The Non-stop Lucy Maunder Show

She’s Rizzo by day, Gertie by night, and she’s doing a rave-reviewed cabaret show that’s aimed at London and New York. Rocketing young star Lucy Maunder tells Frank Hatherley about her non-stop life.

Touring Australia as Gertrude Lawrence in the sophisticated entertainment Noel and Gertie, Lucy Maunder does what she calls “some really cute Fred and Ginger dancing” with her co-star James Millar. But as she glides around the various stages she conceals a far wilder dancer inside.

For her next role, opening in August, is Rizzo, leader of The Pink Ladies in the new Gordon Frost Organisation multi-million dollar production of Grease.

“I nearly had a heart attack at the Grease dance auditions,” she tells me from Colac, Victoria, today’s Noel and Gertie destination. “They said, right, you’re all 18 year olds and you have to remember your wild teenage abandon. We did the hand jive and it took me a good half-hour to get my breath back. It was shocking!”

Lucy Maunder’s current schedule is quite shocking, too. “There’s a two week crossover between the shows. I’ll actually be rehearsing Grease during the day and performing Noel and Gertie at night. I’m really excited about it — Rizzo by day, Gertie by night — a totally different voice and accent, an entirely different character.”

And that’s not all. Last year she launched her own one-woman cabaret show, Irving Berlin: Songs In The Key Of Black, and has just come back from a notable one-off performance at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. “We had some glowing reviews,” she says proudly. Lucy has very big post-Grease ambitions for her show.

If Lucy was a thoroughbred you would say she has good lineage. Her father is the greatly talented Opera Director – Stuart Maunder. Her mother is the equally talent musician Anne-Maree McDonald.

So it comes as no surprise that Lucy has hardly stopped working since graduating from WAAPA in 2006. She came to national attention five years later as Lara in the musical version of Doctor Zhivago, playing opposite Anthony Warlow. “It was a total dream come true for me, and such a joy to sing that music.

“The show got stronger and stronger as the months went on. When we were in Sydney it was still so new and crazy. But when we went down to Melbourne it was in a much smaller theatre. I loved performing it in Melbourne.”

The unplanned gap after Doctor Zhivago closed was soon filled with the planning and construction of her one-woman show. Why her interest in Irving Berlin? I asked.

“He’s always been my favourite composer of that era. When I was really young I watched a movie called Blue Skies. It starred Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, and all the songs were by Irving Berlin. I learned them all.”

During a 2010 Korean tour of The Rocky Horror Show (she played Janet) she developed her cabaret idea with fellow cast member Nicholas Christo, also a WAPPA graduate. By 2012 they were ready to tour their show nationally.

“The show’s not about Irving Berlin himself and it’s not about me,” she says. “It’s more of a guided meditation through Berlin’s time period and the effect that the ragtime era and his type of music had on popular culture at the time.

“It features 18 songs, including the big hits, but nothing from his musical theatre repertoire. It’s all standards like How Deep is the Ocean, Say It Isn’t So and Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and his earlier Tin Pan Alley stuff.”

When Noel and Gertie came up she went happily back to an eight-shows-a-week schedule. “I’m having such a ball playing Gertrude Lawrence,” she says. “She’s such a brilliant, wicked character, so full of life and so adorable.”

Then along came Grease. How did she get the prized role of Rizzo?

“It was a standard casting call through my agent. I just went through the rounds like everyone else. I knew that John Frost was bringing out the recent West End production, so all the UK creatives would be coming out for the auditions.”

Did she prefer to go for bad girl Rizzo rather that good girl Sandy?

“Funnily enough I started out auditioning for Sandy. I went through several rounds as Sandy and got to the final audition. I had my nice little blouse on and my headband and my straight hair and I sang Hopelessly Devoted to You and did a couple of Sandy scenes. They said to me ‘how would you feel about reading for Rizzo?’ and I said, ‘Oh, I’d love to read for Rizzo’.

“So I came back next morning for the final, final audition in front of all the people from the UK and Australia, and I had my crazy wild curly hair and I had totally changed what I was wearing, and I came in and sang There Are Worse Things I Could Do and did the Rizzo scene and I got the role.

“That song – oh, it’s heaven! - I remember walking away thinking ‘I am absolutely desperate for this song’. The great thing about Rizzo is that she starts off being so tough, the head of the Pink Ladies, sarcastic – and then in the second act it’s revealed that she’s entirely vulnerable and insecure, just like everyone else. And that song really shows the vulnerable side to her personality. It’s just really juicy.”

The non-stop Lucy Maunder is sorry, but she has to get going. She’s performing one part, rehearsing another, planning further conquests.

“After Grease finishes I hope to go over to London. I want to do my Songs In The Key Of Blackover there, and then I want to do it in New York as well.”

I’ve absolutely no doubt that she will.

Originally published in the July / August 2013 edition of Stage Whispers.

Images: Lucy Maunder in Noel and Gertie (photographer Nicholas Higgins), in rehearsal with the cast of Grease (photographer Matt Watson) and in Dr Zhivago (photographer Kurt Sneddon).

Summer Nights - Grease Australian Cast

www.greaseistheword.com.au