Musical Dynasties

I remember being backstage in Jill’s dressing room after the show. It was late in the run and word was out that Jill would star in Funny Girl the following year, the show that had made Barbra Streisand a household name. Jill was taking her makeup off and I said naively that this would surely make her a big international star.

I clearly remember her reflection in the mirror, mascara and Leichner smeared on her face, as she answered. “There are no stars in Australia. The best we can hope for is to keep working.” She had no idea of the profound effect that moment would have on me.

Flash forward 57 years, and Hairspray is the huge hit for 2022, a musical set in the 1960s - when Miss Perryman’s star ascended. There is the amazing Shane Jacobson, in drag as Edna Turnblad, wearing the same necklace that Jill wore when she finally got her turn to play Dolly Levi and bring the house down! And in the cast is Jill’s grand-daughter, Mackenzie Dunn, as Penny Pingleton.

Image: Mackenzine Dunn

It’s not MacKenzie’s first major role. Graduating from WAAPA, she immediately joined the cast of Jersey Boys and swiftly added a slew of major roles in shows like Ragtime, A Chorus Line and Thoroughly Modern Millie. She even got to create the lead role of Sophie Parker in the workshop of a new Australian musical, WAGS.  And though Mackenzie never got to see her grandmother on stage, Jill Perryman did get to see her, as well as her mother, actress Trudy Dunn, “tread the boards”.

The second memory I have is of another theatre icon – the late, great Gloria Dawn. It’s hard to describe Gloria Dawn to anyone who hasn’t seen her. She started as a variety and revue performer, and only had to set foot on a stage to own it completely. She was fourth generation Show Biz and there was absolutely nothing she didn’t know about timing or connecting with an audience. It’s an under-statement to say she was awe-inspiring, and yet, before she even turned fifty, she was gone, leaving a legacy of great performances.

Gloria was what we now call an old-school pro’. There was no ego and she lived by the adage that “the show must go on”. Even when she was terminally ill, she still owned the stage as Mama Rose in Gypsy, receiving a standing ovation every performance. I was in awe of her talent when I first saw her in a Phillip Street Revue, A Cup of Tea, A Bex, and a Good Lie Down, in Sydney just a few short weeks after my encounter with Jill. She had blown me away with a song called “The 51^st State”, about the Americanisation of Australia, and yet here she was, in the dressing room, in fluffy mule slippers, knitting between the matinee and the night show.

She was down-to-earth and embracing; not a star, just a pro’ doing her job. It reminded me so much of my grandmother, who terrorised English stage managers into letting her have a cooking ring in the dressing room so she could cook “tea” for my grandad on matinee days (breakfast was always at lunch time).

Image: Donna Lee and Gloria Dawn.

Jill and Gloria were two megastars who never understood their power but recognised the greatness in each other. Jill used to call them a “mutual admiration society” and yet it seems they only appeared together once - on the ABC’s Jill Perryman Show.

Though they never appeared in a musical together (what a meal they would have made of Chicago if the timing had been right), they shared upbringings that were similar. Both came from Show Business backgrounds. Jill’s father was an actor, her mother a singer – and a stage mother who pushed both Jill and her sister Diana (a noted actress) to go after the success she herself never quite managed. In truth, the two girls didn’t take much pushing; neither wanted to do anything else.

Gloria’s grandparents were travelling carnival people known as Carny People - adjusting their act to the different states and territories they toured - working with elephants, camels and whatever else was thrown in their path.

Her parents were vaudeville – or, as we called them, variety -performers. And while Jill started performing as a child, at the age of 3 Gloria was already touring with her parents’ act, and, by the age of 12, she was a child star at the Tivoli theatres. Both married fellow performers and had children who went into show business. And that brings us back to Hairspray again.

Image: Donna Lee

Gloria’s daughter, award winning musical performer and cabaret artist Donna Lee, is also part of the cast of Hairspray and, in a curious quirk of fate, she actually plays Mackenzie Dunn’s mother in the show - and it gets more bizarre. Donna has played on stage opposite Mackenzie’s mother - Jill’s daughter Trudy. Show-biz really is a small world.

But while Mackenzie’s childhood was stable, mostly normal, and travelled a path through a prestigious performing arts academy, Donna’s was the stuff of fairy tales, or perhaps nightmares. Between major shows, Gloria would revert to her carny roots. Tent shows were a part of show-biz tradition in the first half of last century. Even when they were replaced by RSLs and Mechanics Institutes, Gloria and her juggler husband would hook up the caravan, pile the kids inside and go touring - town to town, state by state.

“I never went to a regular school,” Donna tells me. “Mum and Dad would enrol me in a different school every week - usually just for the week. I was either a genius or a complete dunce, depending on what state we were in at the time. People don’t believe it. It sounds too crazy.”

I believe her because my childhood mirrors hers, except that touring in a caravan in English winters wasn’t half as much fun as touring the outback - there were times we almost froze.

It was inevitable that Donna would follow her Mum into the “Business”.

“I really didn’t know anything else, and it was just assumed I would follow. Learning acrobatics and dance steps were part of everyday fun, especially since we didn’t have television,” Donna explains.

“I remember the very first time I saw mum on stage. I knew that’s what she and dad did, but it didn’t make much impression. Then I saw her in panto - I think it was Babes in the Wood - at the Tivoli. I was standing in the wings, and suddenly she wasn’t my mum. She was this golden creature in tights with lights shining on her and people laughing and clapping, and I thought, I want to do THAT!”

Image: Donna Lee and Gloria Dawn.

Later Donna feels she was perhaps held back because of being Gloria’s daughter. There was always that comparison that she was Gloria’s … but she wasn’t Gloria, despite winning multiple awards in her own right.

Mackenzie never had to endure the comparisons.

“I knew my Gran had been famous,” she says, “and I’d heard recordings of her, but I wish I could have seen her on stage, just once. I’m told that when I was born, she came straight from the theatre and playing Dolly, still in full makeup and with her wig on. I hate that I’m too young to remember that. What I do remember is how she encouraged me. I think I’m more ambitious than she was. Like you said, she was happy to be working, and didn’t have huge expectations. But to me she is legendary for how she loved her family. That’s always been the most important thing I remember from my childhood. But I do google and chase every snippet I can find of her performing live.”

Hairspray has brought two dynasties together and, much like the Redgraves and the Foxes in Britain, the talent is what keeps the legends of the past relevant in the present, even though the names are forgotten by most.

Donna tells me that every night on stage, two of the kids from the ensemble help her down the stairs for her applause in the finale.

One night, after the curtain, they asked her if she was aware of what she said each night. Donna assumed that she said ‘thankyou’.

But instead they corrected her, “No, every night as you go to take your call you say to us ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ ”

And yes, indeed we are.