good shape and it always looked hilarious when these maggoty-looking brothers were trying to beat him up to sell him. It looked like they were trying to beat up Superman,” he says.

Current Joseph, Craig Chalmers, “is a great communicator and done years of singing before doing BBC’s Any Dream Will Do. He also has the same gift as Jess Conrad and that’s likeability”.

Metcalfe pays tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and Bill Kenwright as pioneers of theatre.

“They were the first to create sungthrough musicals and use a character in the show as a narrator while Bill was the first to put TV stars on the stage. It seems simple now, but no one had done it before.

“Joseph was only an end-of-term show by two 19-year-olds and it is such a clever piece. Every scene has a different musical style be it cowboy, French, calypso or Elvis and Lloyd Webber’s music is always memorable and Tim Rice’s lyrics always innovative,” he says.

Before that the mainstays were things like Seven Brides For Seven Brothers and Oklahoma and conventional shows like the Desert Song. “You occasionally get these people who come along and knock Joseph and say it’s childish. Yes it is.

But it is the joy and wonder of childhood using a show done in a new way,” adds Metcalfe who works with each season’s touring cast and regularly makes changes to dance routines. “Bill Kenwright comes to see the show about every six weeks and is disappointed if there isn’t something new because he likes shows to evolve,” he says.