Actor, recording artist, radio presenter… and now producer. Michael Ball finds time in his busy life to have a quick chat with Caroline Bishop.
“I’m a bit frazzled,” says Michael Ball when I catch him on the phone one weekday lunchtime. I’m not surprised. It must be constantly frazzling being Michael Ball. With a touring production of Hairspray to star in, another series of his Radio 2 show on the horizon, a new album to record and a solo concert tour to plan, it is no wonder that fitting in a trip to Frinton-on-Sea (it’s in Essex since you ask) to present a teaching award for BBC2 has left him feeling frazzled.
Still, the fact Ball also has to spend the drive back from Frinton-on-Sea – “Never been there before; don’t expect I’ll go there again” – doing a succession of phone interviews doesn’t seemed to have affected his natural bonhomie. A consummate professional – as a radio interviewer himself, he knows the drill – Ball is warm and charming, setting a relaxed tone by apologising for calling late.
He knows these things have to be done if he is to promote his latest venture. As if he wasn’t busy enough, Ball has added another iron to his heavily-laden fire by making his producing debut with the West End transfer of Chichester Festival Theatre musical Love Story.
Erich Segal’s 1970 novel about a sporty rich boy and an arty poor girl who meet and fall in love was written specifically to be turned into a film, starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. Love Story’s brand of weepy romance made both novel and film huge hits, and composer Howard Goodall and book writer Stephen Clark would surely be delighted if their musical stage adaptation did the same.
However, as Ball points out, Segal’s tale is a sentimental narrative that could seem a little contrived. “I think as you get older you get more and more cynical about the film,” he says. “It is a bit maudlin and a bit gloopy.”
“I will always want to be on stage. I like the sound of applause too much”
So why, I wonder, has he chosen Love Story with which to make his producing debut? “The show wasn’t like that,” he continues. “When I went to the show, I was curious, would they be able to avoid the sort of cliché of the movie? And they absolutely did.”
He had taken his mum and his long-term partner Cathy (McGowan, known for presenting music show Ready Steady Go! in the 1960s) to see the Rachel Kavanaugh-directed stage production in Chichester, “purely out of interest” because he lives nearby, and because Emma Williams, his former co-star in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, was playing the female lead. The idea of Ball coming on board as producer wasn’t even a whiff in the air. But the show made an impression. “I was simply knocked out,” he says. “I thought it was beautiful.”
Love Story’s existing producers, experienced professionals Stephen Waley-Cohen and Adam Spiegel, were already considering taking the musical up to London, so when Ball rang Spiegel – with whom he had worked on recent West End hit Hairspray – to express his enthusiasm for the show, the producer seized the opportunity. “He said ‘do you want to put your money where your mouth is and come on board as co-producer?’,” says Ball. “It just seemed the right thing to do at the right time, and one of those things that happened so organically, not planned, not contrived. It’s one of those things that absolutely feel like they are meant to be.”
Getting Ball on board was a canny business decision indeed; Ball himself knows that his prominent public profile after 25 years as a leading musical theatre star and platinum-selling recording artist means he is well-placed to “beat the drum” for Love Story’s West End transfer. “It needed a wider audience, it needed help to bring it in [to London] and I’m so pleased I was able to contribute in some way to that.”
But he isn’t producer in name only. Ball is fully involved in producing duties, not least advising on the production itself. “I think it was very helpful for them to have somebody who is coming into it absolutely fresh, seeing it for the first time in the theatre having not gone through workshops and different permutations,” he says. He has also taken on the marketing side of things, advising on the poster design and creating press opportunities. “They’ve [Spiegel and Waley-Cohen] not treated me with kid gloves and said ‘oh don’t worry we’ll look after that.’ It’s a completely hands-on experience.”
Thankfully, he hasn’t come to this blind. With many concert tours behind him “where you really end up being your own producer”, he has experience of dealing with budgetary issues and other constraints, and his 25 years in the business have taught him a few things, too.
“They’ve not treated me with kid gloves. It’s a completely hands-on experience”
Nevertheless, being this side of the fence has been illuminating for Ball, not least in learning that, as producer, the buck stops with you. “You have to make the decisions. There are deadlines and they have to be met. You can’t prevaricate, you have to take the bull by the horns and say ‘right, this is what we’re going to do.’ And you have to be quite tough, you have to know what your constraints are.”
He has come a long way since making his West End debut in the original production of Les Misérables – alongside Love Story cast member Peter Polycarpou – in 1985. That production, he says, was a classic example of a producer – Cameron Mackintosh – having to make tough decisions. “Les Mis was so long when we first opened it, in previews, four and a half hours long. Those decisions, what gets cut, how do you try and keep the story working – and every person on stage is going ‘no, no, my bit is the most important, you can’t cut this because I’m in it’ – you realise those decisions have got to be made.”
“I think producers have to mediate,” he says of how to deal with such situations. “If something needed rewriting or restructuring, to talk to the writers and say ‘have you thought maybe that this might need to happen?’. There are different ways of approaching it. I think I would always [take the approach] of mediation and conciliation and a group, company effort. But I know some would just march in and say ‘no darling, this is what’s happening’.”
The hardest thing about his conversion from performer to producer, he predicts, will be to sit in the audience on opening night and not be able to do anything to influence the evening. “You just have to sit and hope.”
Ball fans will be pleased to know that this move into producing does not mean he will now always be sitting in the stalls rather than performing on stage. On the contrary, his enthusiasm for Hairspray, which he continues to star in on tour after a Laurence Olivier Award-wining performance in the West End, indicates that performing remains at the heart of what he does. “It was – still is – the best experience in my life,” he says of donning a dress and false breasts to play big-hearted mother Edna Turnblad in the 60s-set dance musical. “Absolute joy from beginning to end. I can’t think of any down side to it. There wasn’t a bad day.” He even has a pet name for his fat suit. “I love Jermaine, as I got to call her,” he laughs.
The tour finishes in Bristol next April “but you never know,” says Ball. “I might one day slip back into the slingbacks again. Never say never.”
“Hairspray was – still is – the best experience in my life”
That phrase seems to sum Ball up at the moment. Producing, he says, is something he would like to do more of – “this is something I feel comfortable doing and I’m excited about” – but he would like to try his hand at other disciplines, too. “Directing, certainly, I’d like a go at. That’s definitely more of a craft to learn that I haven’t learnt, but absolutely something I would do. But nothing will ever stop me performing, unless other people stop me. I will always want to be on stage. I like the sound of applause too much.”
As his career continues to expand, I wonder how he manages to juggle so many balls (sorry) at the same time. “You have to be able to compartmentalise,” he says. “You have to have structure. You have to know when your time off is and make the most of that time. It’s about delegation, you have to trust that people will be doing their job when you’re doing yours.”
So you can’t be a control freak then, I suggest, and he laughs. “No but I am. Andrew my driver is laughing because this is the first journey – because I’m doing interviews on the phone – I haven’t been telling him how to drive.”
With that, Ball prepares to say his goodbyes, off to ITV to do another interview in his ever hectic schedule. “Then I’m going to go home, cook a very nice dinner,” he says, “and then it’s a family weekend in front of the telly watching X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.” With a life like his, it sounds like a relaxing Saturday night in is just what he needs.
CB