‘Get ready to come on a ride!’
SHE REVEALS ALL ABOUT NEW DRAMA TO BAZ BAMIGBOYE
You can’t keep a good show down. And after my exclusive story last week, the London Palladium took £500,000 at the box office in a matter of hours for its Pantoland variety extravaganza.
And now Elaine Paige, the first lady of British musicals, is joining the fun to bring us mirth over the Christmas holidays. oh yes she is! And ... she’s evil.
She told me showman Michael Harrison asked if she’d do another turn as Queen Rat for the three-anda-half-week run at the Palladium from December 12 — which I have a hunch might extend further, such is the demand for tickets.
Paige performed there three years ago, sharing the bill with Julian Clary and Charlie Stemp in Dick Whittington. ‘It was such fun — and Julian was so naughty!’ she said, clearly relishing memories of the high jinks they got up to.
‘We had a nice rapport with each other as well,’ she added as we chatted about the I Know Him So Well duet she and Clary did back in 2017. ‘We’ll change a few of the lyrics to make it current,’ she told me; and said another number, As If We Never Said Goodbye (from Sunset Boulevard), would be slightly rewritten ‘to make it pertain to life as it is today’.
However, there are no plans to fiddle with the gags from Dick Whittington.
‘People are desperate to laugh out loud,’ she said, ‘because it’s so miserable. Also, I wanted to be part of something that would just help the theatre come back; get it back up and running. We’ve all been in such desperate straits in the theatre.’
Paige said she’d never heard an audience ‘roar’ like they did at the Whittington show, though she wondered how the laughter might sound ‘muffled through surgical masks’. Producer Harrison told me ‘Julian’s salivating at the thought’ of performing with Paige again.
OTHER cast members include Beverley Knight, Ashley Banjo and Diversity, Nigel Havers, Gary Wilmot, Paul Zerdin and Jac Yarrow. the award-winning star has continued with her popular Radio 2 show Elaine Paige on Sunday; she’s also appearing as Helen, the ‘ other woman’ caught up in the marriage of Alison Steadman and Peter Davison in writer Mike Bartlett’s compelling BBC1 drama Life, which also stars Victoria Hamilton, Adrian Lester, Calvin Demba and Melissa Johns. ‘I was thrilled to be asked to be involved,’ she said.