K.T. hits the high notes in new musical!
SCOTTISH singersongwriter K.T. Tunstall wants audiences at her musical — based on the film Saving Grace, starring Brenda Blethyn as a widow who turns to growing marijuana to pay off her husband’s debts — to leave the theatre high... on her songs.
‘I want everyone to come out whistling their favourite tune,’ Edinburgh-born Tunstall told me, adding that for the show to work, it’s important ‘that there are stand-alone songs that you can go off and sing in the shower’.
Speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, the singer, whose hits include Suddenly I See and Black Horse And The Cherry Tree, said she was fascinated by the character of Grace Trevethyn, the part Blethyn played in the 2000 film that also starred comedian and TV host Craig Ferguson (who wrote it with Mark Crowdy) and Martin Clunes.
Clunes’s part, as a frequently stoned local doctor, was later spun off into the popular ITV series Doc Martin.
Tunstall noted that Grace is this uptight, well-behaved woman — older than 50, younger than 60 — coming out of her shell in the fictitious Cornish fishing village of Portwenn. ‘She’s stepping into her power,’ she commented, adding that she thought audiences would find the character ‘quite relatable’.
The film, directed by Nigel Cole, was shot in Port Isaac and in London, and followed on from Blethyn’s Oscar-nominated success in Little Voice and director Mike Leigh’s screen classic Secrets & Lies (a film which Tunstall said helped her make up her mind about ‘finding my biological mother’). The show features a book by playwright April de Angelis, as well as music and lyrics from Tunstall. It will be directed by Laurence Connor, who did School Of Rock, and Joseph at the Palladium.
Producer Barney Wragg said Ferguson, Crowdy and film executive Xavier Marchand were happy for De Angelis to make the tale work for the stage. ‘It’s a bit madcap, and a bit wacky. And it’s a little bit naughty — about cannabis and weed — but they don’t end up doing anything terrible,’ he said.
HE ASSURED me that unlike the film, which featured real marijuana plants — after police gave their permission — no actual cannabis would be used in the theatre production, which will open in the West End in 2023, following a try-out at a small, as yet unnamed venue in December.
First, though, there will be a rehearsed reading of Saving Grace on Friday (February 25) in front of an audience of theatre owners. Tunstall was headed over here following our call on Wednesday, to attend.
Clare Burt has been chosen to play Grace at the reading.
And Ferguson, who played Grace’s gardener and co-conspirator in the film, has agreed to read the part of the show’s banker baddie next week. ‘We can only pray to the gods of Scotland that he will join us in the actual show,’ Tunstall said, of the Glasgow-born funnyman.
I asked Wragg if, perhaps, there might be a chorus line of dancing joints and bongs. ‘I wouldn’t like to give the game away,’ he responded, but did add: ‘We’re going to have a good time!’
Just don’t inhale.