Lesley Bates writes: When it comes to Christmas, Salisbury has a special place in GLYN KERSLAKE’s heart. For the past seven years or so, the West End veteran has become a regular fixture at Salisbury Playhouse over the festive season, either as performer or musical director or both, usually for the musically-themed revues offered by the theatre as an adult alternative to the pantomime.
More recently, he has added composer to his CV as his collaboration with Playhouse artistic director Gareth Machin has resulted in two enchanting musical treats for tiny tots, The Night Before Christmas and Little Robin Redbreast.
This year Glyn, wife actress Elaine Glover and their two-year-old son Joel have packed their bags and left the family home for another Christmas in Wiltshire.
“Elaine and I met in Salisbury in a production called Come Fly With Me, so Salisbury has a lot of special connections,” Glyn tells me. “Two years ago, we came here just five weeks after Elaine had given birth to Joel. That was quite daunting in a way, but he was great.”
With Glyn and Gareth already working on a third story in the toddler trilogy, the pair has brought The Night Before Christmas back to Salisbury this Christmas in response to public demand.
So how did this collaboration come about? “Actor Simon Green took on the residency at Christmas doing revue-type shows and I was musical director on the second one. Basically, once I did it, they kept inviting me back,” he explains.
Gareth, then the father of a two-year-old himself, took over as artistic director at the Playhouse in 2011. “Gareth was keen to move forward an idea he had had for a while of giving very young children a theatre experience at Christmas, because sometimes pantomime is too long and a bit scary for that age group. He came up with The Night Before Christmas and I immediately got excited about writing a musical adaptation of that with him. I often think that Christmas Eve is more exciting than Christmas Day.”
Watching the show requires patience if, like me, you eagerly anticipate the introduction of the Clement C Moore poem – it doesn’t happen straight away for practical reasons.
Glyn Kerslake in The Night Before Christmas
“Musicalising the poem would take less than ten minutes and we wanted a show that was just under an hour. Gareth’s idea was to feed the poem in sporadically and set it around a Victorian family Christmas so we could bring in the anticipation of Father Christmas arriving, the decorating of the tree, Father Christmas getting stuck down the chimney, eating too much food – all the ideas that toddlers will find engaging.”
Glyn is once more be at the piano for the returning show, which has the same magical set plus a few tweaks and refinements, including a new song. He has had something of a charmed career, taking him virtually straight from drama college to the West End where he moved from one mega-hit, long-running West End musical to another, including The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard and Miss Saigon.
I ask him if the story of him appearing in two West End shows at the same time is true or apocryphal. “It’s true – I still can’t believe it happened. I was appearing as Enjolras in Les Misérables and the role of Javert was up for grabs. They wanted me to sing for Cameron Mackintosh, but at the final recall, he came down to the front of the stalls, took me into the bar and said: ‘There’s a job I want you to do, but it’s not Javert’.
“Apparently Iain Glen’s alternate in Martin Guerre had just been released to do a television series, so they needed someone to be the alternate there. So I did five shows a week as Enjolras, and two a week as the lead in Martin Guerre. But I was also covering first understudy to Valjean in Les Mis and there was one week where I went on as Enjolras, Valjean and Arnaud in Martin Guerre on three consecutive nights – and I have been told that’s a record.“
Lara Stubbs, Adrian Grove and Katherine Potter in The Night Before Christmas
But he hasn’t been involved in a West End show since the Menier Chocolate Factory’s transfer of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along in 2013 and that has been a very conscious decision. For the last two years, he has been Head of Music at the Midlands Academy of Dance and Drama (MADD) in Nottingham where he and Elaine have a house in nearby Newark-on-Trent.
“Having spent the best part of 30 years living in London, I felt I just didn’t need to be in London anymore,” he says. His priority now is to concentrate more on being a teacher, composer and musical director. “I feel like I’ve achieved all I want to achieve as a performer and now I’m a family man, I don’t want to do endless eight show a week contracts.”
Interest in developing young performers has been with him for many years, he says. “I’ve always been passionate about teaching younger people. I’ve done it ever since I was in Miss Saigon and had a piano in my dressing room. People in different shows, who had auditions coming up, would come to me and go through their repertoire, so I got a feel for teaching then. What I learned from good directors and good musical directors and composers, I wanted to pass on to a new generation. I get a lot out of it – I think people who have had experience of performing have got something extra to give. There is a realistic attitude about the pitfalls, the positives and negatives of being in this profession.”
* The Night Before Christmas continues at Salisbury Playhouse until 30 December 2019.
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