The new Olivier Award-nominated musical The Girls has turned out to be a revelation for more than one reason. None are more revelatory than the show’s Wembley-born Jewish star Debbie Chazen, who became attached to the story about cancer just as she learned she was to have a mastectomy.
For those who have been living under a stone, The Girls was inspired by the Rylstone and District, Yorkshire branch of the Women’s Institute who in 1999 raised money, awareness, eyebrows and smiles by stripping off for a calendar.
First, the world’s press descended on the village, then came the movie, followed by the play. This latest version is the musical with a score co-written by Gary Barlow and Calendar Girls playwright Tim Firth, who also wrote the film.
Revelation No 1 is that, if you’re Tim Firth, it’s possible to write the film, then the play of the film followed by the musical of the play while continuing to be inspired by the true story instead of becoming sick to death of it.
Revelation No 2: Gary Barlow’s talent for writing catchy, heart-snagging pop songs has created a musical score that, while not perfect, is truly impressive.
And then there’s Debbie Chazen.
For although it is Joanna Riding’s Annie who leads the cast as the grief-stricken wife of big, bluff John, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Officer, it is Chazen’s Ruth who dominates the second half of the show.
“I do think out of all the six ladies in the musical she’s the one with the biggest journey,” agrees Chazen when we meet in her cosy and slightly claustrophobic dressing room at the Phoenix Theatre, a couple of hours before the show starts. “Maybe Tim should rename the musical, Ruth,” she giggles.
Of Annie’s five friends, Ruth is the one least likely to fall in with the plan to raise money for John’s hospital. In fact, Ruth is implacably opposed to stripping off. In denial about her unhappy marriage, her confidence is low, while her chances of humiliation, she calculates, are high. This, it has to be said, might also have been true for the actors in all the versions of the story, which is a combination of the risqué and downright risky.
The wall-sized mirror in Chazen’s dressing room is crowned with a string of cards wishing her well. This is her first musical — a huge shift for any actor, although she played Ruth in the stage play back in 2009.
“I’ve done shows with music but never a musical,” she says. “I auditioned once for Madame Thénardier [in Les Miserables]. They gave me all this sheet music to learn. But because I’d been practising so hard I lost my voice by the time the audition came round.” Chazen’s voice is naturally jazzy, a quality that she has to suppress somewhat for the conservative Ruth. But then there is the matter of stripping off in front of a West End audience. It happens in the photography scene, during which more flesh is exposed than the audience might expect. It’s all done in the best possible taste, of course. There are strategically placed props to prevent the partial nudity becoming total. But as Chazen says, “It certainly feels like full nudity — every night and twice on matinee days.” Was the Calendar Girls play and its musical version the first time she had taken her clothes off in public?
“Absolutely!” she says deploying a little of Ruth’s prudishness. “I’ve never done it before, and would never on film. Never! Never do it where it can be viewed over and over again.”
As far as I could tell while watching the show there are no safety nets in the form of body stockings. No one will see anything, producer David Pugh assured Chazen when he first mentioned the idea of the stage version to her.
“It isn’t strictly true depending on where you are in the theatre,” says Chazen. “I was 23 stone at the time. I was so surprised that anyone would ask anyone of my size to get her kit off on stage, I don’t think I believed it.”
But nothing could have prepared her for the ordeal that began on the first day of rehearsal for the play in 2009; the day she discovered a lump on her breast.
“I have to say, after I’d been diagnosed, every word [about cancer] in the play was like a missile in my soul. I remember having to turn off a switch in my brain because I thought, ‘This could be me.’ I didn’t know whether I was going to live or die and in a very melodramatic way I’d stand there in the funeral scene and think ‘Well, I wonder what they’ll say about me at my funeral.’”
From early on in the run she knew she was about to have a mastectomy.
“That was so bizarre, knowing that one boob was about to hit the dust. And when I came back to the show, still at 23 stone and only with one boob. That was another level of weird.”
This was all several years — and about 11 stone — ago. Today there is an ease and generosity of spirit with which she talks about this most personal and devastating of episodes. A hearty laugh is never far away. Yet anxieties persist.
“I lost weight and still only have one boob, if you don’t mind me saying so. So although I’m now playing Ruth at a smaller weight this is the worst incarnation of all because I’m supposed to have the perfect figure and yet don’t. Taking my clothes off is almost more difficult now than it was before. Does that make sense?”
She looks terrific, I say, which is true. And who is to say what a perfect body looks like, I add which sounds less wise and sensitive than I’d hoped in the light of Chazen’s direct answer, which could be summed up as “everybody.”
“As a woman you’re constantly told smaller is better,” she explains. “If you looked at the two incarnations of me, one at 23 stone and one now, you’d probably say I look better now than I did then. But I’m more body-conscious now. It’s not the breast, which is hidden on stage, and most of the audience won’t know about unless they’ve read this article. And if they do I kind of don’t mind, because I’m proof that life carries on. It’s all the loose skin and cellulite that every woman in the world has. Someone in the cast, who I think has the best figure I’ve ever seen, hates her body because she’s got no boobs. So you’re never happy with your body.”
Chazen was born and raised in Wembley by her mother Frieda — a teacher — and her father Arnold, a “jack of all trades” whose jobs included being the chazan at North Western Reform Synagogue and the choir master at Wembley United Synagogue. He also used to work as a film extra. But, Chazen says, it wasn’t the filming that got her interested in showbiz. It was the food trolley.
She tells it well but it feels like a story that started as a defence mechanism — the kind intended to get a laugh about her shape before somebody else does it for her. That body consciousness is always present.
It turns out she “always, always wanted to be an actress. I remember going to see Snow White at the Harrow ABC. I used to just cry at the cinema because I wanted to be on the screen. I remember that feeling so well. I’m feeling it now.”
Chazen’s performance was jointly nominated for an Olivier Award along with the other members of the cast who play the defrocking WI ladies. And that is probably as it should be given that the show is about the camaraderie generated by a group of brave women.
“Offstage we’re such a tight group,” says Chazen. “That photo shoot scene would be awful if people weren’t there for you.”
But, for my money, it’s Chazen who delivers the stand-out performance. Without giving too much plot away, the role demands not only that she conveys the blossoming of wallflower Ruth, but also delivers one of the best examples of comedy “drunk” acting you’re likely to see.
It’s not a part of the performance drawn from real life.
“I’m a bit too much of a control freak to get drunk. I just used years of observation at parties. I don’t mean to sound, ‘Oh, I just do it darling,” she says, with a theatrical wave. “But, I do just do it.”
With only an hour to go before curtain-up, a company announcement blares through the tannoy above the door. She reaches up to turn it off, something she does during each show at a particular moment, when she’s offstage, back in her dressing room and Riding’s Annie sings the show’s most emotive song about taking her dead husband’s clothes to Oxfam.
“I can’t listen to that any more. So I have to turn the tannoy off. It’s such an emotional show. But it ends on a high note of inspiration and that’s why I don’t mind talking about having only one boob.
When I was ill, I became sick and tired of how every news article about cancer was about death and dying. But we have to look at these things and minimise them. And live life.”
