This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:01] Michael Ritchie: Welcome to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast.

[0:07] Michael Ritchie: I'm Michael Ritchie, Artistic Director of the Center Theatre Group. For each episode of this podcast, we talk with some of the talented artists working across our three stages: the Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, and the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

[0:22] Michael Ritchie: Our guest on this podcast is Sir Matthew Bourne, who has brought a new generation of audiences to dance, breaking down the walls between classical ballet and theatrical entertainment. In 1995, Matthew changed the worlds of dance and theatre when his daring interpretation of Swan Lake made its world premiere in London. A year later, it had become the longest running ballet on the West End. And a year after that, in 1997, he made his U.S. debut here with Center Theatre Group at the Ahmanson Theatre, where Swan Lake became an instant hit before becoming the longest running ballet on Broadway. The images Matthew conjures on stage are often striking and always imaginative. He now returns to the Ahmanson with a revival of another one of his classics, Cinderella, on stage February 5 through March 10, 2019.

We're proud to have Matthew consider the Ahmanson his second home and also to have him as an Associate Artist at Center Theatre Group. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and I look forward to seeing you at the theatre.

[1:34] Michael Ritchie: Welcome back to L.A.

[1:36] Matthew Bourne: Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here always.

[1:38] Michael Ritchie: Well, obviously, we want to talk a little bit about Cinderella, which is playing right now. But to lead into it, let's do some background on you, I guess in your career, and how and where it started. Did you grow up dancing or going to dance?

[1:55] Matthew Bourne: Well, not really going to dance that people might think the sort of thing that they might think I was going to. I was brought up in East London. I'm actually a Cockney, really. And my parents loved going to the theatre. They're not in the theatre, but they loved to take me. I was lucky to live in London, of course, where there's lots of theatre. So I saw a lot of dancing musicals, and they loved movies as well. So they sat me down in front of MGM musicals from about four or five onwards. So I really loved that. So I knew that kind of dance, you know. For many years, that was the kind of dancing I knew, and I didn't know anything about ballet or contemporary dance or modern dance. So the instinct in me at that age was to put on a show.

I mean, it's in a very Mickey and Judy kind of way. I always wanted to put on a show, get kids from down the street to come and work, you know, to be in it. That moved into the sort of church hall down the road. I used to put on shows. I used to sing in the choir, but then I used to be able to put on my own shows as well. I've always done it. It's an instinct in me to do it. But the training and the dance-specific thing that I do now came a lot later.

[3:10] Matthew Bourne: I discovered ballet and contemporary dance in my late teens. Very late teens. Yeah, 18.

[3:16] Michael Ritchie: Before we get onto that, did you charge for the performances you put on in the neighborhood?

[3:20] Matthew Bourne: I did.

[3:21] Michael Ritchie: You did? How much?

[3:24] Matthew Bourne: I used to say something like, what would it have been? A couple of shillings or something in those days. Actually, pre-decimal. Pre-decimal money, which was before the age of 11, I guess. I used to get little old ladies that I knew and liked down the street who lived on their own. I used to bring them to my house to sit and watch me do these shows and offer them a cup of tea and biscuits to go with it. So that was free.

[3:49] Michael Ritchie: Did you share the proceeds with the performers?

[3:52] Matthew Bourne: Do you know, I don't know what I did with the proceeds. I'd really like to know why I was charging them and what it was for. I don't know.

[3:59] Michael Ritchie: Well, clearly someone was paying. So you discovered dance late and then wanted to become a dancer, was it?

[4:10] Matthew Bourne: Yeah, I'd done it in an amateur way for a long time, and I was sort of self-taught, and I kind of think I felt I was quite good. You know, like you do if you're doing it. I thought, oh, I'm quite good at dancing, you know. The idea of training was not something that occurred to me really. In fact, the locals of the amateur dance group I went to, they used to do a ballet class at the beginning of the rehearsal session each time, and I would turn up after that. I didn't want to be – There's something about young males, you know, and dance that I didn't want to be seen to be doing ballet at that age. So I went after – I turned up after the class. So there was something going on in my head, which I can't quite explain now, but it wasn't for me, you know.

I knew it wasn't for me at that point, and it took a long time for that to become something I felt I needed, which I did, obviously, to do what I do now. But I got into ballet and all the great choreographers that were coming to London. You know, again, living in London, it was a great chance to see so much in a short space of time, and I used to go a lot. And it came to a point where I just thought I'd need to take this more seriously, you know, and I met some people who were also training. I was ushering at the National Theatre at the time.

[5:29] Michael Ritchie: Oh, nice.

[5:30] Matthew Bourne: I worked there for a long time. I was working there pre-training, through training, and when I started my company, I was there for nine years. Some American travellers might recognise me from being there. I used to get recognised quite a lot, and they thought, oh, is he an actor or something? No, he's on the bookshelf at the National Theatre sitting in that foyer because I used to chat to people. But I love that job. You know, I saw so much. But I met all my fellow ushers and people like that who were trainee actors and dancers and singers and people like that, and I met some who were a similar age to me, had gone into training as a dancer, full-time training, and I thought, well, he's the same as me. Why am I not doing that? And I applied, and it was literally my first ever dance class was my audition. It's crazy. And I got in.

[6:19] Michael Ritchie: Did you go to university?

[6:21] Matthew Bourne: Well, this was sort of – it was a BA honours degree course. It was one of the first of its kind in dance at that time. So I did end up with a degree. So it was like going to university. But at the time, to justify the degree, it was backed up with an enormous amount of written work as well as the rehearsing and the class.

[6:42] Michael Ritchie: General academia or in the craft?

[6:45] Matthew Bourne: All in the craft. Yeah, all to do with dance. We studied movement, studied criticism, history, all sorts of things, as well as choreography and dance training.

[6:59] Michael Ritchie: In that training, did you watch film? Was that part of your training was to look at different choreographers?

[7:07] Matthew Bourne: Well, certainly to learn about the history of dance, and I've always loved that. I really was big on that. I found that fascinating. As people have seen in some of my pieces, I love calling upon the history of dance and using that. So that was a big fascination for me. One of the things I first liked about ballet was that it was some piece of art preserved all these years, sort of recreated. I thought that was sort of extraordinary that it was still there and quite eccentric in its way.

[7:37] Michael Ritchie: Did you learn dance notation?

[7:39] Matthew Bourne: I did a bit. I got up to sort of an intermediary level or something in Laban notation, it was called. Not really useful these days, I don't find.

[7:51] Michael Ritchie: For you or in general?

[7:52] Matthew Bourne: In general, it's a very slow process, and we can film everything now on our phones and it's from all angles. Yeah, it always fascinated me. I had very little experience with it, but when I saw it being used, I was stunned by the hieroglyphics of it and the ability to translate. I was really lucky at one point in my career to end up in a rehearsal room with Jerome Robbins for about six months on and off, where he was trying to develop essentially his autobiography. It was called The Papa Piece, and it was some scripted sections, a lot of dance from his childhood on up through his career, his political problems, where he was in his life, never came to life, never left the rehearsal room. And it was, I mentioned that because of the notation, I remember seeing that then, and he would have someone else come in.

And recreate some of his script. Recreate for him, he couldn't read it, but he'd bring people in that knew. But it was also one of the few times I've ever been in a room where I thought that I'm sitting next to genius. There was something that came out of him that was inspired, that is rare to see.

[9:13] Michael Ritchie: Well, you hear that again and again with him, don't you, that people very much felt that. You obviously experienced it and you saw it. But also quite a dark character, wasn't he?

[9:24] Matthew Bourne: Oh, he really was. Now I was lucky in that since I lived a block away from him and we rehearsed across town, so we would ride back and forth together. I'd go over to his townhouse to pick him up and we had a car for him. And so I had a lot of quiet time with him. And so it was, and I was the stage manager, so he needed me just to be useful. I just had to provide things for him. And then because we lived near each other, he got to know my wife and my son on the street. And my son, our son at the time was three years old, and he was great with little kids. And so there was something that I found very charming about him, but to watch him turn on a dancer, I mean, he would rip holes in people. But he had a crew of his dancers for years in the room together, and they just took it. They all knew. They knew how to deal with it. But boy, if he got someone a rookie or someone raw, he could rip them apart.

[10:25] Michael Ritchie: Yeah, no, I've heard. I'd find that a very difficult way to work. I'd feel so guilty all day I wouldn't be able to work if I'd been horrible to someone or rude to someone. I'm almost the opposite, too nice.

[10:39] Matthew Bourne: It may be a work of bringing inspiration to others. You're creating.

[10:44] Michael Ritchie: Yeah. How do you create that space where something happens and it's different for different people? And it brings out something in those people. I'm sure it can work, but to each his own, really. I just wouldn't like myself if I did what's like that, you know.

[10:59] Michael Ritchie: So when you came out of your training, did you join a company as a dancer?

[11:04] Matthew Bourne: No, I started the company and I still run today.

[11:08] Michael Ritchie: You got balls. So how did you go about doing that?

[11:13] Matthew Bourne: All right, so you just like, you know, kicked around and tried shillings on the street until you were in your late teens, took a little bit of training, and then suddenly you think, well, you know what? It started really small. I mean, I had a fourth year of training, which was about being part of a company where you would sort of audition for the fourth year. And you became a company and choreographers came in and worked with you. So I learned about how a company works and the sort of venues you might go to. And I was working with a group of friends at college and we just decided to start our own thing. Several of us wanted to choreograph. We all wanted to perform. We thought if we don't do ourselves, it was quite a culture of that in UK at the time, lots of little companies around.

So there's only about eight of us. So it wasn't what it is now. It was a very small, unpaid concern to begin with where you ironed your own costumes and rolled out the floor and put it down and rolled it up at the end of the evening. But fun, you know, lots of fun. I loved it.

[12:14] Matthew Bourne: Because in the beginning, always the best. Don't you have just the best memories of just living on the edge? Yeah, I loved it. I mean, I love what I do now, but I love that as much. I never sort of hankered for more. It just happened. The company was there.

[12:28] Matthew Bourne: In the beginning, both as a dancer and a choreographer, certainly you weren't doing the large scale pieces, both in scope or in length. So you're working on smaller pieces at the time? Yeah, there were small sort of pastiche kind of pieces, collage-y pieces about ideas. You know, I did one about Englishness, I did one about Frenchness, you know, sort of like I'd bring together ideas and make a little, almost a cabaret in one sense. But at the same time as that, I was getting offers to work in theatre and do work in plays and musical theatre. John Caird was one of the first people who came to me and offered me something. I've got him and Stephen Schwartz, actually, as well. He brought Stephen Schwartz along to some of my shows.

And I've actually got an old video of one of my performances, where there's about ten people in the audience, including John and Stephen, and you can hear them laughing all the way through. And this led to some nice things, you know, John invited me to work with him at the RSC on a production of Actually Like It, and I met lots of great actors I'm still friendly with now. Alan Cummings has been a lifelong friend, you know, since then. And I got invited to do a musical with them called Children of Eden, which is Stephen Schwartz's musical. And we did the premiere of it in London; it was a big flop. So it's a big lesson to me at the time. Because I thought, well, I'm made now, aren't I? Stephen Schwartz, John Caird, just done Les Mis.

You know, all these shows run forever. Three months, I was gone, you know, so it's interesting. But I learned alongside that I was working with some really interesting directors and learning from them and bringing that to what I do in dance. That was a very valuable time, actually.

[14:23] Michael Ritchie: Now, isn't there? Look, the hits are wonderful. But in retrospect, isn't there something wonderful about the flops? Isn't there something? Isn't that where the stories come from?

[14:32] Matthew Bourne: Yes, I think so. And maybe you learn things as well. You know, I mean, you're learning what you think, well, okay. Because I think when you build up to an opening of anything, you're convincing yourself it's good. Because that's your job, in a way, to convince everyone, this is great, isn't it? Isn't it, everyone? And then publicly, people are telling you in newspapers that it's not so good. You can't come to terms with this, you know. And it does hit you. It's hard. Anyone who works in theatre knows this, you know, the public judgment of your work when you're most vulnerable, really, is not nice. No. And look, for me, I have a little bit of a distance in that I'm, you know, I produce the shows, I put the teams together, you are putting yourself out there, your performers putting themselves out there.

It's, you know, being an artist isn't what you do. It's who you are. So when your art gets judged, it must feel like, it must feel very personal. I can, I can remove myself a little bit. I don't know if I'd have the capacity to be as close to it as I see in artists.

[15:55] Matthew Bourne: Yeah, I mean, I think it's true, you open yourselves up, don't you? And it is a very public thing. But of course, that's what it's all about. It's about audiences. So it goes, it goes along with that.

[16:07] Michael Ritchie: I don't know fully the history of the company. My first experience with it was with Swan Lake. So now that began back in Great Britain and London where you were. How did it come to be a piece that was seen in some ways around the world? What was that trajectory? And was that the first big leap for you in the company?

[16:29] Matthew Bourne: Well, it changed my life, that piece. I'd done Nutcracker before, but it was a commission for another company, an opera company called Opera North. So that experience had been a good one. And I'd enjoyed working with a score and everything. So I wanted to do another one. And Swan Lake would have been my first choice anyway, probably. It was a big gamble to do it in some ways, but we had proper funding to expand. We were the small company, as I was saying, and then we expanded to do it. The two weeks, which was a long time at that time, run at Sadler's Wells. So there was a lot of faith in it, I suppose, in a way. We felt we had a good idea. Other people didn't share that thought outside of the rehearsal room, some people.

So it was a little scary, but we had faith in it. But we had no expectation of what would happen once we did that first show, really. It was sort of an incredible, life-changing night. Cameron McIntosh literally pinned me against the wall in the bar in the interval and said, "This has to be in the West End. This is beyond dance. We're going to do it. We're going to do it." Before it even finished. It made me really respect him, actually, because I thought, "Well, he really does know when he's seen something that might work." Then it was on the news the next day. It was big news. But during that time, whether it was at Sadler's Wells or during that tour, the following year, it went into the West End, the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End, which was an unheard of thing.

During that time, Gordon Davidson had come to see it in London and Charles Dillingham. Gordon decided that it was something he wanted his audience to see and offered us the opportunity to come here to the Ahmanson. It was literally our first ever international date for my company anywhere in the world. This is why this relationship is so important to me, because I think it started when no one else had the faith to bring us. I think it was an extraordinary time to be within what we'd looked at then, I suppose, as essentially a season of theatre, musical theatre and play, great plays and things. To put this dance piece in the middle of that was an unusual and unheard of thing at the time. But coming here as a group of young people from London who'd never really travelled in that way, and to be embraced by the city, which we were, it felt like the talk of the town for a while, was an incredible experience that I still have very fond memories about now. It was a great time.

[19:22] Michael Ritchie: I wasn't here at the time, but from the minute I started interviewing for this particular position, I was hearing about that experience here, how it did light up the city and it did light up the audiences. Internally, people would say it appeared to be a risk, but it wasn't. We had seen the effect of the show elsewhere. For those of our listeners who don't know your version of Swan Lake, what made it special? What was the difference-maker there?

[19:57] Matthew Bourne: Everyone calls it the all-male Swan Lake, which of course it isn't. It does have female dancers in it, but the swans are played by men rather than, famously, the women in the ballet, which was a big cultural thing. I realised that it was because I felt in some ways that the thing that we picked up on in my version of it was the royal aspect of it, because our royal family and our piece, the piece is always about a prince who the queen is trying to marry him off to a suitable princess. When I made the piece, it was in the news every day. It was Diana and Charles and Camilla and all these royal scandals that were going on. It was big news and about a prince who couldn't be with who he wanted to be with.

Our prince looked a bit like Prince Charles and he dressed a bit like him. I thought, if anything, this will be the thing that the papers pick up on, you know, Prince Charles in gay ballet or something like that. None of that at all. It was all about swans. It was all about this culturally powerful image of the female swan, the dancing swan, against Adam Cooper, who was our original first cast dancer. The new swan, you know, the look, the male swan. And that was what it was all about.

[21:14] Michael Ritchie: What gave you that idea? I mean, it's inspired. No one else had done it. Where did that come from?

[21:23] Matthew Bourne: Well, I sort of knew the ballet very well. I used to go to the Royal Opera House and watch it quite a lot. And it was a bit of a daydream, actually. I did a what if, which I do quite a lot when I watch things a lot. You know, what if the swans were, you know, male? You know, I sort of thought, what is it he's looking for, this prince? You know, he's always saying, he's saying, no, no, no, I'm not going to marry her. I'm not going to marry her. What is it he's looking for? So I had this sort of strange sort of little fantasy going on in my head, never dreaming that I would ever do it. It was just literally a daydream, you know. And then when this possibility came up, I came back to it and I thought, well, this could be really interesting.

I mean, it's the most basically obvious thing. I mean, there are male swans and there are female swans. Otherwise, there'd be no swans. So the idea of male swans just gave me an opportunity to go back to looking at the real thing, looking at real swans, how they moved and using all those aspects and creating a new vocabulary of movement for the swans that was more masculine. I'm gonna have to be careful when I talk about it now, because you could do a new version of Swan Lake with women and do new choreography and they could be very powerful. Absolutely. You know, so I'm not meaning that. But it was just, the interesting thing was what it psychologically did for the story of a prince who is drawn towards this swan.

It became much more the good voice and the bad voice in his head. It became much more about who he was and what the swan represented rather than just an attraction. It was more like an attraction because he was free and wild and beautiful and did what he liked. Everything he couldn't do himself, you know.

[23:11] Michael Ritchie: Let's talk about Cinderella. Yeah. When did you first approach this particular piece and why?

[23:18] Matthew Bourne: It was the follow-up to Swan Lake, which is a difficult thing in itself. It was like the second album syndrome, you know, sort of thing when you've had a big hit. And it's just like, oh, whatever I do, it's not going to be as good. Wait, separate this. So tell me about that.

[23:38] Michael Ritchie: No, this is, this is interesting. Okay. So you've had this huge success and you've been able to wear that badge for a little while and sort of, you know, make peace with this shift in your life. And there's a lot of good that comes with that. What's the dark side? What's the downside when you're there in that moment?

[23:57] Matthew Bourne: Well, I was very conscious and very keen not to be a one hit wonder, you know, and that's what it felt like a little bit that it was beyond just a successful show, you know, gone to other places and done things that I would, I'd never expected it to do. So to follow that up was a little bit scary, more than scary, but you had to do it. You know, you've got to do, if you don't follow it up, you don't follow it up. You know, you've got to do something. Something has to be the next piece, you know. You become the troggs. Yeah. So there's a lot of pressure on it, a lot of expectation. And so it could never quite, it was almost impossible to live up to it in a way. So, but interestingly, you know, it did, it did do pretty well when we first did it. But I felt there were, I needed more opportunity to work.

[24:57] Matthew Bourne: What we decided to do was do it straight into the West End, which is maybe a little bit of a difficult thing to do as well, rather than try it out in other places, you know. But it's a piece I've always had a lot of faith in, a lot of, I believe in it as a piece. I love the piece. It's such a delicate piece, you know, it requires sincere performances and quality of acting, which is not what dance normally does. You know, it's about real people in a real situation. I feel that's an important thing about it. And it has its own special quality. It's not like Swan Lake; it's a different kind of different animal. But we maybe have talked around the wrong way, because I haven't explained to people what the theme of it is yet.

But really, have I? But the piece we're bringing back, because we did do it here 20 years ago, very successfully. People loved it here then. And we've had a dream to bring it back for some years now, you know. But the production I felt that we did here was definitely a move on from the one that we did in the West End. It was two years later. And again, we had this brilliant opportunity to redo it. And I think it went steps upwards when we brought it here. It had a lot of differences to the West End production. And this was the only other place that it had been done. So we did it in the West End and at the Ahmanson, and that was it. And so I wanted to bring it back about 10 years ago; I wanted to have a proper look at it and start from the beginning again and work out how we could do this as a touring show.

It wasn't actually made to tour even. It was a sit-down production, you know. So Les needed, Les Brotherston, my designer, needed to do some work. We needed to pare the cast down a bit, make it a workable thing. So now the cast are constantly busy. When they're not on stage, they're in quick change, you know, they're always working through the evening. And we had this opportunity to redo it. And I really wanted to bring that to audiences here. It's also sort of a personal piece for me, because it sort of comes from, it's set during the Blitz in London, where my parents were growing up. They were not evacuated, like Angela Lansbury was, mentioning this to her assistant the other day about coming to see the show.

And I said, well, Angela might be interested in this because she was evacuated to the US at this time in 1940 and became an actress. So I said, it's almost part of her history as well. And my parents stayed in London. Both sets of grandparents lived within streets of each other during that time. And so I heard stories about it when I was growing up, that time, the nightly bombardment of bombs, you know, and how my dad used to think it was a lot of fun, actually, you know, because he was so young. He used to go out and explore the next day with bombed buildings and stuff like a lot of kids did. Some of the characters in it are named after my grandparents. But the whole Blitz story in Cinderella, as people who saw it before here will remember, it works extremely well, because it's that whole thing of people seeking escapism.

So one thing was very big time, you know, so the dance tonight, we may all die tomorrow. You know, people fell in love very quickly, which is what Cinderella is about. And the idea of a shoe going missing in the rubble of a bombed building is such a powerful image, that sort of sparkly shoe, and that feeling of some sort of hope in that as well. It's all in that music, which was written during that time, but not written for a wartime story; it was written to be a fairy tale ballet, you know, in the manner of Tchaikovsky. So it was sort of, it was the key to this piece was really reading that Prokofiev had written it at that time. And it just sparked a whole, the whole piece, really, and it made so much sense to me.

How much research do you normally do? Is that you were reading about the period? Is that you know, this is a great film for a piece of research, so many films, so many great films to watch. I mean, I get all my dancers to watch all these old black and white movies. It's amazing how many young people don't find it difficult to watch a black and white movie. I mean, I don't get it, but one of them says, I have to watch it in 20-minute bursts because it's in black and white. What does that mean? But you know, there's a lot of great research and pieces to base your characters on, you know, but the big movie that it's based on mainly is in England, it was called A Matter of Life and Death. I think it was called Stairway to Heaven in the States, Powell and Pressburger film.

And as we know, we did the Red Shoes here recently, and that is another one of their films. And it's about the hovering between life and death of these two characters that fall in love in a very short space of time in an airplane. He's sort of, she's the air controller, the American girl, and he's the English pilot who's about to crash land, you know, and they fall in love in this instant. And it's that something mixes up the order of things in the heavens. And it wasn't supposed to happen that he dies, and he doesn't. And they survive because they're in love. It's about the power of love. And that's what this piece is about as well. It's about finding two people finding each other in difficult circumstances. When you walk into the room at the beginning of a rehearsal to create the piece, how much do you know? How autocratic are you about where it's going? What's happening? Or is it looser than that?

[30:59] Matthew Bourne: It's two things. It's quite strong in the sense of I know the music structure very well. I know what the music is doing because I've had to convince myself that all my ideas are in the music and not put on top of it. So I know where we're going a bit. And I know emotionally what I want to do and what each scene might be about. But beyond that, it's free. I want help. I want them to help me create. I want them to give me ideas. I want them to do their own research and bring things to me. I always say to them, I can't read everything. I can't watch everything. You've got to do your own. Bring things to me. So you go, oh, but I read this. So it becomes very collaborative in the room with the dancers. And you never know who's going to have the best idea. Sometimes it's not always going to be me, certainly. And sometimes it's the person who's just joined the company. So you've got to be open. I always find that you keep the ears and eyes open.

[31:57] Michael Ritchie: How many are in the company now?

[31:59] Matthew Bourne: Well, at the moment, there's 70 because we've got 30 here in Cinderella and 40 back home in Swan Lake, which has just finished its eight-week run at Sadler's Wells. So the company is split in two at the moment. There's a lot of dancers.

[32:15] Michael Ritchie: How do you find your dancers to fill out the company as time goes on?

[32:19] Matthew Bourne: Well, Cinderella is an interesting one because you've got generational differences in it. You've got people who've been with me for 20 years in this show, and you've got others that are brand new and lots of young talent to see as well. But basically, the company, you know, I find the mixture of the experience with the new is a really good thing. You can learn a lot from each other. It's not all one way. I look for people who are passionate about moving. Sometimes they're not trained in any way as actors. So the way I try and find it is how passionate are they to get their ideas across? Because I feel that's the beginning of acting. For me, it's the wanting to be generous with an audience. Let's tell the audience a story, you know, and that's how it develops from them.

Their passion for movement, it becomes their passion to tell a story to an audience. And they have to be very skilled. There's some lovely performances in this Cinderella, I have to say. I mean, some really delicate acting, sincere, wonderful stuff going on all around the stage. I would tell people to really look around and follow a few little interesting stories that go on. I'm probably telling people not to look at the main action now, but they always say, oh, it's too much to look at. We have to come again, which is not the worst thing that can happen to any of us, right? But it's important, you know, that this piece has that element to it of real situations and real people.

[33:53] Michael Ritchie: Well, I have to say, we're thrilled to have you and the company back here. It was one of the blessings for me when I took this job. I knew that you had been a part of, you know, the recent history here at Center Theatre Group and in Los Angeles. And it was certainly something that others had encouraged me to pursue. I don't know how many we've done together now, but it's more than a handful. And I certainly hope that there are more to come in the future. Are you working on anything new?

[34:24] Matthew Bourne: Yes. Well, thank you, Michael, for that. Because, you know, I would have been so sad if that relationship hadn't continued. And it has thrived under your leadership as well. And we're so grateful to keep coming back. But we've got a new production actually starting. I'm very nervous at the moment because I'm working on it, trying to solve it. Romeo and Juliet, which is something that I've resisted for years, because it's been done a million ways. You know, every version you can think of has been done in all mediums. My take on it is quite simple in some ways, although it will be different. But it was about a young cast and young people involved in the creation of it. Sparked something in me that I thought was really exciting.

So I've gone for the younger members of my company and a lot of new recent graduates coming into it. And young people that we pick up around the UK in each city that we go to. We have six talented young people that we've auditioned already who will join us in each city. But also we have young associate artists as choreographer, designer, lighting designer, conductor, arranger. We're all working with a young associate, and I'm working with a young associate choreographer called Arielle Smith, a young female choreographer, who's absolutely brilliant. We'll have a great time with her as well. She's a talent, but actually she's fun to work with. You know, the big age gap between us, she's 20 and I'm quite old.

[35:55] Michael Ritchie: I will say one of the great things about your company, and I don't know when and where this started, is the fact that you don't sit down and just do performances. You reach out, you go out into the schools, you go out into the communities, you do training, you do introduction to dance, into theatre. It's a very active give and take with the audience, particularly the younger audiences. And I know that when we do student matinees, they are among the most exciting performances I've ever been to. It's a blessing to have you guys come in and continue to do that. And I know we've got a lot of events around the company over this five-week stay, going outside the walls of the theatre.

[36:48] Matthew Bourne: Absolutely. It's what we're all about as well. Yeah. And that's why we're a great team, I think. That's right. It works. Well, Matthew, thank you for this. I'm glad you're here for five weeks. We'll be seeing more of each other and looking forward to talking about the next times you're coming back here.

[37:03] Michael Ritchie: You've been listening to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theatre Group podcast. You can find out more about Matthew Bourne's Cinderella, our organization, and upcoming productions on our website at centertheatregroup.org.