Most rehearsals are about the same, so we’ll just look in at one in the Bamboo Theatre called for 10 o’clock one morning. Seated on a stool marked ‘Leo Frick’ is the great producer, wearing a pair of clompers, sunglasses, a pink Jap-Happy and a knitted dark blue skullcap. Seated at his side, on a smaller and anonymous stool is the A.S.M. Hung up on a bamboo thorn is the Call Board, showing all the ‘calls’ the various actors are due to make that and the following day. This rehearsal is for 10 o’clock, followed by two others. At five minutes to ten, Leo starts fidgeting and walking up and down, saying nothing for a few minutes and then suddenly he calls me over. ‘John,’ he says, ‘do go and see if you can find Bobby, will you? And then there’s Bill and René not here, either. We can never start until the whole cast is here – will you look in the cookhouse and see if you can drag them out?’ ‘O.K., Leo!’ The first week I walked many miles ‘calling’ people who were so sorry they hadn’t seen the Call Board, but in the end we made it their responsibility to go and look at the board daily.

When all the cast are present who look like turning up that day, we start, and begin with the opening scene – a queue of theatregoers in London being entertained by buskers while it waits for the ‘stars’ at the stage door, hoping to collect autographs. When these long-awaited people at last appear, they are kidnapped, complete with the band, in a stolen bus and taken on board a gangster’s yacht. Leo has to be very patient, and lines and actions are repeated over and over again; the producer demonstrating what he wants and trying to interpret, for those who are reading their lines un-understandingly, what the words are meant to mean. After about an hour everyone has had enough; the A.S.M. has followed the script all the while and noted down various instructions – for it seems the A.S.M. holds the baby as well as the book!

The American gangster scene on the yacht is then rehearsed, Leo himself being the arch-gangster who in the end, after broadcasting the band kept for ransom from the deck of his yacht, reveals himself as a super G-man, arrests crooks left and right and marries the seductive crooneuse of the band!

For three weeks we have anything up to four rehearsals a day and everyone is driven hard by the quality producer, and it’s obvious that if the show is a success it’s purely due to Leo’s terrific personal efforts.