Top 10 things to do
Elaine Paige is returning to Scarborough with her new show Stripped Back.
It will see the EP on Sunday
Radio 2 presenter perform her favourite tracks from an array of contemporary songwriters with a small group of musicians.
Elaine said: “I’m so excited about this series of ‘weekend’ concerts. Having made the decision not to do a back to back tour again, this appealed to me notonly because of the schedule, but as I’ve marked my 50 years on stage, this is going to allow me to do something completely different, celebrating the contemporary songwriters I love such as Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Jim Webb, Burt Bacharach, Leonard Cohen and Elton John.
Elaine Paige has been in Rome singing for the Pope – a little engagement she can add to performing at the White House and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. She’s charmingly unphased if a tad humbled by the honour, as indeed she should be with a 50-year career under her belt that’s cemented her place as one of our most respected entertainers.
“I was asked to perform in the magnificent setting of the Roman Forum,” she said. “There were artists from different cultures and countries including the wonderful tenor Andrea Bocelli, a beautiful soprano called Carly Paoli and the legendary American record producer David Foster (think Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion) who, I’m thrilled to say, accompanied me on the piano. It was all in aid of UNESCO, marked the Pope’s jubilee celebrations and was an experience I’ll never forget.”
It’s performing closer to home though to which the West End and Broadway legend (for once a word you feel is justified) is now turning her thoughts.
This autumn she’s giving a series of concerts across England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland are due to follow next year) and it marks something of a departure. It’ll bring her to Scarborough next month.
It comes two years after a sell-out “farewell” tour culminated in a memorable – and emotional – Royal Albert Hall show during which Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice made a surprise appearance to salute the performer inextricably linked to so many of their successes. To be fair, she was quite clear in 2014 that the “farewell” referred to lengthy concert tours and not to the R word.
“We performers don’t retire. We either stop being offered work or the public decide they’ve had enough,” she said with a giggle that’ll be familiar to the more than two million who have tunedin to her BBC Radio 2 show every Sunday for the past 12 years. “What I said two years ago was that I no longer wanted to do the long tours where you’re away from home for weeks on end, travelling every day and sleeping in a different bed every night,” she said.
The answer (“a cunning wheeze,” she calls it) has been to schedule the 23 concerts across a three-month period with no more than two consecutive dates before she returns to her London home for a few days to pursue other interests such as going to the theatre and her great love of tennis. And she’s no armchair devotee. She can talk the current form of the world’s top players impressively and, by all accounts, is formidable across the net.
We think of the West End as her home but surprisingly – and with exception of the short-lived The Drowsy Chaperone – hasn’t been seen in a major role on the London stage for 16 years. It’s a different matter Stateside, where in 2011 she scored a personal success in an acclaimed revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, firstly in Washington DC and then on Broadway and in LA.
She’s been widely quoted as saying the rigours of a long run, eight-show week is not something to which she’s drawn these days.
“Theatre is all-consuming and musical theatre even more so. You have to put any thoughts of having an ordinary life on hold. It’s a young person’s game and I’m not sure it’s a commitment I want to make anymore. I had years of, thankfully, going from one great role and hit show to another. You should ‘never say never’ though, especially in this unpredictable business.”
She is of course known for songs such as Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, I Know Him So Well (the million-selling number one duet from Chess with Barbara Dickson) and, from Cats, Memory, which despite being recorded by icons such as Streisand, remains emphatically the signature tune of the north London born Paige.
Her career has been typified by magnetic and frequently award-winning portrayals of strong, independent women from Eva Peron and Edith Piaf to the English governess Anna Leonowens in The King and I and the deluded silent movie star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the role that finally took her to a triumphant, superlative-strewn Broadway debut. She’s also known for a big voice able to pluck emotion from, and inject dramatic power into, even the simplest lyric. It’s a voice that seems to impossibly emanate from her 4ft 11 inch frame.
“They put a key in my back, wind me up and shove me on,” she jokes. She does though acknowledge her lack of height may have precluded her from certain roles but was a decided advantage when it mattered.
“Thankfully Eva Peron was blonde and short. I may not be talking to you today if she wasn’t. Evita gave me career.”
It certainly did – getting on for 40 years after it premiered it’s considered by many to be one of the most iconic performances in musical theatre history.
She went on to be in Cats and has also done straight acting roles including the TV series Miss Marple. She has appeared in Scarborough before, playing the Open Air Theatre and the Futurist.
She is, though, promising audiences something different this autumn but surely she can’t be let out the stage door without singing one or two of those career-defining belters?
“They’ll be in there,” she says with a reassuring glance. “But the evening is also about me celebrating the great songwriters I grew up listening to - people like Paul Simon, Lennon and McCartney, Jimmy Webb, Carly Simon and Burt Bacharach. They’ve influenced me greatly, were the soundtrack to a whole generation and, crucially, they’re songs that endure and transcend the years.”
You don’t have a career spanning six decades without discipline, talent and a desire to keep surprising your audience. Elaine Paige has – and does – all three in spades.
Elaine Paige plays Scarborough Spa on Sunday November 20 at 7.30pm.
Tickets: 01723 821 888.