Why Mel's Making a Song and Dance ; Mel Smith Once Said He Wanted to Abandon 'Repetitive Performance'. So Why Is the Millionaire Comedian and Director Becoming a West End Hoofer in Hairspray?

Evening Standard - London › September 25, 2007

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THIS sounds like a joke: Mel Smith, the bulky curmudgeon of British comedy, is to make his song-and-dance debut in the camp, American hit musical Hairspray. At 55 and around 16 stone, Smith does not come across as a natural hoofer. What's more, after he and Griff Rhys Jones disbanded their successful double act and sold their production company Talkback for 60 million in 2000, Smith planned to focus on the film-directing career he began with The Tall Guy in 1987, and to abandon "boring, repetitive" performance. What's going on, Mel? "I have a massive camp streak," he says, giving a Muttley laugh while alternately attacking a white wine spritzer and a Villiger cigar outside a Southwark pub.

"I have always really loved musicals. The idea of singing and dancing on stage has always appealed to me but it's just not the sort of thing you talk about. So I'm finally coming out of the closet." Smith points out that before producer John Lloyd asked him to join the satirical sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News in 1979, he was working as a theatre director, and staged My Fair Lady and The Fantasticks at Sheffield Crucible as well as straight plays at the Young Vic. It was he who suggested a musical component for NTNOCN starting with the punk anthem Gob on You which survived in his subsequent partnership with Rhys Jones. "My voice isn't bad, actually," he says, "and anyone who saw Griff and me do our Madonna send-up knows I'm a pretty sexy mover." No, he's not joking.