Sex and the City, Emily in Paris, now Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Never on a Sunday
By Ali Gripper
Director Blazey Best walks into Matinee Coffee in Marrickville looking every inch a woman in her charge of her destiny.
This is unlike the protagonist in the show she’s directing Tell Me On A Sunday, about a young English woman who arrives in New York in the late 1970s looking for love and a purpose in life, often in all the wrong places.
Tell me on a Sunday director Blazey Best.Credit: James Brickwood
The musical is based on an idea originally conceived by Tim Rice, who intended it as a TV show with his songwriting partner Andrew Lloyd Webber, on the back of their worldwide success with Evita.
Soon into the project, Lloyd Webber realised Rice was writing the role for singer Elaine Paige, with whom Rice was having an affair. Lloyd Webber felt that allowing Paige to appear in the series would suggest he approved of the relationship, so he sought a new lyricist, Don Black, (with whom he later teamed on Sunset Boulevard) and a new direction for the one-woman show.
A single woman arriving in a big city is a popular narrative, Best says; Sex in the City and Emily in Paris are recent examples. What intrigued her about Tell Me on a Sunday was how much higher the stakes were just a few decades ago.
“It’s only within my lifetime that my Mum could apply for a bank loan without a note from her dad or her husband,” she says.
“Career options were far more limited for women. They enjoyed far less freedom and independence. Finding the right man wasn’t the only option, but for many women, it was the expected way to move ahead in your life.”
A quarter-century as an actor in film, TV, and theatre, has given Best a finely honed eye as a director as well as the courage to take on gritty subjects. She has appeared in Home and Away, won several Sydney Theatre Awards and is well known to Hayes’ audiences for stand-out performances in Gypsy and Miracle City.
Blazey Best as Gypsy.Credit: Phil Erbacher
She made the leap into directing six years ago with Steve Rodgers’ King of Pigs and followed the success up quickly with Sensitive Guys, by MJ Kaufman.
“I love how collaborative the whole process is,” she says. “I love drawing the best out of the actors, and working with the designers, right down to the stagecraft of getting the lighting just right.”
Previous directors adapted Tell Me On A Sunday to modern times with mobile phones and text messages, but this version is proudly planted in 1978.
“We wanted to show the choices that were available to women at the time – or not available. It may give young women who come and see it an understanding of the women who have gone before them,” says Michelle Guthrie, who is producing this Hayes Theatre Company show.
“Things have changed vastly for the better,” she says. “Thanks to the agitators and activists who came before us, it’s a different world to what it was 40 years ago. But we still have a way to go.”
Erin Clare starring in Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 the musical. Credit: Steven Siewert
The 70-minute song cycle rests on the shoulders of 34-year-old Erin Clare who whooped it up as Doralee, in Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, the musical. Clare, who wasn’t even born in 1979 when the show premiered, is both daunted and excited by the role; she’s thrilled to be wearing high-waisted trousers and having her hair flipped back every night.
Best and Clare sang alongside each other in the Hayes production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music last year.
Erin Clare stars in Tell me on a Sunday.Credit: Marnya Rothe
The musical is one of Lloyd Webber’s shortest, but the score includes some of his best known ballads such as Take That Look of your Face, It’s Not The End of the World and Tell Me on a Sunday.
“No-one is going to leave without hearing Erin’s full repertoire,” says Blazey.
At its heart, Best says, Tell Me on a Sunday is about a woman coming of age and learning her own true worth.
“It’s not a political show; it’s not so much about the men she sees as what she learns about herself along the way. I hope when people leave, they feel they have got to know the young woman. Her rage, her lust, her fear, her joy.”
Next up for Best is a return season of Well-Behaved Women at the Belvoir Theatre. “This is the era for women’s stories.” she says. “I just happen to be fortunate enough to be around at the right time to direct them.”
Tell Me on a Sunday is at the Hayes Theatre April 12 to May 12.
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