Because I was based in Derby, I tried, as best I could, to find work locally. Sheffield was a couple of stops north along the Midland railway, so was local enough as far as I was concerned. The rep theatre there, the Crucible, was under the artistic directorship of Clare Venables, who had run Stratford East. She offered me the musical directorship of a production of Sweet Charity, to star Suzanne Danielle, a then-popular TV personality who had trained and worked as a dancer. She was friendly, talented and hard-working. The fact that I had a rotten time on the production was in no way attributable to her.
Like an idiot, I’d agreed not only to MD but also to do re-arrange the songs so that they could be played by the small number of musicians we had budgeted for . Sweet Charity was a dance show. It had long routines which developed out of the score’s well-known songs. By the time I’d finished teaching the songs, accompanying rehearsals, and commuting, the only way I could write up the arrangements was by not sleeping. Gradually I became exhausted.
Meanwhile, Clare was becoming ill. I don’t know exactly what was wrong. Perhaps it was the first sign of the cancer that was eventually to kill her at the early age of 60. Whatever it was, she was too poorly to continue directing the production, so she withdrew. The baton was passed to Michael Elwyn. He was kind and charming and seemingly unfazed by the rather tense atmosphere which had been building because of Clare’s illness and my exhaustion.
Michael steered the show to its opening, the musicians and the actors blessedly compensated for my tardiness in delivering finished arrangements, and I was able to slot in to simple commuting and recover. You would have thought I’d learned a valuable lesson about taking on too much. But I found myself in a similar situation a decade later.