It is not just any West End star who, after five minutes of meeting you, will offer to pop round to your house and lend a hand with your tiling. But Anna Jane Casey, who stars in Forbidden Broadway at the Menier Chocolate Factory, does not appear to have a prima donna bone in her body, writes Matthew Amer.
When we meet, it is not in a swanky hotel or a glamorous dressing room complete with fruit of her choosing chilled to precisely 5.5 degrees, but amid a forest of stacked chairs and tables at the Menier’s restaurant. The whiff of freshly painted walls hangs in the air and the chilled fruit is replaced with a shop-bought salad, though she doesn’t manage to eat much of it due to her undeniable ability to chat. The girl, it is fair to say, can talk. It is one of her many talents.
The others include singing, dancing, acting, grouting and being naturally funny, even if she sees this more in her little sister – TV sitcom star Natalie – than herself. Still, it is easy to be entertaining when you are as happy as Casey clearly is.
“I’ve never laughed so much in my whole life,” she says of the Forbidden Broadway rehearsals which, when she is not performing, see her “cackling like some old witch in the background”. She demonstrates the laugh, which sounds more like a power drill struggling to bore through some particularly tough concrete than a wizened old hag. She saw the revue show when it was first staged in London, 10 years ago at the Jermyn Street theatre. “I remember crying with laughter so much that a bit of wee came out. When I heard it was coming back, I was like: ‘Oh my God, I’d chop my legs off to be in that.’” Luckily for her, no amputation was required.
All that was needed, apart from her vocal and comic talents, was the ability to chip in at the small London Bridge venue which doesn’t offer the luxury of larger West End productions. That was not an issue for Casey, who is more down-to-earth than a plummeting satellite: “Maybe the money’s better [in the West End] and maybe your costume’s a little nicer and maybe you get your own dresser rather than everybody just doing up each other’s costumes like you get here, but I think when you do something that’s so involved, you care about it more. Everybody’s in on this and we’re all throwing ideas in.”
A hit in New York since 1982, Forbidden Broadway takes the West End and Broadway’s favourite shows and pokes a hefty dollop of fun in their direction. Some might say it mocks the hand that feeds it, others would point out that if Theatreland can’t laugh at itself there is something horribly wrong. Appropriately enough, the show doesn’t take itself too seriously either: “The costumes look like your mum’s made them,” Casey laughs, though with her normal giggle, not the pained drill. “You know when you have to dress up like… an elephant at school, they go ‘We can do towels for ears and we can do a great big hose from the tumble drier for your nose…’” One of the four-strong cast, Steven Kynman, even ends up in the altogether, very revealing in the intimate Menier auditorium. “Don’t have the sausage when you come for your meal after,” Casey deadpans, “that’s all I’m saying.”
“The costumes look like your mum’s made them”
While Forbidden Broadway enjoys a knowing laugh at theatre’s expense, Casey doesn’t mind laughing at herself either. Since Wicked first opened in the West End, rumours have been rife that she wanted the title role of green witch Elphaba. It turns out she did, and auditioned on numerous occasions, though one unchangeable fact stood between the 37-year-old actress and meeting the Wizard of Oz: “If I get told I’m too old to play Elphaba one more time, I’m going to kick someone in the face!” she growls, still slightly frustrated, I think, but clearly giggling about it. She does, after all, “get to sing my Elphaba” in Forbidden Broadway. There might be some extra passion behind that performance.
Another rumour she is keen to set straight surrounds the multi-Laurence Olivier Award-winning production of Sunday In The Park With George. She starred in the Sondheim show, opposite Daniel Evans, when it was first staged at the Menier Chocolate Factory at Christmas 2005. The show was so successful that it transferred to the West End, but with a different leading lady.
“I want to clear this up,” Casey starts, picking up on the mutterings that surrounded her departure prior to the show’s run at the Garrick theatre. “I did not hate the show. Sondheim, for me, is not my favourite writer, but I thought the show here was beautiful and I loved doing it, but I was pregnant and I couldn’t go into town with it. That’s the reason and that’s official.”
In rejecting the transfer, she unknowingly missed out on the glut of awards the production won, including, possibly, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress In A Musical, which went to her replacement and friend, Jenna Russell. Though she was happy for her former colleagues, she admits that stung a touch, “but I was breastfeeding at the time, so that probably stung a little more!”
Her daughter is now two and a half years old, and while Casey calls her “my best mate”, for the first 18 months she “wanted to hang myself”.
“I have a wonderful time most of the time,” she explains, “but when it’s hard, it’s really hard. Now my little girl’s two and a half, so she can tell me when she’s hungry, when she needs the loo, when she’s bored, what she wants to do, and it’s great, but the first year and a half was just horrible. Being a performer, you’re so used to people telling you when it’s alright. [With children] nobody gives you notes and nobody gives you a round of applause at the end of the day either. Not knowing what to do is the thing. I love it when people say ‘Use your instinct’… I’m so tired I can’t see; what’s my instinct?”
“If I get told I’m too old to play Elphaba one more time, I’m going to kick someone in the face!”
The performing genes – Dad is also a musical theatre star, Graham Macduff – are already starting to become apparent in Casey Jr, who is eager to stage shows for her parents. It echoes Casey’s own childhood, though both her parents were market traders. “You know those scary children who get up at weddings and want to sing and dance?” she asks. “That’s me, one of those really annoying children like Bonnie Langford must have been – love you Bonnie! – but you know what I mean, I was that child.” There must have been something in the water, as her younger sister was exactly the same though, according to Casey, Natalie was the more photogenic of the two and was appearing in adverts aged just three.
While Natalie ended up receiving her big break in TV soap Hollyoaks, Anna Jane found herself hopping on a train from Manchester following her GCSE history exam to audition for Cats. “I must have looked like the biggest berk known to man,” she laughs, “because they were all really trendy dancers with their tops hanging off and I literally had a pink leotard on and pink tights with my hair in a bun. I looked about 12.”
The pre-pubescent ballerina look didn’t stop her impressing the casting team, as, at the tender age of just 16, she was treading the boards in London, miles from home and alone in a strange new city. Looking back, though, this life-changing leap didn’t seem that daunting at all for the teenage Casey. “At 16 I didn’t realise the big step I was taking. I hadn’t been kissed, kicked or run over at that point. I was dead innocent and in a room with nine women taking their clothes off and going ‘Ooh, I’ve got a boil on me bum!’ I wasn’t scared. I didn’t think London was a big scary place. I just knew I had my work to go to and tried to sneak a drink in the pub after, until they found out how old I was.”
The years since have seen her carve a niche for herself as one of British musical theatre’s most dependable leading ladies. She has appeared in Starlight Express – “You know the meaning of hard work when you’ve done Starlight” – Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Grease, My One And Only, West Side Story, Sweet Charity, Piaf, Chicago and John Doyle’s actor/musician production of Mack And Mabel, in which she doubled up as a percussionist – “They hid me round the back because every time I got it wrong I was swearing”.
After putting in the years of work to push herself to the top of her field, you wouldn’t blame her for feeling a little annoyed at the current fetish for reality shows and ‘star’ casting. Yet her grounded nature and typically Northern dryness will have nothing of it. She is more than aware that while musical theatre fans know her work, the wider public might need a recognisable face to entice them into a theatre. “If I’m in a show with Jodie [Prenger] or Connie [Fisher] or somebody, I’ll be glad that we’ve got a full house rather than two lesbians and a whippet in the audience because nobody’s famous. I can understand it and it really doesn’t bother me. I just say ‘Has the cheque cleared?’ For me, that’s fine. As long as I get paid and I have a laugh and I can go home to my husband and my baby, that’s fine.”
“You know those scary children who get up at weddings and want to sing and dance? That’s me.”
In fact, those actresses who take themselves a little too seriously receive some stick at Casey’s hands, and not just on the Forbidden Broadway stage. While, hugely frustratingly for me, she refrains from mentioning any names, Casey does bring up the 10th anniversary performance of Chicago, which saw many of the show’s former stars returning to its ranks for a special one-off performance in which no two scenes featured the same performers. “Apparently people were getting sh***y,” she whispers conspiratorially, referring to the decisions about who would sing which song. Casey even managed to nab Ute Lemper’s wig when the Teutonic chanteuse declined to wear it. “At the end of the day,” Casey states, in her very typical fashion, “we’re all just doing jazz hands, aren’t we? Get on with it.”
Casey, I learn in the half hour I spend with her, is like a cream cracker glitterball, hugely entertaining but delightfully dry as well. She might sing her way through answers and adopt the voices of the little old ladies in her cul-de-sac, entertaining and performing at every turn like the child she once was, but it is never really in an obnoxious, attention-grabbing, ‘look at me’ fashion. That is just who she is and what she does. She is as plain speaking as a lecturer on deserts and isn’t afraid to turn that honest, truthful eye on herself.
She doesn’t do straight plays very often, and there is a reason: “The couple of plays and straight things I’ve done, I miss the jazz hands, I miss standing out front and getting a round of applause after a number. I’m a stagy ba****d; I know, it’s terrible. Do you know what? Play to your strengths, know your limits. I’m better at singing and dancing and jumping into splits than I am being deep as Hedda Gabler. I’ll have a go, but she’ll end up with a show tune in Act II.”
She hasn’t fixed my tiling yet, but I bet she would be the most tuneful workman I had ever had.
MA