Forbidden pleasures

PART of the appeal of the musical Return To The Forbidden Planet, which celebrates its 25th year with a visit to Darlington Civic Theatre, is the iconic poster with a Dan Dare-style space hero rescuing a damsel in distress from the attentions of an alien being.

"What we asked of the designer was to give us a B-movie feel to it," says show creator Bob Carlton. "You remember the original film with the robot and the girl in its arms. We didn't want to copy that, but we wanted was the Dan Dare spaceman and the girl, who I suppose is Miranda. I'm old enough to remember that B-movie posters offered very little of resemblance to the actual film."

Forbidden Planet is a clever link between Shakespeare's The Tempest, 1950s sci-fi and pop music from the 1950s and 1960s which Carlton created as a small open-air show for the Bubble Theatre Company.

"We started out the first national tour, after the West End, at Plymouth, but where we went after that I can't remember," says Carlton, who won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical in 1989 and 1990.

The astute theatre boss added interest to his shows by adding Sir Magnus Pyke and then Sir Patrick Moore as narrator on pre-recorded video sequences.

"It was a day's work and the celebrities think it's funny. For this tour we approached Brian May and he was fantastic. As far as speaking the verse is concerned, he's been the best. When I originally wrote it I had this idea of a screen and a sci-fi chorus that a Shakespeare play would have. I just put newscaster or newsreader because I was was going to do it with a dickie-bow on like Sir Robin Day. Then a guy playing the robot said, 'My mum has just worked with Sir Magnus Pyke, shall we give him a ring?'. I thought that was cheeky, but tried it and he agreed.

"Then we went to America and although Patrick Moore is well-known over here, no one knew who he was over there and we used Scotty from Star Trek (James Doohan). You just have to have the bottle to ring these people up and pay them some money. Brian May is a friend of our musical director and was the executor of Patrick Moore's estate, so he was well up for doing it," says Carlton.

Another famous face in a 2012 version was Richard O'Brien, who has worked with Carlton on The Rocky Horror Show.

Strange coincidences in Forbidden Planet includes Carlton's use of the expression X Factor, which Dr Propero uses to create his space monster.

"Not only have I been blamed for the invention of the jukebox musical, but also the X Factor element of entertainment. So, my career is finished," he jokes. "The expression gets a laugh now. X Factor was always being used, but I just turned it into a drug. This is a joke which has made itself because of Simon Cowell."

When he wrote Forbidden Planet in 1983, Carlton put in songs that he liked because he couldn't write music.

"I didn't know I was creating a genre and the songs were fashionable. By the time the show reached the West End songs like I Heard It Through The Gravevine were appearing in a jeans advert. That was another lucky coincidence. The story came first and I was following Shakespeare's storm and I then needed a song. It's going to be a fiery event in space so it had to be Great Balls Of Fire," says the man who wrote the first version in two weekends.

"I had been planning it for about a year and a one point I told an actor he was going to play the captain of a spaceship who smokes a pipe. But it's kept growing because each country has brought new things to the production," says Carlton.

Captain Tempest (Sean Needham) still has a pipe firmly clamped in his jaws in 2015. "It was important to me because the heroes I knew from the 1950s were square-jawed heroes who smoke a pipe, with one foot on a chair, and were patronising to girls. I was brought up to believe they were brave people and realised the only reason they were brave was because they were too bone-headed to understand what the danger was," he says.

Carlton is just back from Pennsylvania where he's directed Private Lives and returning to do Harvey, the original stage version of James Stewart's much-loved movie.

His big memory of a visit to the North followed a conversation with Ron Rose, who ran the Doncaster Arts Coop. "Ron was a writer and he wanted to do a pantomime. I used to do an escapology act and he asked me to come up and teach a girl to do this. So, I had to come up to Doncaster to this strange hall that smelled of paraffin heaters and it was freezing cold. That's all I can remember."

Frederick "Frido" Ruth started out as an early Ariel on rollerskates, but has moved to assistant director/choreographer for the tour having been listed as a cast member until reported as damaging a knee in November.

He toured to the North-East in 1993 playing Ariel with Gemma Lowy as Miranda and recalls visiting Billingham Forum theatre.

"I've always kept touring calendars and when the original cast went to Japan after the West End and I joined the tour version. We did six weeks of rehearsals and then did one weekers in theatres like Billingham, Newcastle and York.

"I remember Belfast was cancelled because a bomb had blown up part of the theatre a week before we got there. We were described as a number one tour and one of the number one venues was, oddly, Billingham Forum. It didn't quite compute in terms of prestige of the theatre, but it's qudos for the management that it has always managed to get good shows," Ruth says.

He did two years of touring and then again in 2001 and 2012 as the show continued to break new ground as casting actor-musicians.

"Basically, I seem to do Forbidden Planet every ten years. It's funny because people always mention the skating to me. I don't want to sound glib, but it's a bit like asking if I forget about walking. Once you've been skating on tour for a year it becomes second nature. I don't think you can learn something until you can do something else at the same time. You don't know how to drive until you can navigate. This show has dancing, performing, singing and playing instruments rather than skating," says Ruth, who is now directing Joseph Mann in the role of Ariel.

"Joseph is actually not on skates. About 20 per cent of Ariels have not skated, because this show works by using the talent it finds rather than making people fit the roles. A rigid formula is harder, particularly with big West End shows that transfer over from Broadway where they try to find the person who looks like the original cast member. You end up with somebody trying to sound like somebody else," he says.

• Runs Monday, March 2 to Saturday, March 7. Box Office: 01325-486555 or darlingtoncivic.co.uk