Having clocked in over a thousand performances as the fair-haired witch of Oz in hit musicalWicked, Lucy Durack is now back for her second turn as Glinda the (mostly) Good. Who among us hasn’t spent time as a child in front of the mirror, imaginary microphone in hand while we sing our hearts out to capacity crowds or deliver speeches that will inevitably lead to the Oscars or Tonys?
Many of us come to distance ourselves from these fledgling ambitions, but as far back as she can remember, performance spoke to Lucy like nothing else.
“I pretty much was that girl singing alone in the back garden. I was given a pair of tap shoes when I was at school, and the first CD I ever bought with my own money was the Australian cast’s recording of 42nd Street. I wore out the shoes by constantly dancing out on our concrete in the back, because when you’ve got the outside lights on, windows can make excellent mirrors,” she laughs. “So that’s how I was able to create my dance studio. I wasn’t any good at it, but I loved it. Plus, I’m the eldest of 13 grandchildren, so I had access to a large cast at every family get-together. There were always 13 Von Trapp children in our stories.”
While the Swiss Alps may now have been replaced by the fantasy land of Oz, Durack’s love of musicals has never diminished. Nor does it seem like audiences are growing tired of the tale of Glinda and Elphaba (Jemma Rix), AKA the Wicked Witch of the West.
“When I started with Wicked it was already such a huge success, I sort of took it for granted a little bit,” Durack recalls. “But I think every audience has its own character. When we were in Brisbane for Wicked it was during those terrible floods, but it was amazing to see people so enthusiastic. I think there was a level of escapism for them, and they were such a generous audience. Every audience has its own personality. You just never know, sometimes you’ll just find a great, surprising audience out of nowhere, and it has a bit of a snowball effect. If they’re really supportive, then we tend to work just that little bit harder to try and give them a better show.” She pauses, then laughs. “Though if you have a really dull audience as well, you’re really like, ‘Oh God, here we go.’”
Despite having already enjoyed massive success and found herself quite a coveted role, Glinda’s character is not the simplest part to undertake. With such history on both stage, film and in literature, it does not immediately strike you as a performance with much flexibility for an actor. For Durack, however, this opened up entirely new performance possibilities.
“Once you’ve been doing a show for such a long time, you can’t change the words or anything but you realise there actually is quite a lot of room to play. Give emphasis to a line you ordinarily wouldn’t and see how that shifts things. That’s one of the joys of being in a show for this long, that you can try these different things. Even accidentally: sometimes you’ll get a laugh by trying out something new, and then you’ll spend the next couple of weeks trying to work out how it happened. The last thing you want to do is try the same thing out every night. I like to shake things up a bit. So the show is always moving and growing, and I think that coming back to Glinda is more rewarding with greater life experience behind you.”
Wickedis playing atCapitol Theatre, season opens Thursday September 25, tickets online.
