Helen Dallimore
In September, it will have been three years since an Australian unknown, Helen Dallimore, opened as Glinda in the West End premiere of Wicked, opposite Tony winner Idina Menzel’s Elphaba. After a year of descending to the stage of the Apollo Victoria Theatre in a bubble and belting out "Popular," she returned to Sydney and her partner of six years, actor-director Abe Forsythe. (The couple got married three months ago.) Now Dallimore, 38, is back on the London stage in a show, Too Close to the Sun at the Comedy Theatre, that promises to be the complete antithesis to Wicked. It’s a chamber musical with a cast of four about the last day or so in the life of Ernest Hemingway. James Graeme plays the fearsome American novelist who gave us The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises, among many other classics, before shooting himself in 1961, and Dallimore is his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, who died a quarter century later. In London, Dallimore is staying this time around in the Clapham home of her Wicked co-star, Miriam Margolyes. She spoke animatedly to Broadway.com during a rehearsal break from the show, which opens on July 24.
Welcome back to the West End!
Thank you! It's really exciting. I'm really pleased to be doing something totally. People will, I think, be surprised to see me in this light, which is great for me because I'm an actress of variety. To be in something as disparate as this is brilliant for me.
And to go from a show that everyone knows to one no one knows at all.
Nobody does know it; [the song writing team of John Robinson and Roberto Trippini] were certainly new people to me. This is new British writing, which is very exciting, although we are writing about an American legend. And James Graeme looks so spookily like Hemingway: I got the famous Hemingway biography, and I walked into rehearsal with it under my arm and looked in and thought, "Oh my God, it's Hemingway!" What we're looking at are essentially the last 24-36 hours of Hemingway's life and the question of whether he had fully decided to kill himself: whether he shot himself unintentionally or on purpose and what the dynamic was between him and his wife and a live-in receptionist [played by Tammy Joelle].
How did you get cast in a British chamber musical living halfway around the world?
Well, I have an agent here, and whenever something interesting comes up, he lets me know—sometimes I can be seen for it, and sometimes I can't. In this instance, they accepted videotaped and email auditions from me, which is great. I sang a song and did a scene and my husband taped it for me and emailed it across, since God knows I can't do anything like that.
But then there's the issue, presumably, of living apart from your husband.
We're used to it: we've had a back-and-forth existence for a long time now. When you make a decision to pursue your individual dreams and still maintain a relationship, you kind of have to live with that and make the best of it. If those are the conditions, it beats not being together at all.
True, and in any case, this is an eight-week engagement, I gather, as opposed to the year you spent in Wicked.
I had never done anything for that long, and a year was enough for me. I'm not really a musical theater person by background and hadn't been used to doing something for that long. I was used to doing theater jobs for a couple of months or film and TV that in some cases can be a matter of days, so Wicked really did stretch me in terms of stamina.
Presumably, you ease into it and develop a routine.
It's like stretching any kind of muscle: it gets easier if you sit with it. Like a long distance runner, the more you do it, the further you can run. It did mean that I couldn't have much of a life: I quickly learned that a glass of wine can knock a semi-tone off your range the next day or that you'll be that little bit dehydrated. I really had to cloister myself for that time: it took a lot out of my life, although I got a lot out of it as well. I knew I was right for Glinda. I knew that was something I could do and something I could sing, if I got it in my voice. It was just the right thing at the right time.
How's your current assignment when it comes to that post-show glass of wine?
Not as heavy a sing, so I'll be able to have that drink after the show. And it's a more mature sing. With only four people on stage, it's really like a string quartet; it's like a play with songs.
But don't you miss making your entrance from miles above the stage?
[Laughs.] I used to start the show in the roof on my own in the bubble, and it was fun centering myself and looking down on the audience. I quite liked it up there.
No fear of heights then?
I don't like cliffs very much but small heights like that are fine.
Do you find these few years later that the Wicked legacy lingers on? I went to see Kerry Ellis [Menzel's replacement] in concert several Sundays ago at the Shaw Theatre and the fans were certainly out in full force.
After two years of not being around and not having anything in the public eye, I went and did West End Live and they were screaming out, "I love you, Helen!" I thought, these people never die. There could be a nuclear holocaust and the Wicked fan girls would survive it. It was really nice, although I was really nervous.
This will test whether that audience has an appetite for a show that isn't crammed full of power ballads.
This is very complex and interesting music, I have to say: dark, almost contemporary classical in some places but then some fantastic Broadway showstopper numbers. I've been cupping my pants, to put it mildly. [Laughs]. I hope London audiences embrace it. The script is why I wanted to do it. I hadn't really heard much of the music before I flew over, and when I read the script, I thought, that's a very good play—much better than one usually sees in musical theater scripts, to be frank. It's got proper subtext and all that.
It's fantastic that you can work between these two cultures and continents.
Well, my maternal grandmother was British, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do this; I have an Australian passport but an ancestry visa here. I've always had very much a back-and-forth life, since my parents are academics and we would come back here for sabbaticals. What's tricky is that it's not always that easy when you're not in the country to get work, particularly for theater, because people want to see you in the room, and it's not financially possible to keep flying back and forth. That's a horrible helluva flight.
What a time for Australian actors on stage, with Geoffrey Rush winning the Tony for Exit the King, Hugh Jackman returning to Broadway in A Steady Rain and Cate Blanchett taking her Blanche DuBois in Streetcar to New York.
I think people find a quality in Australian actors that they don't find in British and American actors. One thing is, we generally have a very good ear for accents, which means we can go into those environments and do the job without sticking out like a sore thumb. And, of course, we have cultural influences from both countries: it's EastEnders and CSI. We've hardly got any Australian content on TV, so young people are growing up hearing the accents.
Have you seen Blanchett's Blanche?
No, but I saw her do Hedda Gabler, and her Hedda was extraordinary. It made me want to give up acting! I remember saying to my husband, “I'm never going to act anymore," though then I thought, Let's see her sing ‘Popular,’ huh?