Lucy O’Byrne is no stranger to the part of Eva Peron. But her current appearance in the lead role of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical Evita, is going rather better than her first attempt to make it into the show. ‘We have quite a lot of supernumeraries in the show, they’re in some of the really large crowd scenes – it makes the company look huge – extras effectively. They’re usually a local amateur dramatics society or school or something. ‘When it came to Dublin and I was in secondary school, they had forgotten to tell the local Dublin supers that there was a weekday matinee, and I got a phonecall from one of my friends saying they need people to come in this afternoon, what are you doing? I said I was probably going to be at school, but I grew up in the theatre, so my parents said, no that’s cool, go do it. ‘We went into town – all we were told to bring was red lipstick and a pair of tights, so we arrived at the door and were told that a drama school had just arrived so they didn’t need us, but they did give us free tickets to the show! ‘Then I ended up playing Eva later in college as my final show – that was only five performances and now we do eight a week.’ Produced by theatrical impresario Bill Kenwwright, the current tour sees Lucy really getting to grips with the woman who rose from poverty to be Argentina’s beloved first lady. But… [Read full story]
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