The best performance I've ever seen: Matthew Bourne
Iwas 13 when I first saw Angela Lansbury as Mama Rose in Gypsy, the musical based on the life of striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, and it changed my life. It captured the possibility of the theatre and what it could do.
I've always revered Lansbury's performance - I can't imagine anyone doing it better. Gypsy is the ultimate stage-mother story: Mama Rose is the one who should have been a star; she's the one with the talent. But she chose to have kids and put her dreams into them. The musical shows the power of showbiz and how much it can mean to someone.
Mama Rose has this famous song at the end of Act 1 called "Everything's Coming Up Roses". It can be sung in an upbeat way but it's actually quite dark, because at this point one of her children has eloped with a chorus boy. In the song she turns to the daughter she's always ignored and says she'll make her into a star.
Lansbury did it in a frightening way, showing you that this was a demented woman living her dreams through her children. What her character does with her kids, it's almost child abuse. It takes a really great performer to bring that out. Lansbury played the strength within Mama Rose without trying to dominate the piece, as a more glamorous actress might have done.
Her performance showed me that you could marry the lighter side of musical theatre with darker themes. That's something I've tried to do ever since – taking subject matter that seems light, like Cinderella, which I'm doing at the moment, and giving it a deeper and darker edge. In Gypsy there's a big song at the end called "Rose's Turn". It starts off as a burlesque number then becomes an inner monologue. Lansbury tore the place down. I remember feeling numb at the end of it.
I wasn't expecting the performance that I saw. I wanted to be a part of it, not just an observer. I actually wrote to the theatre and asked if I could audition for a part. I just wanted to be in that world, and I've never really lost that.
Matthew Bourne's Cinderella runs at Sadler's Wells, London EC1, until 23 Jan