A plague on BOTH your trainers!

Dance rehearsal tomorrow at 12.00 instead of 2.00, so comfortable clothes (no jeans). Bring your plimsols or jazz shoes or you'll be dancing barefoot!

Once again I am writing about Romeo and Juliet as out of all the many projects in which I am currently involved, this is the least depressing and most amusing.

I haven't owned a pair of plimsols since I was 7, the nature of jazz shoes are an enigma and I only own one pair of casual trousers that aren't jeans. The director will just have to accept training shoes and a surly attitude if he expects me to dance.

I plodded along to discover that the Masquerade Ball, a key scene in the original text because Romeo kisses Juilet for the first time, has become a choreographed dance routine set to Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel. It's certainly different.

As Paris, I spend most of this scene dancing with Juliet. This is a mixed blessing. It is good because Juliet is obscenely talented and manages somehow to keep me (mostly) in time with the music and from making too big of a prat of myself. It is bad because we are at the front of the stage a lot of the time and when you're leading the rest of the dancers in the steps, you shouldn't suck quite as much as I do. Nevertheless, I gave it my best and managed to produce a fair approximation of the complex stepping, rotating and high-fiving that everyone else pulled off with ease.

Until the lift.

When the choreographer explained that the next step involved a lift, I had visions of Flashdance and compound fractures. I made the mistake of muttering "Time to hit the gym", which is not the best thing to say within earshot of the girl you are supposed to lift. Somehow my defense of "it's not because you're fat, it's because I'm weak" failed to heal the sudden rift. Women are strange.

I was reassured when it appeared to be the simplest damn lift ever. It seemed that all I had to do was hold the girl up for half a second, balancing her mostly on my right arm. Fine. Easy. The girl was quite small and light, so I went into it fairly confident. In fact, she was so small and light that I was worried about hurting her, so the first time we did it I hardly lifted her at all. The choreographer told me off and said I should be using my hip to support her.

We tried again. It went wrong. As she soared gracefully in mid-air I smashed my hip into her side and flung her several feet across the room.

Whoops.

Sorry toots, but that's Shakespeare.