John Barrowman: my tiff with Andrew Lloyd Webber

Published: 6:19PM GMT twenty-seven February 2010

Comments 6 |

John Barrowman, left, and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber Photo: REX

The initial lane on John Barrowman"s new manuscript is aptly patrician When I Get My Name in Lights, and it is a feeling that Barrowman contingency be well-accustomed to. Having been the entire face of light party for years, the singer-cum-actor-cum-presenter with the unequivocally white teeth has been basking in each set of lights going on radio and on the stage.

It has been close on unfit to switch on the radio on a Saturday night and miss Barrowman, possibly in his purpose as Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who a impression so renouned that the BBC gave him his own spin-off series, Torchwood hosting his party show Tonight"s the Night, or as a decider on How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, Any Dream Will Do and I"d Do Anything, the BBC"s fibre of being shows sport for Andrew Lloyd Webber"s subsequent West End stars.

Matt Smith on being Doctor Who Andrew Lloyd-Webber: an reparation Eurovision Song Contest: Its not my time, admits Andrew Lloyd Webber Top five cocktail strain events of 2009 Annabel Croft tells of slight shun from blade conflict on being TV show Diversity kick Susan Boyle to win Britain?s Got Talent

Having played lead purposes in what seems similar to each vital musical, together with The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and Sunset Boulevard, Barrowman laughs when I contend there is no evading him. So was it regularly the plan to get that name wedged in the lights?

"It was never a plan, it was regularly a dream, and as a result the preference of that song," he says. "If I could go behind in time, I would deliver that strain to my eight-year-old self, and I"d let him sing it, since that"s only the instruct I had as a kid not to be important but to sing and dance or be on the entertainment and television. Anything only to get my name in lights."

Lloyd Webber has turn something of a coach to Barrowman, with the span operative together in entertainment and radio for some-more than fifteen years, but currently I clarity only a sniff of a falling-out. Barrowman is smarting since Lloyd Webber has forsaken him from the soundtrack of Love Never Dies, the supplement to The Phantom of the Opera, that has only non-stop in the West End.

"I was taken off it since Andrew motionless to reorchestrate everything," he says, rolling his eyes. "Sometimes I don"t know since he creates a small of the decisions he makes."

Would he cruise personification the haunt in the new musical, somewhere down the line? "No."

Why not? "Just because. There are alternative things I wish to do. And if he longed for me to do the Phantom he should have asked me."

Still, Barrowman treasures their friendship, deliberation it a benchmark of his success. Resting his china trainers on the coffee list in the Sony strain executive"s swanky bureau where we are chatting, he says: "The one thing that I love about the attribute is that Andrew doesn"t mind if I remonstrate with him. There"s a lot of people who won"t remonstrate with Andrew, but I have no complaint with it, and clamp versa he with me.

"People are fearful of him. He"s Andrew Lloyd Webber, for integrity sake. It still tickles me that I can lay here and speak about him similar to this, since when I was in high school, I listened to The Phantom of the Opera for the initial time, and I pronounced to my friend, Laura, "I wish to work for that man one day". Then a integrate of years later, I was you do Phantom. Now, I"ve been to his house, swum in his pool, flown in his jet … I mean, who knew?"

The BBC shows spearheaded by Lloyd Webber have come in for a satisfactory volume of flak, with critics disbelief since the composer and the shows with that he is compared should be since so most prime-time exposure, with alternative dissenting voices claiming that a being show is as well slight a process of sport out loyal melodramatic talent.

When I discuss this, Barrowman launches a ardent defence. "How is it slight when we poke the total country? It"s a formulaic approach to find someone that functions and that creates a �16 million allege [the West End"s greatest ever allege was for Oliver!, that non-stop last year]. It gave the West End and musicals bearing that no alternative TV programme or network would have done. They didn"t think any one was interested.

"So afterwards the BBC came up with this show, and it was large because, as I"ve been observant for years, there"s a marketplace out there in the ubiquitous open for musicals. I assimilate since people go, "ugh, we don"t similar to it", but I see at it this approach all the shows that I was concerned in have right away hired thousands of people."

Barrowman has no time for the arrogance in a small entertainment circles that has ensued, with producers griping that the radio shows have lowered the tinge of their audiences and critics griping that each theatregoer right away expects a radio "star" to underline on the billing.

He points to the new proclamation by the Society of London Theatres that West End box-office takings pennyless by the half a billion bruise symbol last year for the initial time.

"All I"ll contend to that is, for those who complained that the Joseph, Maria and Nancy programmes were unpropitious to the West End, force that down your throat. It brings people in to the entertainment who competence not have been introduced. And I"ve had association managers complaining, "Oh, we"ve got people sitting in bombard suits in the theatre." Well, you"ve got people in the theatre, bums on seats, your expel is being paid and you"re being paid since your residence is full, so don"t complain."

Barrowman, 42, was innate in Glasgow, but changed to Illinois when he was eight, as a result his accent wafts in in between Scottish and American, depending on who he is with and what he"s articulate about.

"In Glasgow, in first school, I used to turn up the kids and do Opportunity Knocks in the playground," he says in Glaswegian. "Perhaps that"s since I have such an love for the bent shows I"ve been concerned in."

While study behaving humanities at the United States International University in California, he visited the UK and attended an open try-out for the low-pitched Anything Goes, alighting the lead piece conflicting Elaine Paige. "I was 22, and the youngest in the company," he recalls. "Everyone else went behind to propagandize and I came down to London for rehearsals."

A 16-year career in musicals followed, and Barrowman obviously adores receiving centre stage, though he confides that he not long ago incited down the event to paint the UK at this year"s Eurovision Song Contest.

So since did the self-confessed Eurovision junkie, who treats me to a miscellany of his prime hits over the years and confesses that he hosts annual Eurovision parties, reject the possibility to sing for the nation?

"I was asked to sing dual years ago, and I deliberate it, but the reason I didn"t do it was since of all of the politics. No make a difference how good the strain was, you"d be nonexistence points. Also, a lot of people are perplexing to provide it similar to The X Factor and American Idol. But it"s Eurovision and we"re not going to emanate a cocktail star out of Eurovision."

Anyway, Barrowman has most bigger fish to grill in Hollywood. He literally bounces up and down on the lounge when he tells me he has landed a piece in the cult radio series, Desperate Housewives.

"I"ve been failing to discuss it someone," he says, lucent at the thought of drifting out to Los Angeles subsequent month and rubbing off shoulders with the ladies of Wisteria Lane. His impression is tip secret, but, he says, is "pure evil", a purpose he is relishing.

Barrowman cackles as the review turns to how all the women of Wisteria Lane see as if they"ve been in a breeze tunnel, so well-spoken and unfurrowed are their Hollywood features. "Ah, well I"m gonna be in that breeze hovel with them," he laughs, pulling behind his cheeks. "I"ll come behind from LA and you won"t know me, I"ll be so airbrushed."

He insists it is his Desperate Housewives purpose that has prevented him from being a decider on the subsequent BBC low-pitched bent show, Over the Rainbow, in that Lloyd Webber will poke for Dorothy for a new prolongation of The Wizard of Oz. He will not, however, be drawn on the BBC"s preference to dump Denise outpost Outen, his associate decider on the prior shows, because, as she claims, she is pregnant.

Barrowman divides his time in in between homes in London and Cardiff, where he lives with his partner of seventeen years, Scott Gill, an architect. The integrate have contemplated adopting, with the new tragedy in Haiti focusing their minds even some-more on starting a family.

"With all the kids who"ve been orphaned there, I pronounced to Scott, we could unequivocally help. Then I thought to myself, if I did that, the press would unequivocally burst on it. That I"m on a bandwagon, and I"d be an Angelina and a Brad or I"m you do what Madonna did. But if you"re going to adopt a child, you should see at taking advantage of in your own nation first, since there are a lot of young kids inside of the UK who need to be adopted. So if that was ever to happen, I would wish to adopt from the UK, and if there were still young kids who indispensable a home, say, in Haiti, afterwards we"d do that. We can suggest a kid a amatory home and a good event they would never have had."

The new manuscript is a gathering of crowd-pleasing covers together with Copacabana and You"ll Never Walk Alone, songs that will no disbelief keep the housewives happy and Sony"s sales buoyant. But isn"t it all only a small bit, well, nice?

"If I were to go out and do a garland of AC/DC covers, it only wouldn"t sail," he says. "I"d receptive to advice foolish and my fans wouldn"t similar to it. I don"t wish to be a cocktail star. I"m as well old. I"m not going to get up and teeny-bop around. That"s not me. Doing this, I can be myself."

And that, as it says on his website, is being "an hostess with a collateral E".

 John Barrowman"s self-titled manuscript is out Mar 1 on Arista