High-flier's colourful role

Susie Dunn might soon find herself clad in spandex floating above a stage at Christchurch's Isaac Theatre Royal. Charles Anderson reports.

The possibility of being a flying narrator in a performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat doesn't daunt Susie Dunn. The Nelson-born actor recently returned from Sydney to rehearse for the role.

She says the most difficult aspect of learning the part has been memorising all the colours of the eponymous coat.

"It was red, yellow, green, brown, scarlet, black, ochre, peach, ruby, olive, violet, fawn, lilac and gold," Dunn reads from the show's script, itself heavily highlighted, "a dazzling coat of many colours."

Dunn, 25, has been working hard to lose her Kiwi accent. As a Sydney-sider for the past five years, she just might have gone a little far. There is a distinctive Aussie twang in the way she speaks and in some words and she finds herself picking up on it.

"I try to keep it neutral and I think that's what I have got. Oh, that sounded really Aussie, didn't it? But over there they think I sound too Kiwi."

Dunn first headed across the ditch to pursue a career in her first and only love – performing.

"I don't think I ever knew anything else. I was one of those ones."

While others her age were glued to Sesame Street, as a one-year-old she was prone to watching Tina Turner and Elton John. Ten years and a few toddler drama classes later, she was performing in her first musical.

The last time The Nelson Mail caught up with her was before she left to study at Sydney's prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art.

It's the same place that Mel Gibson, Hugh Jackman and Cate Blanchett got their start. It gave Dunn one, too.

She has recently been part of a part-comedy, part-cabaret show that took her to dozens of venues across Australia.

"There is always opportunity but a lot more competition. I don't get involved in the politics."

The politics is a small price to pay for doing what she has always wanted to do – be on stage as part of "heightened reality", as she calls it. That is where musicals can take you, both the audience and performers.

"In real life, people don't walk down the street and break into a dance number."

But in musical theatre they most certainly do.

So on hearing that Joseph, according to its director, would be a contemporary, funky, fantastical journey, Dunn was sold. That and the rumour the narrator might have a flying part.

"Everyone has to do that eventually, don't they?"

To get strung up with metal wires and launched over a neck-craning audience. Perhaps.

However, Dunn has already done a fair share of flying. She has visited the hallowed halls of Broadway and the West End, which is, of course, where she wouldn't mind ending up. Pinning down a dream role is a little harder. She has always wanted to play Mary in Jesus Christ Superstar but would much prefer to play Judas.

"Which may be a little difficult. It's not that I'm having gender identity issues or anything but more men's roles jump into my head."

Those sorts of thoughts and ambitions might seem more legitimate now than when Dunn was at school.

She is a long way from where she started out – performing in school shows at Nelson College for Girls and with Nelson Musical Theatre, among others. It might come as no surprise, then, that the company's director, Ross Benbow, lives right next door to where she grew up.

"It's just how it works out. It's Nelson."

Now, in Christchurch, it is down to business for a month of rehearsals and 10 days of performance. And then?

"I am not really that sure. I just take it as it comes, it's kind of part of the job. When you have work, it's fantastic, but other times, of course, it can be a bit difficult."

She never had ambitions to sell real estate or cars like other members of her family. It was always just the performance.

"I was a bit out on a limb. It doesn't really run in the family and, no offence to my parents, but neither of them can really sing very well, but they both really love music."

It's fortunate, then, that neither of them said she needed a back-up plan. "Maybe for the future, when I am a bit more dried up."

She is joking because that moment is certainly not now.

"This is my career."

• Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat at the Isaac Royal Theatre in Christchurch from April 15 to 24. Tickets on sale from Ticketek. Phone: 0800 TICKETEK.

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