London Sunny Afternoon Star Oliver Hoare on Swinging from a Chandelier & Leaving a Note for Mark Rylance

Sunny Afternoon, the hit London show scored to the back catalog of iconic British rock group The Kinks, is entering its final months at the Harold Pinter Theatre. What better time, then, to check in with the Olivier Award-winning musical and have a word with Oliver Hoare, who has replaced Olivier winner George Maguire as the irrepressible bad boy Dave Davies, brother to Kinks frontman Ray Davies. A graduate of the Bristol Old Vic theater school and boasting a resume steeped in the classics, the amiable Hoare chatted with Broadway.com about trying a musical on for size and passing the baton to, of all people, Mark Rylance.

Nothing in your credits suggests that you would be in a musical.
That's because I never thought I would be in a musical. But what drew me to [Sunny Afternoon] wasn't that it was a musical; it's that it told the story of a band and a great British band at that. The musical thing didn't really come into it.

Is it a nice change of pace?
Oh, it is! Let's face it; straight theater can get a little bit old. You find yourself facing down these classics where it's like, "Right, how are they going to do this one then?"

What do you think of the kind of musical that Sunny Afternoon is?
With a lot of these sorts of musicals, you're thinking, "Why are you talking? Just get on with the songs!" But what's great about our show is that people seem surprised that they're getting more than just a tribute show. We've got a proper story that builds to this finale that is delivered directly in your face.

It helps that the show has a proper writer in [British playwright and screenwriter] Joe Penhall.
That's it, which means that the scenes are as important as the songs. There's really been no downside to doing this for a year—except, perhaps, at those performances when you feel really hung over, but this show in fact sweats it out of you.

So you’re not living like a monk during the run?
You know, I probably should go home straight after the show, but for the most part I don't. This is the longest I've ever spent in a show, and I can't say I've tired of it once.

Were you surprised to find yourself in this particular musical?
Not entirely, I suppose. When I was at Bristol [drama school], we did study the whole idea of acting through song, and I've been playing and performing myself since I was about 15. You can look up Freddie and the Hoares on YouTube: we're very different, of course, from The Kinks, but it's not as if I had to do a whole lot of research into what it meant to be part of a band.

On the other hand, you've had to capture an artist—Dave Davies—who exists on disc, not to mention in real life.
That's actually been part of the thrill! The truth is that my instinctive response to the [job] offer was to say no because I don't especially like jukebox musicals that just play the songs back to you, but when I came to see it, it just had so much integrity and it seemed to me that a standard had been set which wasn't just about whacking out the songs.

And Dave is quite the character.
Isn't he? Not many roles allow you to swing on a chandelier in a nightie! I remember when he came to see us a couple of months ago. I was incredibly nervous and sat there thinking, "OK, you're playing Ray Davies's brother in a version of their family story that of course can't be the whole story," and I felt like saying, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm sure there's more to you than I can offer." But then he came around afterwards for a drink and was the nicest man and didn't for a moment feel as if he had been made a fool of.

Had you seen a lot of musicals prior to this one?
Not many. I've seen Les Miz, and that's about it. Oh, and I saw Blood Brothers on a school trip.

The next show at your theater is the West End transfer of Mark Rylance-led Nice Fish, which was seen last spring in New York.
Yeah, and I think I'm going to leave him a present. Not that he knows me, of course, but I mean, he's the guy! So I've got to think of what to leave him.