Finding Fran and Scott

After months of anticipation, Strictly Ballroom The Musical finally had its leads. After an exhaustive audition process, by late 2013 Baz Luhrmann had chosen Phoebe Panaretos and Thomas Lacey for the pivotal roles of Fran and Scott in the stage adaptation of his hit movie. Both spoke to Neil Litchfield about the grueling audition process on the day of the casting announcement.

No stranger to the competitive world of ballroom dancing, which he entered at age 10, 20-year-old Thomas Laceyis probably best known as Ben Tickle in ABC TV’s Dance Academy. Starting dance classes at the age of two at the May Downs School of Dancing, he still trains there in ballet, jazz, tap, hip hop, contemporary dance and acrobatics. Tom’s first professional gig, at age 7, was the stage version of The Magic Faraway Tree.

Phoebe Panaretos adds the role of Fran in Strictly Ballroom to her already impressive dance card. Making her professional stage debut as Rose in the Cameron Mackintosh production of Oliver! at 11, Phoebe later topped NSW in HSC Drama after studying at Newtown High School of Performing Arts, before going on to become one of the inaugural Victorian College of the Arts’ Musical Theatre graduates in 2011.

Thomas Lacey: My first audition was a pretty generic kind of call - go in, take two songs, learn a scene and do a dance.

Phoebe Panaretos: Mine was the same.

T.L: From there it was callback after callback after callback, then a mini-workshop with a few people, and then more callbacks.

N.L.: How many callbacks?

P.P.: I didn’t count …

TL: Quite a few handfuls …

P.P.: It was a lot …

N.L.: So Phoebe, you weren’t discovered at the highly publicized open search for an actress to play Fran calls?

P.P.: I’d gotten to the end when they did that Australia-wide search for Fran. I was kept away from it. I did come back again and I was in a big cattle call with the number on my chest with quite a lot of girls, but I think because I had been around before, they kept an eye on me and treated me well.

N.L.: I believe that you met Tom and struck up a rapport at your very first audition.

P.P.: When I first auditioned in Melbourne, I arrived about 45 minutes early. I was signing in, got the number on my chest, and I was stretching, and I happened to sit next to Tom. I knew his face, but I’d never met him before. We just started chatting then we suggested having a read of the Scott and Fran scene just to practice. It went well, and he said, ‘Well there you go, Scott and Fran.” It’s so funny looking back now, every audition since then we’d see each other in the waiting room and congratulate the other one for getting a step further in the process.

TL: Now we tell Baz the story, and he can’t believe it either.

P.P.: It was only at the last auditions in Melbourne that Tom said, “It would be sooo good if it was you and me.”

N.L.: And the experience of auditioning with Baz Luhrmann?

P.P: I went in not expecting to come out where I am now. It was a long process, and the journey really began once we met Baz. He definitely had in mind what he wanted and he expressed that to the actors in the room, and brought out the best in everybody. It was once Baz was involved that the journey and the process of discovering the cast began.

T.L.: He didn’t really throw any new songs at us, so each time we’d go in he’d try to get the characters out of us through our songs that we brought in, and we mainly did the same dance.

P.P.: We improvised too. He would throw things at you and you’d have to go with it.

T.L.: When I first sang my song, ‘Corner of the Sky’, he got me to sing it plain as day with the accompanist, and he’d then think about what he wanted me to do. With most of us he’d tell us to walk away from the piano and strip it right back. He wanted to see it as nothing, and then he’d add to the scene and create this magic.

P.P.: He’d create a scene out of your song eventually, to a point where he would direct a scene for you, which didn’t exactly correlate with the Fran or Scott journey. I chose ‘Out of my Life’ by Michael Jackson. The first time I sang for him he said just sing it by the piano. Then he said, now I want you to sit down on the floor in the middle of the space. All the lights were switched off and he asked me to sing it. It sounds funny now, but I completely poured my heart out, and I was crying through the song. It was in the dark, and I had all these people watching, because he had all the auditionees and the creative team in there too. He would direct you in a way that wasn’t even like an audition; it was like you were rehearsing or performing a part in a show that wasn’t necessarily Strictly Ballroom.

N.L.: Can you take me a few steps forward, toward the end of the audition process?

T.L.: We concentrated on one of the scenes from the show. We did that quite a few times with different partners. We’d go in and come out, and go in and come out. Baz and all the team had to see the transformation from both Scott and Fran. For Scott it took me a while, but I really tuned into what Baz was saying and that’s what came out. I trusted him.

P.P.: He really helped you. Tom was cast a lot sooner than I was. I remember at one point in the auditions I said to Tom, ‘Do you have any advice?’ I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong, and Tom said, ‘Really listen to Baz. He wants to see who you are. Don’t stress out and you’ll be fine.’ I took that on board, and that’s totally what Baz wanted – he just wants to see you. If you just listened to what he was saying and tried to stay calm, and were quick on your feet, you could pull out some good work.

When Tom and I got close to the end we were paired up together at an audition in Melbourne, and we were doing the Scott and Fran scene where she asks him to be her partner. When the scene ended, Baz just said keep going – there were no more lines left on the script, we just had to keep going. So Tom said, “Well what have you got Fran, show me something.” And Baz said, “Fran, just go with it, and now you teach Scott something. And Scott, try and teach Fran to dance.” And we just had to think on our feet and improvise.

T.L.: And he would always keep throwing different things at us throughout the scene.

P.P: Something unexpected, and definitely challenging.

N.L.: Tell me about the moment when you heard you’d got the part.

T.L.: I was at the airport. The night before I’d been in Sydney for a meeting with Baz and the team. The next day I was expecting a call, yes or no, and I was sitting at the airport - my plane was two hours late – and I couldn't scream because I was at the airport. Then my agent called me. She was hysterically crying, and then I called my mum, and she was on a transfer bus for a plane to Brisbane with my dad, and she couldn’t cry or scream. So it was all a bit internal, then getting on a plane for an hour and a half back to Melbourne. It was kind of nice, because I had to turn my phone off, so it all just sank in really nicely.

P.P.: I found out on about the second last day of the workshops (Phoebe had been involved in a two-week workshop of the musical at the ABC studios in Sydney, and had even had costume fittings, but had not been officially cast). I’d just had a really great day with Baz, and Tom and I had been working on a scene from the show. I was just waiting out the front of the ABC building for my dad to pick me up. Everyone had been filing out of the building and Tom was actually the last person to come out. He gave me a big hug, and said, ‘You did great today, and I’ll see you tomorrow’. Then I get this call on my phone from an unknown number and a part of me just knew it would be Baz. It was, and he, himself, told me that I got the part. I was obviously over the moon. Unlike Tom, even though I was in a public place, I was jumping up and down and screaming, trying to talk to Baz, but while I’m on the phone just jumping up and down. My dad pulled up in the car, and as soon as I got in I just turned to him and said, ‘Dad, I got it,’ and my dad just started crying at the wheel. It was a really exciting moment, and I’m still getting my head around it.

Strictly Ballroom The Musical commences previews at Sydney Lyric, The Star from Tuesday 25 March, with Opening Night on Saturday 12 April, 2014.

Originally published in the January / February 2014 edition of Stage Whispers.

Images of Phoebe Panaretos and Thomas Lacey - Rehearsal images by James Morgan. Portrait by Baz Luhrmann.

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