Elaine Paige in an ensemble production? That’s what it says on the tin. The
Drowsy Chaperone is the show in question – a Canadian fringe offering turned
Tony award-winning Broadway smash, now arriving on the West End with “the
first lady of musical theatre” given top billing. “But I only have one song
to sing,” Paige says, “and the rest of the time, I’m in the chorus.”
Although no one could question her zealous work ethic (she drove herself to
breakdown performing in Pam Gems’s Piaf in 1993), Paige is not
exactly known for her humility. In newspaper profiles, that dread word
“difficult” is often applied, and yet here she is in the chorus line,
cheerfully taking on a modest role in a musical with far more credibility
and less bombast than the shows that made her name. The Drowsy Chaperone
is a musical that celebrates and spoofs golden-age musicals – at one point,
it makes a catty remark about Cats, one of the shows (along with Evita)
which made her famous.
Paige doesn’t seem to mind – she’s too busy sending herself up as the waspish,
pint-sized prima donna Beatrice Stockwell, forever trying to upstage the
leggy leading lady. In a recent interview, Paige cited as “a common
misperception of me” her supposed seriousness. The Drowsy Chaperone
offers her a chance to earn her comedy spurs. “To hear people belly-laugh in
the audience. That’s so rare. It’s wonderful to hear laughter like I’m
hearing eight times a week,” she says.
So is Elaine Paige mellowing? Or were the spikier elements of her reputation
always undeserved? It’s certainly true that, both onstage and at this
interview, she doesn’t exactly radiate warmth – although, to be fair to her,
our conversation takes place in stressed circumstances, 45 minutes before
she takes to the stage. And in any case, who needs warmth, or lightness of
touch, in the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber? Paige was the supreme
interpreter of Lloyd Webber’s theatrical colossi. Her fans are Lloyd
Webber’s, her critics are his, and her reputation is forever tainted, or
gilded, by his own.
To Paige, the criticism is just snobbery. As far as she’s concerned, “I was
very lucky, early on, to be part of the cutting edge of musical theatre. The
time of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice [was] the renaissance of British
musical theatre. It was a wonderful time.”
The child of a milliner and an estate agent, Paige was born in Barnet,
Hertfordshire, and showed early signs of a steely musical ambition. Though
not academically gifted (she failed her 11-plus), she taught herself to read
music at the piano and attended the Aida Foster Stage School, where, she has
said, she began to feel she belonged.
Minor roles in Grease, Jesus Christ Superstarand Billy followed, but she
felt stalled. At the age of 29 she seriously considered giving it all up to
become a nursery nurse, but a meeting with Dustin Hoffman, who asked her to
sing for him and made her promise not to give up, gave her the encouragement
she needed.
Paige’s breakthrough came, at the age of 30, when she was cast in Evita
– albeit as second choice to Julie Covington. (Five years earlier Paige was
very nearly cast as Covington’s replacement in another iconic 1970s hit, The
Rocky Horror Show. How different her life might have been . . .)
A career that at crucial moments seems blessed by serendipity progressed when
in 1982 Judi Dench dropped out of Cats with an Achilles tendon injury.
Paige duly inherited her most famous role, and the song, Memory, that
would become her signature tune.
In more ways than one, this is the defining passage of Paige’s life. She
wasn’t just Lloyd Webber and Rice’s star, but Rice’s lover too. By the time
the relationship ended (Rice dithered too long over divorcing his wife),
Paige had missed her moment to have children. She has never married,
although last year she was to be found “giggling coquettishly” (in one
interview) about her new, young, French lover. In this same era, meanwhile,
with the help of No 1 singles such as I Know Him So Well (her duet with
Barbara Dickson, taken from the musical Chess, remains the biggest-selling
record yet by a female duo), Paige indelibly established herself as a
musical theatre actress, a label against which, it seems, she has chafed
ever since.
She has tried shape-shift-ng, with limited success. She once released an album
“which marked a significant change in [musical] direction” – but it didn’t
succeed, she complained, because “my audience find it too hard to absorb
change . . . It was clearly too much for them.”
A decade ago she was threatening to quit musicals altogether (“I feel I’ve got
nothing left to prove”), and in 1998 made her West End debut in a
non-musical leading role in Peter Hall’s production of Molière’s The
Misanthrope. Recently, she has popped up in a few telly dramas: Where the
Heart Is, Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced. But
“fundamentally, I am not asked to do things as a dramatic actress as often
as I am [to do things] connected with music.”
For this, Paige blames Britain – and its scourge, snobbery. She’s the victim
of us small-minded Brits twice over, first because we don’t give musical
theatre enough respect, and secondly because “people don’t like you to move
around too much,” she says. “You’re kept in your little niche.” These rules
don’t apply in America, where no one will ever make a snide remark about her
being “suburban” and where “you can do practically anything”.
Paige might have moved there permanently after her Broadway success as Norma
Desmond in Sunset Boulevard but it wasn’t a good time. “My parents were
elderly and I wanted to be here for them,” she says. “So it didn’t pan out.”
In his autobiography, Tim Rice talked about Paige’s “strange combination of
sparky confidence and self-deprecating modesty”. But, at least in public,
the need to assert her achievements far outweighs the self-deprecation,
which is rare and seldom rings true. She talks about acting as if it were
running a marathon. And she is straight on the defensive if any of my
questions imply a criticism.
Do you have any regrets? “I don’t think so, no” she says, managing to make the
very idea seem preposterous. “I can’t complain, can I?”
By Paige’s own admission, insecure actors are ten a penny, and she’s one of
them. She tells me, as if it were a secret, “I’m not as confident as perhaps
I seem.” But she doesn’t seem confident at all, and even her recent
criticisms of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?-style reality TV
reveal her hypersensitivity to what others think. For a start, she resents
the implication that acting is something that can be quickly learnt.
Furthermore, “if you’re a serious actor,” she says, “you wouldn’t put yourself
up for one of those shows in case you got bumped off the first week and all
your colleagues saw it.” (As a vocal critic of the phenomenon, Paige must be
miffed to see Lloyd Webber referring to the Sound of Music starlet Connie
Fisher as “my new Elaine Paige”.)
Her current insecurity relates to her age – she’s 60 next year. Maturity
brings added confidence, she says – “but that’s about the only good thing
that comes from it. I don’t relish the fact [of being 60] at all. It’s just
that my body tells me I’m not 25 any more – which is really irritating.”
It’s a bit sad, this 59-year-old woman longing to be 25, but at least on this
point, Paige is absolutely candid about her real feelings – and I find
myself admiring her refusal to pay lip service to the usual
“young-as-you-feel” pieties.
Likewise, I admire her in The Drowsy Chaperone. If she were half the diva
she’s said to be, she wouldn’t be prepared to hoof away in the background, sublimating
her stardom to a show whose star is the show itself. Perhaps her performance
will dispel some of that snobbery she feels pursues her and that bedevils
musical theatre too.
“What the show is saying is that musicals transport you to somewhere else,”
she says. “You’re allowed to forget the ghastliness of real life for an hour
and 40 minutes when you walk into a musical theatre house.”
Finally, on the issue that matters most to an entertainer – entertaining
people – Paige rightly refuses to be insecure. “Music doesn’t have to be
particularly cerebral, and what’s wrong with that? Life is tough enough. Let
all that go, and allow musical theatre to be what it is, to just sort of
wash over you. I’m of the view,” she says, “that that’s a good thing.”
The Drowsy Chaperone is previewing at the Novello Theatre, London WC2 (0870
0400046), and opens on Wednesday
