All The World Is... Well, You Know

Greetings America.

What do Madonna, Gwynneth Paltrow, Macauly Culkin, Kevin Spacey and Gyles Brandreth have in common? You guessed? That's right. None of us feels we've really lived until we have strutted our stuff on the West End stage here in London town.

From Charlton Heston to Dustin Hoffman, from Judy Garland to Madonna, the icons of American theatre, the stars of Hollywood, only truly believe they've cracked it when they've played live on a stage in the city where William Shakespeare and Laurence Olivier used to ply their trade. Now I'm having a go too.

At the end of January I open at the Duchess Theatre here in a show called "Zipp!" It's a celebration of musical theatre. We guarantee to give you 100 musicals in 90 minutes or you get your money back. We give you the Complete Works of Andrew Lloyd Webber in 60 seconds. It's a roller-coaster ride across a century of great shows, from Floradora, the big Broadway hit of 1900, to the smash hits of today. We cut to the chase.

We give you the show-stoppers without the tedium of the intervening show. And if you don't like a particular musical, don't worry. Another one will be along in just a minute. It's an evening for people who love musical theatre. They get 100 of their favourite shows in quick succession. It's also an evening for people who HATE musical theatre. They can get through the entire repertoire in one fell swoop. They need never go to the theatre again. And after they've seen us, they may not want to. As I hope you can tell, it's supposed to be a comedy.

But, to be candid, on our journey to the West End it's been tears all the way. We are onto our third director and our fourth cast already. And raising the money has been like scene after scene from the current Broadway musical hit The Producers. I sing and dance in the show. And I keep losing my voice and twisting my ankles. We tried out the show in Edinburgh at the Festival they have there. Because I was a politician before I went into showbusiness, I wasn't used to seeing rows of contented, happy, smiling faces. And when at the first performance the audience stood up at the end, I thought they were going to throw things. In fact, they were standing to cheer.

If you are in London next year, come see "Zipp!" If we're still on. Statistically, most shows flop. And we are playing a theatre that features in the Guinness Book of World Records. It's the only theatre in London where a show was once so unsuccessful it opened and closed on the same night.
by Gyles Brandreth