In a parallel universe Neil Tennant is a ballet dancer. The Pet Shop Boys vocalist witnessed the Royal Ballet performing Giselle in Newcastle as a child with his brother and they were so enamoured he borrowed a Teach Yourself Ballet book from his local library. “We used the radiator as a barre,” Tennant told the New York Times. “I moved on and decided I wanted to be an actor. And then I thought I might have the potential for being a pop star.”
Tennant did, of course, eventually fulfil some ballet ambition with his production, The Most Incredible Thing, which earned rave reviews during its Sadler’s Wells Theatre run in London during 2011. The production was too expensive to tour but a scaled down version ran at the Knight Theater in North Carolina earlier this year. The cost and commitment hasn’t put the Pet Shop Boys off doing another ballet one day, but Neil Tennant admitted: “It’s not like three-act narrative ballets come along every day of the week.”