Nicola Dawn Brook tells Laura Davis how she ran away from singing Andrew Lloyd Webber show tunes and joined the circus instead

YOU feel like a pinball machine and you’re bouncing from culture to culture,” says Nicola Dawn Brook, the Cheshire-born singing star of Saltimbanco.

“The show is a reflection of society. You walk down the street and come across all different nationalities and groups of people – the music shares that vibe.”

With the production’s influences ranging from Celtic folk to rock ’n’ roll to opera, Brook has to be a flexible performer.

And she also has to learn a new language – one that has been specially invented for the Cirque du Soleil extravaganza.

“They are not just random words,” she explains, “there’s a certain way to say them and they have a rough meaning.

“At the beginning of the show, there’s a poem that one of the characters, the Baron, speaks. That has a very specific word-by-word translation and elements of it are repeated in the show.

“But there are songs that, when we learned the text, we were asked to make up our own translation.”

She quotes a passage from one of the numbers – an incomprehensible stream of noises.

“It sounds a bit Welsh to me,” she chuckles throatily.