Matthew Amer talks to this year’s winner of the Best Actor in a Musical Olivier Award about his incredible 2010 and an exciting 2011…
It has been a remarkable year for West End performer David Thaxton. He has realised a childhood ambition, landed his first bona fide West End leading role and topped it all off with a win at the recent Olivier Awards with MasterCard.
Such success sets the bar pole-vault-high for his current project, following Joseph Millson as Raoul in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Coney Island-set musical Love Never Dies.
“I think musically some of the show is among the finest stuff Andrew Lloyd Webber has ever written,” says Thaxton as he chats on the phone from the comfort of his Adelphi theatre dressing room. “Til I Hear You Sing [the Phantom’s big number], I genuinely believe is probably one of the five, maybe three, best things he’s ever written.”
Love Never Dies – unofficially the sequel to Lloyd Webber’s long-running hit The Phantom Of The Opera, though officially described as a continuation of the Phantom’s story – had a chequered start to life when it opened last year. While some critics sang its praises – the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer described it as “Lloyd Webber’s finest show since the original Phantom” – influential bloggers The West End Whingers dubbed it Paint Never Dries, a moniker which stuck like particularly tacky excrement to the production. It was also hounded by a group of Phantom fans who believed a sequel should never have been written in the first place.
Far from sitting in an ivory tower gazing down at the criticism with disgust, Lloyd Webber took the comments on board, rolled up his sleeves and reworked the show, which subsequently received seven Olivier Award nominations, the most of any single production in 2011.
While Thaxton, who is not the type of performer to immerse himself in musical theatre in his spare time, let many of the harsh words drift past him like a phantom in the night, he is, he says, “aware that I am going to have an easier six months than the first six months in the show”.
The Raoul of Love Never Dies is not the suave, dashing hero of the show’s predecessor. The action has moved on a decade and the years have treated him badly. He has more problems than an agony aunt’s postbag. “He’s intensely frustrated more than anything,” explains Thaxton, defending the Vicomte de Chagny. “Of course, being an alcoholic and a gambling addict doesn’t help.”
Indeed it doesn’t, but if you are worried about Thaxton having to put himself through the wringer each night, fear not. For all Raoul’s foibles, Thaxton’s last job was nothing if not draining.
Thaxton led the cast of the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Passion, the starring piece in the powerhouse theatre’s celebration of composer Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday. Though the tale of a love triangle was less than two hours long, Thaxton was a constant presence. “I think I only left the stage twice, but that was to run around, put a jacket on and come in from a different entrance,” he says. It was not, of course, just during performances that this was exhausting, but even more so during rehearsals when he was needed for every scene and during the show’s technical rehearsals, where again, his presence was necessary to ensure the smallest details of the production were correct. “It was a fascinating, difficult, rewarding experience and not something I’ll forget in a hurry.”
It was his appearance in Passion that made 2010 such an incredible year for Thaxton. It was his first leading West End performance, it was the role for which he won the Best Actor in a Musical Olivier Award and it was the production that allowed him to fulfil an ambition he had harboured since before he was a teenager.
“When I was 10, I was this musical theatre geek. I loved it. This was before I got into Radiohead and girls. Back then I was falling in love with Sweeney Todd. I saw the video from 1982 with Angela Lansbury and remember thinking that’s just the best thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s stayed with me ever since. Watching it back now there’s a couple of performances in there that I think are ropey to say the least, but it’s still my favourite piece of anything.”
So, when Thaxton arrived for the first day of rehearsals, was introduced to “Steve” and then sang Sondheim’s own show to him around a piano, it was, as director Jamie Lloyd called it, “a collectable moment”. Thaxton adds: “It was bonkers, not overawing, just great, something I’ve always wanted to do.”
American composer Sondheim is often spoken of like a theatrical unicorn, a mythical entity whose very presence offers a sense of musical theatre perfection. To hear him chirpily referred to as simply “Steve” seems outrageous. But, says Thaxton, “you do because he’s the nicest, most down-to-earth guy imaginable. He’s completely unassuming and fantastic, a really good laugh, just a really nice normal bloke. I’ve only met two people I would call a genius and he’s one of them.” The other, by the way, is Irish composer Brian Irvine, whose opera The Tailor’s Daughter Thaxton starred in for the Welsh National Youth Opera.
“Why I like Sondheim’s stuff,” Thaxton explains, “is why I like Radiohead. As a viewer or listener you have to invest yourself and then you get great reward out of it. The more you give of yourself to something, the more you get out of it.”
Clearly Thaxton got a lot out of this particular Sondheim experience; it delivered him the highest accolade that can come to a West End star, an Olivier Award. “Being nominated is just the most extraordinary honour,” Thaxton says. “Winning was bizarre. I was just so happy and so pleased to just be there and be in the room and be nominated that I didn’t have the slightest thought of winning, so I was dumbfounded when I won.”
To win such a prestigious award for his very first leading role makes Thaxton appear an overnight success. This is not entirely the case. The Neath native had spent four of the five years prior to Passion performing in Les Misérables, two years understudying Enjolras before taking a break for a year and returning to make the role of Enjolras his own.
“That show’s never going to stop,” he says, describing London’s longest running musical with a fan’s passion and enthusiasm. “Everybody loves Les Mis. I loved Les Mis when I was younger and I still love it now. I can’t imagine it not being there and it’s like that for a reason; the story’s fantastic and the music’s fantastic and the direction’s fantastic. It’s one of those great examples of when all these different things come together stunningly.”
Though Thaxton talks passionately about musical theatre, I get the feeling it is not where his heart truly lies. “I do love my job. I love acting. I love singing. I love performing,” he says, but unlike some of his musical theatre colleagues, he does not spend his spare time performing cabaret. “I find that incredibly boring and I’m not into it.” If he sings in the shower, there are much higher chances of his song of choice being a Radiohead track than anything by Jason Robert Brown. He used to play in a band, Glasgow Coma Score, before its members found themselves dispersed around the country, and being an award-winning West End leading man makes gigging in the evening difficult. But he is working towards bringing the two worlds closer together with his company Blue Iron, which aims to find and support like-minded West End performers who write their own music but don’t have a platform to put it in the spotlight.
Only the meanest of interviewers would ask this year’s Olivier Award winner if he would rather be a rock star than a musical star. “Eerrr… eeee… uummm… would I? I’d like to work out how to do both. I’ve got all these ideas about how to get things going, but at the moment musical theatre’s what’s happening. It’s a crazy way to earn a living but it’s fantastic. I’m phenomenally lucky. We’re all phenomenally lucky. Anybody in the industry is and if they tell you otherwise they’re lying.”
If the past year’s success is anything to go by, keep an eye out for Thaxton performing alongside Radiohead sometime soon.
MA