Alfie Page 13

  There was another tenor on the programme, and David gave him so many opportunities in that house, so many major roles, covering other singers, and he was going on to perform them on stage as well. Proper dates in the diary for him to perform these great roles at the Royal Opera House. Alfredo in La Traviata, Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore. I thought everything would be distributed equally, everybody should have the same opportunities as each other on a small programme like that, there shouldn’t be favouritism. I asked them why this was happening and they said, ‘We just think he’s more suited to those roles than you are, you’ll get the chances.’ And I said, ‘Well I’m not getting them, am I? Look at what I’m doing. I’m carrying a spear and pretending to dig a fucking hole.’

  Those young artists programmes don’t equip you with anything other than the experience of playing one stage. The classes they run, movement classes, acting classes – if students haven’t had that education by that point, they shouldn’t be on a young artists programme. They should send them around the UK to perform for different audiences, take productions on the road, play small theatres, church halls, scout huts, town squares in the middle of the summer. Just get out there and take the music to the people, and give everybody in the cast a specific role. Scottish Opera Go Round was the best education I could have had in that respect, it showed me how to handle different audiences, how to work in different venues, how to cope with acoustics, with different sets, different spaces on stage. Simply playing the Opera House stage is not what this business is about. And I always thought it was. Get to the Opera House and you’ve made it. I got to the Opera House and I hated it, because of that programme. I’m not the only one who’s had such an experience, far from it. Maria Callas got a lot of criticism from opera houses, she got a lot of stick for her appearance, for her singing, she’d been fired for being a diva, but she just knew what she wanted. She moved fast. She knew what life was about, she knew what singing was about and what audiences wanted. She was a great actress. That was what shone, even more than her voice. People criticised her voice, but her acting was what made her voice, the emotion, her honesty. And that counts for a lot. The Royal Opera House Covent Garden, such hallowed ground. It’s a bloody wooden platform. No better than the Marine Hall in Fleetwood.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ROCKY ROAD TO BROADWAY

  I started to hear mutterings about a new Broadway production of La Bohème when a girl I’d been seeing was auditioning for it. It was generating a right old buzz, everybody was talking about Baz Luhrmann. Who? I didn’t know who he was, then somebody told me he’d directed Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, which had come out a few months earlier. I asked my agent about it and he said, ‘Well, is it really something you want to be doing?’ Well, yes.

  Part of my requirement on the course was to watch productions and dress rehearsals, which I’d often take advantage of as a chance to take a nap. I’d smuggle in a cushion from home, find an empty box and have a lie down. Unfortunately my audition for Baz happened to coincide with a dress rehearsal for Parsifal, a Wagner opera that goes on for five hours. The only time I could do it was in the hour interval, so I jumped up, ran out, tubed it to Waterloo and legged it to this studio they were rehearsing in, turned up sweating like crazy, wet through. It was Baz, his assistant, his wife Catherine Martin – everyone calls her CM – producers Noel Staunton and David Crook, and the conductor, Constantine Kitsopoulos. I did ‘Che Gelida Manina’, and while I was singing Constantine was nodding and smiling at Baz, while he was conducting, which was encouraging, and at the end Baz said, ‘That was great, can we do it again? Let’s try it like this . . .’ They opened the fire doors and they sat me there, cross-legged, in front of Baz’s assistant, and asked me to sing to her. It was quite something, because it was a bright day outside, but quite foggy, and this fog was flooding in, and I was singing away . . . it was really beautiful actually. Like Baz was directing the weather. And he was really sweet, he said, ‘Well done, that was great, great. Hey, they have really good coffee here, go and try it. And we’ll see you soon, we’ll be in touch.’ And that was it. So I cleared off, and I felt really good about it. Shot back to Covent Garden for the start of the next act of Parsifal, and all I could think about was the audition, it was going round and round in my head. I was thinking, ‘Please, please, please.’

  My agent got a call a couple of days later from the casting director’s assistant asking me to go to New York for a second audition, they’d fly me over and put me up for the weekend. Well. At that time I was supposed to be learning a repertoire for a recital, and Tisi Dutton brought me into an office and said, ‘I hear you’ve got a second audition for Baz Luhrmann’s Bohème.’

  I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to go over to New York.’

  She said, ‘Well not yet! It’s up to us if we let you. You can go if by Friday you’ve learnt all of your recital, from memory.’ Nearly 20 songs. ‘I want you to sing through your recital stuff with David and I want you to have learnt it.’

  I said, ‘OK.’

  She said, ‘Do you think you can do that?’

  I said, ‘I’ll try my best.’

  She said, ‘There’s no trying your best, it’s either yes or no! A simple yes or no.’

  It was that aggressive, man! So I said, ‘Yes then.’

  It would usually take three or four weeks to learn all that, I had about four days. Didn’t sleep much, brainwashed myself with the music. And Friday came, and I sang through it with David, and it was fine.

  It was my first time in New York and I was absolutely buzzing. I just wanted to stay there. I was blown away by everything. I walked out the airport, I was blown away by the yellow cabs. We drove over those bridges, I was blown away by the bridges. I saw Manhattan appear on the skyline, blown away. To sum up: I was blown away. I was grinning from ear to ear, my heart was pounding . . . I just felt alive again, I felt really alive! And happy! Really happy! I loved holding a dollar. I loved ordering a coffee and a pretzel and a burger and fries and sitting in a diner. Everything I dreamt about America when I was a kid in Fleetwood looking out to sea seemed to be coming true.

  They’d booked me an arty Times Square hotel where every room was a different colour – mine was yellow. Bright, bright yellow, the bedsheets, the floor, the walls, the pictures . . . it was like living in an egg. I walked into Times Square that evening, overwhelmed by the lights and sounds, and I couldn’t sleep that night because I was so excited about my audition the next morning. And when I got to the rehearsal studio I was met by Baz, and the producers, and the assistant casting people, and they were really pleased to see me! They wanted to see if I could work with the soprano they’d chosen to pair me up with, to see how well we would work together. A girl called Wei Huang, from Shanghai, and we seemed to click. That evening, Baz’s assistant called me: ‘Alfie, I just want to say you did really well today, well done.’ I thought, right, this doesn’t sound good. She said, ‘I just want to hand you over to Baz.’ My heart was pounding. ‘Hey, Alfie, how you doing? Well done today, mate, you did really, really well, great audition. I just wanna say that I think that you’ll be ideal for our show and I’d like to offer you the job.’ I almost cried. And I spent the night so excited thinking about working on Broadway, about starting a new journey. I wanted to be there so badly.

  I was still on a high the next day, still dazzled by New York. ‘I’m gonna fly from JFK!’ Then when I got to JFK, it hit me. I realised, ‘I’m flying back . . . to shit. I’m flying back to my life at the Royal Opera House. Back to being treated like crap by the Vilar programme.’ And I knew the Broadway gig wasn’t going to go down well with them. I had to give three months’ notice, and those three months would be absolute hell, quite possibly the worst three months of my life. I didn’t want to say that I was leaving because of La Bohème. I was leaving because of La Bohème, but I wanted to get out anyway because of everything else. And I was getting a lot of pressure from the other singers to be the spokesperson about
the programme, because they didn’t want to speak up. I felt this pressure from all angles. We were having singers meetings, I’d confided in them that I was going to leave and they were saying, ‘Alfie, you have to tell them what’s wrong with this programme, fight this for us.’ But I couldn’t, because I had Baz saying, ‘Please do not say anything bad about the Royal Opera House. Just hand in your notice and leave.’ He knew what I thought about it all, but he didn’t want to get his hands dirty, and I think there was talk of his Bohème coming to the Opera House – he didn’t want to burn any bridges. So I went to the top and just said I was leaving because I wanted to go off and do La Bohème.

  The Director of Opera there, Elaine Padmore, couldn’t give me enough support. She was wonderful. She said, ‘There comes a point in every singer’s career when enough study is enough, and it’s time to go out and do the job. I know you’ve done the job before and you have the opportunity to do this. I wouldn’t miss it, go and do it.’

  The Music Director, Antonio Pappano, said to me, ‘Can you really imagine yourself singing act three of La Bohème three times a week on Broadway? It’s a tough old scene, can you imagine doing that three times a week?’

  I said, ‘Yeah, I can.’

  Then I told David Gowland and Tisi Dutton, and they gave me such a hard time. I had so many meetings, there were so many times where I had to sit in a room with them and explain why, why, why I wanted to leave the programme to go to America. I didn’t tell them what I thought about the programme, but I was nevertheless threatened by David Gowland. ‘If you EVER say ANYTHING negative about the Vilar Young Artists Programme I will be down on you like a ton of bricks.’

  I said, ‘You know what mate – I don’t take kindly to threats, and if you’re threatening me, let’s have it out now, let’s do it now, let’s sort it out.’

  Tisi Dutton said, ‘Guys, please, calm down, calm down!’

  But I was gonna smack his face in in that room, I really was. He’s still running that programme now, it’s called The Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, because Alberto Vilar, the investor, didn’t fulfil his financial commitments. He went to prison for fraud.

  You’d think they might have been proud that one of their students was going off to do this amazing job, starring in a huge production of La Bohème in New York. But the thing is about the operatic world, if an opera is not put on on an operatic stage like the Opera House or the English National, La Scala or Metropolitan, then it’s not an opera, it’s not legitimate. To them. If they’d investigated a little further they would have realised that Baz Luhrmann started out his career as an opera director. The La Bohème he did on Broadway was originally on the stage at Sydney Opera House, in 1990.

  I was a mess. I was sick every single day, physically sick. From the stress of simply going into the building – I was scared shitless going in there every day. I was shaking, my nerves were shot. It was awful. I almost lost it, I was really unstable. I lost so much weight. I was living in a room in a house in Clapham North, and thank God I’d bought this little vintage drum kit. I’d sold my last kit, the one from the Whisky Train era, years earlier, and didn’t have a kit until this new one. I set it up in the bedroom, and every night for three months I bashed all hell out of my drums in my little sanctuary, blasting out Bridges To Babylon by The Rolling Stones on my headphones, smacking my drums just to get my mind off my mental torture. I can’t listen to that album now because it takes me back to that eerie time. It’s a funny old thing that.

  Later, I even found out through Baz’s production team that they’d been contacting my agent months before I knew they were auditioning, because they’d seen the Channel 4 broadcast of the Glyndebourne La Bohème, liked the way I’d played Rodolfo, the innocence, and wanted to see me. My agent had been turning it down without telling me, saying they didn’t think it was right for me. They probably didn’t want to rankle the Opera House by having one of their artists leave their programme. Either way I was furious when I found that out, that they’d not given me the option to make my own mind up. My agent did attend meetings with the heads of the programmes and defended me to some extent, explained that this was something I wanted to do, but there was still an element of him sort of siding with the house, that it was possibly not what I should be doing. They’d turned down other offers too, they weren’t sending CVs and photos out to people when I was asking them to. They weren’t on the same path as me, so I left them soon after. Even at that stage I wanted to do records and to play to more mainstream audiences. I wanted exciting jobs! Jobs that inspired me and took me into different worlds. I wanted to shake up the classical world, I wanted to work with that European feeling, opera for the masses. Because England is very insular when it comes to classical music, they keep it very much to themselves, very much protected.

  There were a couple of lights in that tunnel. That January there was a Royal Opera House production of Tosca, with Pavarotti. His mother died during rehearsals and it wasn’t clear if he’d go through with the production, a four-night run. But he did, and I got to watch him from the wings, he was absolutely amazing. He played Rodolfo there in the 1960s. David Gowland arranged an afternoon for me and this other tenor, the guy he was giving all these opportunities to, to sing to Pavarotti in his hotel suite. But I didn’t go, because I was just so shaken up about everything. My confidence had gone and I just couldn’t do it. But it’s one of my biggest regrets, not doing that.

  Also I was in a production of Tristan and Isolde, playing the shepherd. I was brought out of class to rehearse it. That was wonderful because I loved singing that music, and I loved working with Bernard Haitink. I actually did his last performance at the Royal Opera House, and to do that made up for all the crap I’d been through, he was a fantastic conductor and he was lovely. I had a tiny little line in the piece, and I sang it to him, and I sang with the rest of the chorus, and he was really supportive, he gave me a lot of encouragement and spoke to a lot of music staff about me, he really acknowledged my voice. No one else there did, and he was a major star. I thought, ‘Wow man, this is great, Bernard Haitink likes my singing!’ Working on that show with him meant a lot, it was very precious to me.

  I left soon after that. I finished my final recital, and at the end, the head of opera came up to me, and the head of the programmes, and the casting director and the company manager, and one of them said, ‘Alfie, that was really good! Did you enjoy it? You looked like you did!’

  I said, ‘You know what? I hated every single minute. I hated every single minute of that. And I promise you, I will never do it again.’

  And I’ve never done a recital since. It wasn’t the music or the performing, it was just all the pressure they’d added. I wanted to get out. They were doing a final Vilar performance, and I said, ‘I’m not coming back, I’m not doing it.’

  They said, ‘Well, we’ll only accept your resignation if you do.’

  I said, ‘You can’t. I’m resigning. I’m leaving and I’m not coming back. And I’m not gonna do the final concert.’

  And I didn’t.

  There was no farewell, needless to say. And they were very quick to black out my face on all the promo posters and flyers for the Vilar Singers. Like I never existed. When I won a Tony award – the principal cast of Baz’s La Bohème all won Tony awards – it was amazing how quickly I was resurrected as one of the Opera House’s artists. But as awful as those few months had been, I was kind of loving it, sticking the rebellious two fingers up at them. Yeah, I wanted to fire it up a little bit. I wanted to be a fox in the chicken house, you know? And I was, I did kick up the dust a little bit. I don’t make decisions lightly and I wanted to prove I was something different. I’ve ruffled some feathers in the industry over the years, but I think you’ve got to do that. It keeps them on their toes! And if I’d turned down La Bohème on Broadway and stayed on that programme, I probably wouldn’t be singing today. I certainly wouldn’t be in the position I’m in today, because Baz Luhrmann’s Bohème brough
t a hell of a lot to me.

  When I was doing Les Misérables last year and I was living in a flat in Covent Garden, I’d often walk past the Royal Opera House, and I’d always feel an element of relief that I didn’t have to go in and be part of that programme any more. And it felt great.

  Before going to the States I had to do Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring in Glyndebourne, and I had three months to kill before that, so I went home to Fleetwood. I needed to recuperate. And I practically locked myself away in that house, sat in my room, because I was just a mess, mentally and physically. I’d really been put through the mill. Mum was there for me, she was great, she gave me the time I needed on my own, and consoled me, and fed me well! I felt safe at home, really, really safe, and so relieved to be there. I was thrilled about America, it was the only thing keeping me going. But I was upset, wrestling with my decision to some extent, a little tormented about what I was doing, concerned about not being able to sing again in the Royal Opera House after everything that had gone on there. Mum said, ‘What’s your gut feeling?’ and I said that I wanted to go to America. She said, ‘Well go. Do it. And you will sing at the Opera House again.’

  There was further madness, I was having problems with someone who was calling me up and giving me a hard time about some gossipy opera nonsense, and I’d had enough. And Mum got my phone, switched it off and hid it. She said, ‘I don’t want you to talk to anybody, I want you to recover. Get yourself back on your feet.’