Why I love being Wicked!
Steven Pinder has swapped Brookside Close for the stage and finds more women are falling under a different kind of spell
NEVER let it be said that the actor Steven Pinder is anything but unfailingly polite. Even though our interview is running only a few minutes behind its allotted time, he is profuse with his apologies. His is a breakneck day of interviews before Wicked: The Musical rolls back into Dublin city for the first time since 2015.
Needless to say, it’s one of the hottest tickets in town. Back in 2015, the show was limited to a strict seven-week run. As the five-star reviews poured in, Irish musical fans snapped up tickets in their droves. The show has been on the road in its current incarnation since July 2016, where it has wowed new audiences in Singapore, Manila, Shanghai and Beijing.
Today, Pinder and the rest of Wicked’s cast — among them Amy Ross (Ephaba), Helen Woolf (Glinda), and Aaron Sidwell (Flyero)—are in Leeds, readying themselves for a seven-week stint in the Irish capital from July 17.
Pinder is excited about bringing the show to Ireland, but he also, somewhat excitedly, makes mention of the fact that the cast arrives into Dublin on the day of the World Cup final.
‘I do admit, being English, that my attention has been taken up a little with the World Cup,’ he confesses.
‘I can’t imagine it might mean too much now from an English point of view, but it will be interesting to watch anyway. I’ve only been to Dublin a few times before socially, but I’ve never worked there.’
The musical’s schedule is a breakneck one, yet Pinder has turned a life of being on the road into the finest of arts.
‘We all have our routines,’ he reveals. ‘I’m sharing a house with three other actors, and they go to the gym and do all that while I have a little bit of a lie in. I do go for a swim sometimes.
‘There’s a lot of camaraderie in musicals, and a lot of it is by definition of the fact that we’re on tour together.’
Being away from his Chesterbased family — actress wife Stephanie Chambers, and their three children — can be difficult.
‘Usually during a tour, you get to come home, but when we spent three months in China, that was, I have to admit, not the easiest, really,’ he says. ‘What made it easier was knowing there was a finite amount of time that we were away. It makes coming home all the nicer, though.’
WICKED: The Musical is one of the West End’s longest-running shows, and has been seen around the world by more than 50 million people in 15 countries. With over 100 major awards to its credit, including two Oliviers, fans have long waxed rhapsodical over the show’s technical wizardry, costumes and unforgettable songs.
The tale is based on the novel by Gregory Maguire that re-imagines the stories of characters created by L. Frank Baum in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The story charts an unlikely yet deep friendship between two sorcery students — one blonde and beautiful, the other green and misunderstood. The two befall extraordinary destinies in Oz.
One, of course, is the ‘good witch’ Glinda; the other, Elphaba, becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. Pinder plays the dual roles of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Doctor Dillamond, the talking goat and professor at Shiz University.
‘Three years at drama school and I end up playing a goat,’ Pinder laughs. ‘He’s the first ‘person’ Elphaba connects with; Dillamond confides in her and had a lasting impact on her. There’s a big persecution theme running throughout.’
Much of the ongoing success of Wicked, says Pinder, lies very much in girl power.
‘You’ve got to admit they travel though many changes in the stories, with one misunderstood and the other effectively born with a silver spoon in her mouth,’ he muses. ‘I think much of the popularity is that there are so many great parts to the musical that make it much more than just a theatre play, but the empowerment of the two female characters is probably one of the main tenets of the story. ‘Though the two witches spend two out of the two-anda-half hours on the stage, the entire cast works really, really hard.
‘Some of the costumes can be very heavy. Luckily, the Wizard needs very little in the way of make-up. But there’s still a lot going on, and it’s often 30c backstage.’
Another part of the job spec for the cast of Wicked is meeting and greeting the musical’s fans, thought to be some of the most ardent in the world of theatre.
‘Oh yes, there’s quite an army of them, and lots of them have seen it many, many times,’ observes Pinder. ‘I’ve been told that when the show came to Dublin, it was particularly successful with fans.’
Pinder has been a stalwart of the theatre for many years, with diverse credits such as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Noel Cowards’ Private Lives and Footloose on his CV.
Yet many be inclined to remember his work on the small screen more readily.
In addition to appearing in Hotel Babylon, Casualty, and True Crime, he was a fixture in many a living room in the 1990s when he played Max Farnham in the Liverpool-based soap opera Brookside from 1990 to 2003.
Posh, floppy-haired Max was one of the soap’s most enduring characters, tumbling from drama to drama, as well as from wife to wife. When he
first arrived on the Close, he and Susannah were the posh couple, like fish out of water.
But of course, the course of true love very rarely runs smooth in soap operas.
There were affairs — one, in fact was to allow Steven to escape the soap for a while and tread the boards in the theatre.
He soon returned but Susannah eventually met her maker by falling down the stairs. And somehow Max ended up married to Jacqui Dixon, the daughter of his arch-nemesis, Ron.
Given that Max Farnham remains the character he is often best known for, does he ever feel it’s difficult to escape the onscreen cad’s shadow?
‘I mean, you can’t deny (that he’s the role I’m best known for), as I did Brookside all the way through the ’90s,’ he says. ‘It was a very big job in terms of the fact that it lasted for the years it did, especially during all those big storylines. I don’t mind (the association) one bit.’
Yet soap opera now seems like a very different beast compared woith what it was during the 1990s. Does he ever hanker after a return to the small screen?
‘It does seem very different now doesn’t it?’ he muses. ‘I don’t know — sometimes I think the genre essentially remains the same. One or two of my mates are in different ones right now.
‘Certainly it was different in my day. I don’t know whether I’d do 13 years again. I don’t think my engine tank would go for that long.
‘But certainly, if I did it for as long as I did back then, I must have enjoyed it to some extent.’
Originally from Blackburn in the north of England, Pinder was bitten by the acting bug at a young age. He attended the Drama Centre London as a teenager.
Its other graduates include Russell Brand, Pierce Brosnan, Michael Fassbender, Colin Firth and Tom Hardy.
‘I think if you ask a lot of actors, they want to get away from reality and spend a bit of time somewhere else,’ he says of the moment that he decided he wanted to take to the stage.
‘I found it quite exciting playing different parts, being different people and getting away from a lot of different things.’
There was one thing he couldn’t escape in his youth, however – a job working at the local cemetery, when he was 15.
‘It was my first ever paid job,’ he reflects. ‘I mean, I did the paper round and the milk round before that, but I answered this call for a job that involved moving soil, and I realised that I would be working in a cemetery.’ But having a job was the making of him, he acknowledges.
‘It gave me quite the world view, I can tell you,’ he adds.
‘It also rained quite a lot. It was a summer of David Cassidy and David Essex, so it was all very much mud and glitter.’
Sounds like the makings of a very successful musical, I tell him.
‘You know what?’ he enthuses. ‘It absolutely does!’
■ Wicked: The Musical is on at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from July 17 until September 1. Tickets are from €25 to €72.50. For seating and details of how to book tickets, visit bordgaisenergytheatre.ie.