Andrew LLoyd-Webber - The Box Five Club Features Gillian Lynne
February 2026
Andrew Lloyd Webber's Box Five Club - the home of his most dedicated fans - honoured Gillie with a special takeover celebrating her life and legacy
Celebrating The Centenary of Dame Gillian Lynne
“On the 100th anniversary of her birthday, we explore the creative life of the late, great dancer, choreographer, director and human dynamo, Dame Gillian Lynne.
It’s fitting that Gillian Lynne is the first non-royal woman to have had a West End theatre named after her, since she has unquestionably earned the status of theatrical royalty. Gillian didn’t just create landmark choreography for two of the longest-running musicals of all time – Cats and Phantom of the Opera – she fused ballet with jazz and mime to introduce a whole new dance vocabulary that changed the face of musical theatre…”
“Nicknamed ‘wriggle bottom’ at home, it was Gillian’s frenetic energy that first pushed her into the world of dance. Worried about her eight-year old daughter’s hyperactivity, Gillian’s mother, Barbara, took her to the family GP who quickly made a very astute diagnosis. After putting on the radio, he and Barbara stepped out of the room whereupon Gillian started leaping around and jumping off the furniture. It confirmed what the doctor had immediately suspected: Gillian was a born dancer. ‘You must take her immediately to dance class,’ he told her bewildered mother.
The very next day, Gillian attended Miss Madeleine Sharp’s dance class at the Bell Hotel in Bromley, where future ballet luminary and lifelong friend Beryl Grey was also a pupil. Finally, the fledgling dancer felt that she’d ‘come home’. In her autobiography A Dancer in Wartime, Gillian describes the joy of becoming part of the group: ‘I seemed to have leapt over a bubbling stream and landed on the bank of a new and undiscovered country.’…”