It’s been 40 years exactly, but musical theatre superstar Caroline O’Connor can still remember the first time she moved from understudy into the spotlight.
A talented and trained dancer, she moved to London to pursue her dreams of performing, learning from the best in the world rather than spending time in a classroom. She was understudying the role of Sally Bowles in Gillian Lynne’s 1986 revival of Cabaret, which toured before opening at the Strand Theatre in London.
“We opened on the Tuesday night, which was the usual thing in London, to open on Tuesday. And then I got a call Saturday morning to say that I was on for Saturday matinee. I hadn’t had an understudy call yet, so the producer, I remember, said, ‘You don’t have to go on if you don’t want to’, because legally, equity rules without rehearsal, you don’t have to go on. I was like: ‘No, no, I want to go on!’
“Even though I was terrified. I remember my flatmate was running through the lines with me. I was lying in the bath. Typical English thing, isn’t it, to have a bath, and she was running my lines with me.”
She says she once heard a story of an understudy who got tapped to go onstage, went to get something from her car and never returned, but O’Connor would never let nerves get the best of her. “As terrifying as it was, it was thrilling.”
O’Connor has known from a very young age that she wanted to perform, but she’s no spotlight-chasing diva. “I didn’t know that it would be this kind of career. I had no idea that it would end up being this busy and fruitful, but it was. I just love being on stage. I mean, I would have been happy to just be in shows, whether it be the ensemble [or a starring role]. I understudied for 10 years in London.”
Early on in her career in London, however, she found a way to make even the smallest roles memorable. During her first show, Me and My Girl, which starred Emma Thompson, she had a very small, non-speaking part. “I remember someone coming to see the show and saying, ‘I’d like to play your role’,” she recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t have any lines’. And they said, ‘Yeah, but it looks like you do’.” She’d given her character a name – Phoebe – and a backstory.
“Then I started to get in a bit of trouble. I remember once I had a scene where I had to serve sugar cubes, and I started getting laughs, the more sugar cubes I would put in the cup. I remember someone writing me a note – someone from the cast – saying, this scene is not about you. I was like, really, isn’t it? But the audience seemed to really like it. I remember going to the director, Mike [Ockrent]; he said to me: ‘Shhhh, don’t tell them I said so, but just keep doing it because it’s hilarious.’ I never minded whether it was a big role, a small role.”
It’s been a long time since O’Connor has been putting sugar in anyone’s tea, and in a four-decade-plus career, she has done plenty of big roles: Velma Kelly in Chicago, Rose in Gypsy, Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Aldonza in Man of La Mancha, Phyllis in Follies, Fanny Brice in Funny Girl – the list goes on and on. She also played Nini in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. “I just can’t believe how lucky I was to get that role,” she says, shaking her head. “They could have had anybody. How did I get that lucky?”
She got that lucky because she’s that good – her collection of Green Room Awards, Helpmanns, and Mo Awards tell that story, even if she’s too modest to.
One of her favourite roles was in Bombshells, a one-woman play written specifically for her by lauded playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. “I never thought be able to do a two-act, one-woman play,” she says.
Bombshells isn’t a musical, and the one show O’Connor would love to do that she hasn’t yet isn’t either. She would love to perform in The Lion in Winter, a play by James Goldman about Henry II. Katharine Hepburn played the king’s estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1968 film version, and it’s a part O’Connor has always wanted to play.
“I just think the script … itself is some of the best writing I’ve ever experienced, so I would love to have a crack at Eleanor of Aquitaine. I’m not sure that anyone would give me that opportunity, because sometimes you are put in a box, a musical theatre box, but maybe one day. It would be thrilling.”
Perhaps such an opportunity will come along, but O’Connor is certainly not sitting at home awaiting a producer’s call. “My husband’s retired now and I was like, maybe it’s time for me to stop, maybe I should, but it doesn’t seem to be the case,” she laughs.
She finished a production of Putting it Together and the next day began rehearsing for The Prom in Sydney, and now that she’s home in Noosa for a few weeks, she’s getting ready for Encore, an Opera Australia concert of some of the most famous songs in musical theatre history.
“I’m familiar with a few of them, because I am a bit of a show queen,” she says, understanding the case fairly substantially. “But with these songs, especially when you love them, it’s so much easier to learn material when you’re in love with it.”
From learning her lines in the bath all those years ago to performing to sold-out crowds of thousands, that love has never changed.
Caroline O’Connor will perform in Encore at the Regent Theatre May 28-30.
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