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Mandy would work with Emma Stone in the morning and co-star Ryan Gosling at night

When Mandy Moore was a little girl, she and her mum used to rent videos of MGM, RKO and other studio musicals from Hollywood’s golden age.

Watching those pictures — An American In Paris, Singin’ In The Rain, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, My Fair Lady and even Sandra Dee flicks — proved to be time well spent.

Because Mandy is the choreographer hired by director Damien Chazelle to infuse his glorious movie La La Land with a nod to the past — and a quick step to the future.

The photograph accompanying this piece shows Emma Stone, the Oscar-nominated leading lady of La La Land, in the movie’s Somewhere In The Crowd number.

There’s a moment where she snaps the skirt of her dress that reminded me of a sequence in West Side Story.

Mandy laughed and told me every film she and her mum watched when she was growing up in Breckenridge, Colorado, was important to her.

‘Anything I could get my hands on that had singing and dancing in it, me and my mom would watch over a weekend. Those films left an imprint.’

Moore was on the project months before the main stars were cast, which meant she and Chazelle could lay the foundations for how the choreography would work.

Sometimes they would try out steps themselves. ‘I wish someone had videoed him dancing,’ she said.

As much as Chazelle loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, he didn’t want his stars to be Fred and Ginger perfect. ‘Damien wanted these people to look like real human beings; having real emotions, while they were moving.

‘There’s no way that you could train someone to be Fred and Ginger in two months; or a year — or three years or four years. Fred and Ginger trained their whole lives to be who they were.’

Despite that, ‘the references to how they (Fred and Ginger) moved as a couple are peppered throughout the film’.

Mandy was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her dad, Bob Moore, is an actor; her mother Wendy a high school drama teacher, and director. No one else in her family danced; but from the age of five, Mandy was putting on shows that included dance.

Mandy Moore was the choreographer hired by director Damien Chazelle for movie La La Land

When the Moores moved to Colorado, she trained at a local dance school and studied tap, ballet, jazz — and belly dancing (something that’s come in handy for her work on So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With The Stars).

On La La Land, Mandy would work with Emma in the morning; and Ryan at night. Although both were what she called accomplished movers (‘I was lucky with that’) she still had to drill them for two months, so they could move with ease and retain her choreography.

Her early start on the project (‘usually choreographers come on board at the last minute’) meant the exhilarating opening number, where dancers perform in a traffic jam on a freeway ramp, could be plotted to the last detail.

‘The very beginnings of that egg was hatched on the back of a piece of paper,’ she said. ‘We drew cars and boxes on paper; and Damien drew in arrows to show me where the cameras would be.

The art department used Hot Wheels cars on a model of the freeway in the opening scene

‘To randomly take a hundred cars and put dancers on them, there on the freeway, would have been a nightmare. We actually had only 30 dancers — and we had to be very smart about where we put them.

‘The art department created a model of the freeway, and used those little Hot Wheels cars, so we could play around and face them the right way; and work out which way — and on which car — a dancer would be.’

A hundred extras were also used in the scene, but the dancers had to be carefully deployed, to make it seem as though there were scores of them, too.

The movie has garnered 14 Oscar nominations — including ones for Emma, Ryan, Damien, and the composer and lyricists: Justin Hurwitz Stone, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. But no honour for the choreographer.

Mandy says she’s not fussed. She was just happy to get a chance to work on a movie in a million. ‘I’d love 700 more movie musicals to work on.’

For now, though, it’s back to TV, and commercials. Oh, and the La La Land number, for the Oscar show on February 26. 

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Genevieve O’Reilly will appear in Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman

Genevieve O’Reilly (right) and Laura Donnelly, who will be joining Paddy Considine in the ensemble cast of Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman, which will be directed by Sam Mendes. 

Performances of the play — about four generations of one family in Northern Ireland — start at the Royal Court Theatre on April 24.

The hope is that if the play is well received there it will transfer to the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.

As this page noted before, The Ferryman will mark Considine’s professional theatre debut.

It’s the truth! 1984 is bound for Broadway 

Orwell’s landmark novel  has been selling well following Donald Trump’s election

The Ministry Of Truth is about to commence battle with ‘alternative facts’ as efforts get under way to open a stage version of George Orwell’s 1984 on Broadway.

‘It would be part of the zeitgeist to get it on in New York as quickly as possible,’ an executive close to the show there told me.

Orwell’s landmark novel, published in 1949, has been selling well following Donald Trump’s move into the White House.

But the book really started rocketing up the best-seller lists after Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s key mouthpieces, came up with the Trumpian phrase ‘alternative facts’ during an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet The Press.

Conway was defending White House spokesman Sean Spicer against accusations that certain statements he’d uttered were ‘falsehoods’. Untrue, she said. They were ‘alternative facts’.

Interest in novels and other cultural works with totalitarian themes increased substantially. Now producers Scott Rudin and Sonia Friedman are looking for an available theatre on Broadway for the adaption of 1984 created by director Robert Icke and playwright Duncan Macmillan.

The play, from Headlong productions, was put together for Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida, then transferred to the West End (three times). It also toured to Santa Monica, Boston and Washington.

A source connected to the show told me: ‘It’s definitely going to happen; and that’s 100 per cent NOT an alternative fact.’ But the producers won’t know yet if they will have a theatre this season, or next (which on Broadway kicks off in June, after the Tony Awards).

After Conway’s comments, thousands took to social media, quoting Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth slogans: ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’

I was struck by this graphic one: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

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Belinda Lang will join Paul McGann in Moira Buffini’s play Gloria

Belinda Lang (right), who will join Paul McGann in Moira Buffini’s play Gabriel when it goes on a UK tour, beginning at Richmond Theatre on March 28. 

Directed by Kate McGregor, the artistic director of Theatre6, it’s about how a family copes on Nazi-occupied Guernsey.

Patrick Marber who has rounded out the ensemble for the revival of his play Don Juan In Soho, which will run at Wyndham’s Theatre from March 17. 

Joining David Tennant, Adrian Scarborough and Gawn Grainger will be Dominique Moore, David Jonsson, Mark Ebulue, Theo Barklem-Biggs, Mark Extance, Emma Naomi, Alice Orr-Ewing, Adrian Richards, Himesh Patel, William Spray, Eleanor Wyld and Danielle Vitalis.