WHAT do Michael Jackson, David Gest, Anthony Perkins, Gene Kelly and Robin Thicke's mum have in common?
Answer: they were all key players behind an aborted nineties musical - which is now set for a belated resurrection - based on the life, work and loves of Scotland's national Bard, Robert Burns. The musical will finally make it to the stage in Scotland some time around Burn's Night 2015 before going on tour, with casting starting at the end of this month.
It was the summer of 1992. Fresh from the success of his Dangerous album, and a year before his career would begin to implode amid the now infamous allegations of child molestation surrounding Jordan Chandler, the King of Pop Michael Jackson wanted to make a dream come true for his childhood friend-turned-music producer David Gest.
Surprisingly in a country where - as Gest points out - few Americans could even tell you who wrote Auld Lang Syne, both Jackson and Gest had become lifelong admirers of Ayrshire's favourite son. The duo used to spend hours scouring antique bookshops in their hometown of Los Angeles, California, amassing a collection of rare volumes about Burns.
"We found his poetry so moving and his life so fascinating," said Gest.
For his birthday in May 1992, the Thriller singer offered Gest the opportunity to use the recording studio of the Jackson family home in Encino, California to assemble the soundtrack for a stage play-cum-musical called, Red, Red Rose, based on Burns' life and featuring songs adapted from 12 of his poems.
Gest drafted in Psycho actor, Anthony Perkins, then aged 60, to be the project's co-producer. The pair quickly recruited a then little-known Scottish performer by the name of John Barrowman to play the lead role, after being bowled over by him during a trip to London, where he was starring in a musical called Matador. Gest's close friend, Hollywood icon Gene Kelly, then 80, was appointed director, with Scots writer and journalist George Rosie hired to draft the script, and musician Paul Jobson recruited to compose the melodies which would turn the Bard's poems into songs.
Among the castmates who joined Gest and Barrowman in the basement of the Jackson family home for a month that summer were actor Dominic Allen, son of Scots-born actress Ella Logan and then-husband to former Dallas star Charlene Tilton, and Gloria Loring, a daytime soap star and mother of Blurred Lines singer Robin Thicke.
"I had this idea of putting his [Burns] poetry to contemporary music," said Gest. "Some of the melodies were already established, they just needed to be a bit lusher.
"So Paul Jobson came up with brand new melodies and for some he took the melodies that were already in existence and orchestrated them. .
"He [Burns] was larger than life. He was an everyday person but also a genius and, to put it bluntly, a real cocksman. Women loved him and he loved women, but he was still loyal to his wife. He just couldn't help himself.
"We wanted to show the many sides of him, as well as that he stood for Scotland and what Scotland was all about, and so it goes into the history - what the Church thought of him, because they really didn't approve of him then. Now, everybody realises that there was a diamond in the rough who was truly a genius."
With the soundtrack in place, financial backers were assembled and the project was ready for take-off. Then tragedy struck.
Perkins succumbed to pneumonia in September 1992, following a long and secret battle with Aids. In 1993, Barrowman was lured back to the West End for a string of roles in Phantom of the Opera, Hair and Miss Saigon, in addition to his burgeoning television career, scuppering the chance to get the Burns musical off the ground - though he would eventually star in a one-off production of Red Red Rose in Holland in 1996.
In the meantime, director Gene Kelly had suffered two debilitating strokes and died in February 1996. "It just took the excitement out of it for me," said Gest. "I wanted them to be involved so much because of who they were and what they would give to the project."
Now, 20 years on and more than 5000 miles away, the musical is being revived as One Fond Kiss - a collaboration between Rock Academy Performing Arts college in Lossiemouth and Gest, who unearthed the long-lost Encino recordings during a recent move from Memphis, Tennessee to York in England.
"I've been asked by the Burns Museum for ages to find the recordings," said Gest, who presented a programme on Burns for BBC Alba last year. "I had put it all on hold and then, about four months ago, I found the recordings.
"I was telling my representatives about it and when I played the recordings for them, they went crazy. They introduced me to [Tish Tindall and Diane Aspinall at Rock Academy] and that's how it all got put together recently."
Work is under way on a revised script and soundtrack, with casting due to begin at the end of June.
Gest - who will star as Tam O'Shanter - hopes the long-awaited musical will finally begin touring theatres across Scotland by Burn's Night next year. "It's going to be a different play, but it's still going to tell the story of Burns," he said
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