The next day, I flew back to London in time for the following evening’s performance of Phantom. Those few days of sheer panic taught me a tough but valuable lesson – and not just about practising safe sex. It was one of those moments in my life when I realized information and awareness can save lives, and everyone should have equal access. I began my association with a number of AIDS/HIV charities at that time, and I continue to be an advocate for Theatre Cares, the Terrence Higgins Trust, Stonewall’s education campaigns and others.
Many things shaped my identity as a young boy: a strong self-worth (something that was instilled in all three Barrowman siblings by our parents), my immersion in theatre and music, and my DNA. I was born gay. It’s not a choice I – or anyone else who is gay – made. If it were, why on earth would anyone choose to be part of a minority, part of a group that in so many cultures and countries, even in the twenty-first century, is regularly blasphemed, hounded and worse?
Happily, during my childhood years in Prestbury, when I first realized my sexuality, my being gay was no more an issue for my friends Laura and Mike than Laura and Mike not being gay was an issue for me. I didn’t act on my newfound awareness in any way that was different from how Mike and Laura were responding to their emerging sexuality. We were all equally confused, equally goofy and equally self-conscious about that aspect of development. I was a child and I was still doing pretty childish things.
So what’s changed? You ask. Not much, except now my toys are bigger.
Of course, in adolescence, there’s a fine line between ignorance and innocence. Did Mike and Laura know I was gay? I don’t think so. Did my other high-school friends? Perhaps. Does it matter? Probably not. Laura is now a lawyer for a firm in Chicago and Mike lives in South Carolina with his daughters and his dogs. I still consider them to be friends and I know that if I’d felt it necessary to say openly to them when I was young that I was gay, nothing would have changed in our friendship.
The only incident I remember from those summers, when I made a decision to do something because I was gay, was when I agreed to crew for a neighbour and his wife in their sailboat because I thought the husband was hot. On the other hand, Mike was interested in the crewing job because to him the wife was equally gorgeous.
Gay or straight, our dicks were driving both of us.
‘New Ways to Dream’
Noël Coward once told an interviewer that a person could learn as much about acting from ‘a bad matinee in Hull’ as a West End show. Beverly Holt, who was the musical accompanist for Joliet West High School when I was a student there and who has since become my close friend and musical director, once said something of similar pithiness1 to me. ‘Listen, bozo,’ she said, ‘sometimes you need to play crap theatre to know good theatre, and you can learn a lot from both.’
At the time Bev made this pronouncement, it was 1984 and she was trying to cajole this bozo into trying out for the Joliet Drama Guild’s Bicentennial Park production of Anything Goes. I was a senior in high school and I was resisting her urges to audition for this community theatre production. However, like most of Bev’s advice to me then and now, it was advice worth following, and so, almost six years before my big break in the West End production of the same show, I ended up auditioning for and getting the part of Billy Crocker.
A number of teachers have been, in the words of Cole Porter, ‘the purple light of a summer night’ in my life and, as the saying goes, if you can read these pages, you should thank a teacher too. Along with Bev, Mark Wilson, my English teacher at Joliet West High School, was inspirational. He was responsible for putting me in the gifted English class and introducing me to Forensic Competition.2 I also owe a huge debt to David Dankwart, who was my high-school choir director – and the first professional to recognize I had a ‘voice’.
I was in a music practice room at high school one afternoon, struggling with a piece of flute music I needed to learn for the school band. I began to sing the piece aloud to help me get a grip on it, when David walked past the room. He knocked and stuck his head inside.
‘Was that you singing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think you have talent?’
‘Yes.’3
‘Are you arrogant?’
I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by this, but I said ‘yes’ anyway.
‘Good. Those are both qualities I like in my performers. Come to the theatre and try out for the school musical.’
Not only did I audition, but – much to the chagrin of the juniors and seniors who also tried out – I got one of the lead roles in my freshman year, at the tender age of fourteen. It was my first real part in a musical, playing Barnaby in Hello Dolly! This high-school production was my first time singing to a real, live, sitting-in-seats-in-front-of-the-stage audience.
It was during this production that I first met Bev, who, along with her husband Jim, from that moment on became a second family to me. She’d sometimes bring her children, Jennifer and Michael (both now adults with their own families), to rehearsals and when I wasn’t on stage, I’d babysit them. I recorded my first solo album in Bev’s living room, on a borrowed soundboard with two duct-taped mikes. Given its amateur quality, it’s probably just as well that we made only enough copies for family and a handful of friends. Bev has since worked with me on most of my subsequent albums. She also accompanied (in a musical sense) my parents and me when we performed at several Burns Suppers in Chicago.
These annual celebrations to the Scottish Bard are held on the anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth, 25 January, in Scotland and in every country with populations of transplanted Scots. Typically, the evening is organized around a number of traditional performances of Burns’s poems and songs, with lots of bawdy stories about his exploits thrown in for good measure, all washed down with a dram or two of whisky. Dressed in our kilts, my mum and I would each sing one or two songs, while my dad would present a tribute to the poet himself, called ‘The Immortal Memory’, which – next to the whisky and the Toast to the Haggis – is the most important part of the traditional Burns Supper.
When I started attending Joliet West High School in 1981, I’d been living in America for about five years. Although the transition had been a bit bumpy at times, for the most part I was settling into my new life pretty comfortably. However, it was during that freshman year in high school that I first came face to face with what I like to call the ‘Dues and Don’t Syndrome’,4 which generally seems to have affected groups of my fellow performers, but not casting directors with any talent. Later, this syndrome followed me into my early experiences at college, but by that time I was prepared for it.
During my high-school freshman year, I kept up with my flute and I continued to enjoy playing in the band, but after getting a taste of performing in Hello Dolly!, I knew I wanted to join in the school’s swing choir. Under Bev’s guidance and encouragement, I was now singing regularly for any organization or church in Joliet that needed a soloist, so I was increasingly experienced. Regardless, it seemed there was a pecking order at school that needed to be followed, and I was told my talents wouldn’t be considered. I hadn’t been forgiven for disrupting the hierarchy by landing the part of Barnaby, and so I was to pay the price in harassment from a few of my peers for a long time.
After a school assembly concert one afternoon, Bev found me backstage, alone and close to tears.
‘What’s up, John?’ she asked, sitting down next to me.
‘Why are some of these choir kids mean to me all the time?’
A few of them had taunted me in the wings that day, as they often did before or after concerts.
‘John,’ she said, ‘they’re jealous of you, and you may not believe this right now, but some day you’ll get the last laugh.’
Bev’s response to me that afternoon was not the first time I’d heard those words; my mum and dad had certainly said them to me many times since I’d started high school, as I’d shared some of the choir incidents with them. For some
reason, though, that afternoon Bev’s words sank in. It was one of the first times that I can remember thinking to myself: ‘She’s right. This is what you love. Get the last laugh.’ It fuelled me with determination.
Despite the initial obstacles, the following year I did become a member of the school swing choir. I loved everything about the experience; the combination of choreography and choral singing was simply irresistible. With persistence and – I’d like to think – charm, I even managed to win round a few of my detractors in the group … eventually.
They say that you never forget your first kiss5 or your first car. Mine was a Ford Escort XR3i and it cost me £10,000. I bought it the first month I was in Anything Goes in the West End in 1989.6 I’d like to add winning your first acting award to this list of unforgettable things. Although I’ve been nominated for and won many awards over the years – including a number of Theatregoers’ Choice Awards, a Welsh BAFTA nomination for Best Actor, and Best New Drama for Torchwood at the TV Quick Awards in 2007 – the first award still retains a special place in my heart. There were no free goody bags when I won it, back in high school, but it has remained a truly memorable experience, especially given all the grief I’d taken from some of my peers during my freshman year.
My English teacher Mark Wilson was the first to encourage my involvement in Forensic Competition, which is basically a kind of academic X Factor, where students from across the country compete in local, regional and then state competitions in events such as storytelling, oratory, acting and public speaking. I’d never done anything like it before, but I was up for the challenge.
I signed up to compete with my friend Barb Eagle in the Dramatic Duet Acting category. We chose to perform a scene from The Lion in Winter by James Goldman. Barb was Eleanor of Aquitaine and I played the role of Henry the Plantagenet. Our first competition was held at Plainfield High School, in a neighbouring town close to Joliet. As Barb and I watched our competition, I grew more and more nervous. The other teams were really good, and although we had rehearsed, there were a couple of places in our scene where I hadn’t completely memorized my lines. Times like this have taught me a lot about myself as a performer – and this time showed me that if I let my nerves get a hold of me, I dry up, my head goes blank and I forget everything. To this day, whether it’s in front of a live television audience or at a Royal Variety Performance, the key is not to let my nerves take over, but instead to channel that adrenalin into my performance.
Barb and I were sitting anxiously at the back of the classroom where the competition was being held. The judges were either drama teachers or other Forensic coaches. When they called Barb and my name, we had a few seconds to prepare. The protocol was that we’d perform, and then walk to the corner and bow our heads: a signal that the scene was over. In the category of Dramatic Duet, we were allowed two props. We had a chair and a desk.
For the first part of the scene, I sat behind the desk, while Barb, as Eleanor, stalked behind me, ranting about my flaws as a king and a human being. About halfway through the scene, we switched places – jeez, we were so creative – and I paced up and down in front of ‘Eleanor’ and returned her jibes in kind.
About a minute after I stood up, I went blank. I had nothing. Nada. Zip. Instead of speaking my lines, I started to stomp in front of the table, gesturing wildly, grunting and sighing loudly like Darth Vader on steroids. At one point, I believe I pounded the table while exhaling. I was really giving it big time. Barb was just gawking at me in sheer terror.
I suddenly made up a couple of the lines and then the rest of them popped into my head. Barb fed me a line and I finally got back on track. In my head, my lexical dry spell felt like it had lasted twenty-five minutes, but in reality it was only about thirty or forty seconds. Barb gave her last line. We moved to the corner. Heads down. End scene. Very dramatic.
Despite having blown our performance, Barb and I were good sports and along with all the other schools’ teams, we attended the awards ceremony. My friend Mike Bryson was teamed in another category with Andy Dick, who was a year ahead of me in school and who is now famous and infamous in his own right. Andy is a successful actor and an eccentric comedian. In his stand-up act, Andy does a little slapstick, tells a lot of raunchy stories, and sings songs like ‘Dip Your Cock in Vodka’ (readers, please don’t) and ‘A Great Day for Drugs’ (it’s not usually). Andy also played the quirky oddball character in a terrific US sitcom that ran in the late 1990s, NewsRadio. The sitcom also starred the late Phil Hartman, of Saturday Night Live fame, comedian Dave Foley, and Maura Tierney, currently playing a doc in ER.
Andy is the only person I know who even in high school made self-deprecating humour an art form. He came to school one day dressed as a superhero and called himself ‘Super Dick’. If I remember correctly, he ran for Homecoming King on that same platform. Of course, I voted for him. He was pretty much a nutcase and, guess what, he and I were often nutcases together. Once, at a school concert, we performed ‘Sing’ from A Chorus Line, and for each of us it was one of our first standing ovations from an audience.
One of the cool claims to fame that Joliet West High School’s theatre department can make is that in the school’s 1983 production of Oliver!, the cast included three performers who’ve gone on to become very successful and accomplished actors and entertainers. Andy played Dr Grimwig, I played Mr Bumble and Anthony Rapp, who has since appeared in films like A Beautiful Mind and Six Degrees of Separation, TV such as The X Files and Law and Order: SVU, and who created the role of Mark Cohen in the Broadway and film production of Rent, played Oliver.
In the Forensic Competition of 1985, Andy and Mike performed a comic scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. They took third place in their category. Up until that point, Joliet West had won nothing all evening, and we certainly weren’t holding out for any more prizes. I’d already told the coaches what had happened during my scene with Barb. Given that it was my first competition, they expected me to learn from it and move on. Good advice.
When our category was called, Barb and I decided to get really into the spirit of the awards show experience, regardless of the outcome. We had the whole faux excitement thing going on, holding hands and squeezing each other as if we even had a chance. Whether we did or not, we wanted to look like we had some confidence left and we hadn’t completely given up.
In reality, I felt utterly defeated.
In our category, my favourite to win was a scene from Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. Two girls from a suburban Chicago high school had performed the scene and, given the lesbian nature of the work, I’d thought it was pretty risky for high-school students to tackle. During the performance, these girls were gutting it and sincerely so – unlike yours truly, who made a dry spell look like a category-five storm.
Then the judges announced, ‘Second place in the Dramatic Duet goes to —’ and the Hellman girls took second.
‘First place,’ continued the judges, as the girls returned to their seats, ‘to Joliet West High School’s John Barrowman and Barb Eagle for The Lion in Winter.‘
Even as Barb and I were yelling and whooping it up, in my head I was thinking, ‘This is crazy.’ I’d bullshitted my way through half of that scene. I’d chewed up the furniture and spat it out – and we’d still won.
The next week in practice, Barb and I really hammered into our scene because at the next competition, usually held the following month, we would be the reigning champs and we’d have something to prove. We worked all my grunts and sighs and table-pounding into the performance and at the next competition, we won again – and at the next one, and the one after that. It got to the point that at the awards ceremony, as the judges would begin to announce our category, they’d say ‘and in first place’ and the audience would yell in unison, ‘Joliet West High School!’
Barb and I took our performance to the Illinois Forensic finals and, in the end, we took second with The Lion in Winter, finally losing to the two Hellman girls and The C
hildren’s Hour.
A slew of trophies from all of my various Forensic wins, state choral awards and solo singing competitions are now packed in boxes in my parents’ condo in Brookfield, Wisconsin, where my mum and dad now spend their summers. One year, I was awarded the First Tenor for the State of Illinois, an honour that required competing at a variety of state-endorsed contests, gathering enough first- or second-place wins to compete at the state level. Another year during high school, I was in the top three in jazz vocals. All of this was possible, in part, because a teacher took a minute to listen at a music-room door.
Along with my peers, including Barb, Mike, Andy, Anthony and others, we brought as many, if not more, state first trophies to Joliet West High School than all the sports teams combined. Yet we’d get a passing mention in the school’s morning announcements, while the football and basketball teams would get pep rallies, cheerleaders, and a huge mahogany case for all their trophies. Am I bitter? Abso-fucking-lutely! And mostly because I don’t think much has changed since I was a student. If anything, support for the performing arts may be worse. Sports continue to rule in many high schools in the US, while the arts and music programmes are regularly losing funding. Yet I’d bet more young people go on to use the skills and abilities they hone in theatre classes, choirs and bands in their professional and personal lives than go on to play sports beyond high school. While I was a student, the funding for the arts was seriously slashed, but the football team always had new uniforms when they needed them.
This funding gap in high-school programmes was one of my initial reasons for starting Dreamers Workshop, my scheme of nonprofit performing arts workshops for young people. A staunch belief that theatre skills are lifelong skills, regardless of the profession you end up in, was the second reason. Oprah was the third.
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