Scottish "Courier and Advertiser" newspaper interview from December 2003.
REMEMBER MY NAME!
While most of us look forward to a holiday over the festive season, for Barbara Dickson it's time to head back to school. In this case the New York High School of Performing Arts, where she is knocking the kids from Fame! The Musical into shape in the role of hard-to-please teacher Miss Sherman. RODDY ISLES spoke to the Dunfermline-born singer ahead of her return to the stage, as she looked forward to Hogmanay in Scotland, a demanding month ahead, and talked about her plans to keep on singing and acting.
It's an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular at Edinburgh Playhouse over the next month with 'Fame The Musical'. Well, maybe cut out the "all-dancing" from that for one of the stars of the show.
"My role is something of a hollow sham, because I don't have to dance," Barbara Dickson happily admits. "It is a dance show and I don't have to dance at all, all I have to do is look over my glasses at folk and give them a kind of fierce stare!
"Most of the big work, the high energy stuff, is done by other folk. Although my role is pivotal, and it's the first time I've ever played an American, so it is something new for me as well. To be fair, my reputation is not based on anything like that. I don't think they'd have asked me it they were looking for someone to be doing all the dancing. They asked me because of my reputation in theatre."
That reputation is an immensely strong one, firmly based on quality ahead of quantity. An acciaimed folksinger who emerged from the Scottish club circuit in the 1960s and 70s, she took her first major role in a stage musical in 1974, singing the songs of The Beatles in good friend Willy Russell's show, "John, Paul, George, Ringo. . . & Bert". That subsequently led to a hit pop career, regular TV appearances, and, after being seen by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber in the Russell show, an invitation to sing on the huge-selling studio cast recording of Evita.
In 1983, she was back on stage in another Willy Russell production, this time for her first major acting role in the highly-acclaimed Blood Brothers which brought her an Olivier Award and many Best Actress honours. During the late 1980s and most of the 90s she concentrated on her music and a burgeoning career in television drama, playing the role of Anita Braithwaite in Kay Mellor's gritty drama series Band of Gold.
In 1999 she made a long-awaited return to the stage in the musical Spend Spend Spend again winning massive acclaim, a second Olivier Award and being named Best Actress In A Musical at the Critics' Circle Awards. In 2001 an award came from higher office, when she was honoured with an OBE for her services to music and drama.
When she takes on a stage role, it seems, praise and success naturally follow. Yet she has strong reasons for not taking on a great deal of them.
"Well basically, it is quite difficult to do a lot of shows in the theatre," she said. "Theatre is the most difficult and taxing medium of them all. Musicals go on six days a week and every night takes a lot out of you. It's really hard work, and you've got to be there all the time. People go on when they're unwell, and our dancers will have their legs, elbows, ankles, everything strapped up and aching by the time we get through this.
"It makes me laugh that opera singers can get away with doing one show a week! The roles in theatre are huge, and very demanding. When I did 'Spend Spend Spend' and 'Blood Brothers', those were enormous roles."
"The unique demands of theatre bring their own pressures. It is somewhat akin to performing an intensely scheduled soap opera, but without the safety net of second takes, and the need to keep the show fresh day after day, week after week.
"It's tough because doing this week after week, month after month can be monotonous," she admitted. "But you cannot allow monotony to come into the performances at all, because there will always be people in the audience who are seeing the show for the first time. You never want people to go away thinking it was 'all right,' you want them to get the best show. That's what we try to do every night."
The fact that a long run with a successful show also inevitably means having to spend considerable amounts of time in London hasn't made it any more attractive for Barbara. It has only been when the roles or opportunities have been too good to resist that she has stepped back on to the stage.
