Bittersweet Sondheim

By WILLIAM DART

I last saw Geraldine Turner on screen in the 1999 movie The Wog Boy, in which she was the waspish Raelene Beagle-Thorpe, the Minister of Employment who meets the movie's hero after he's pranged her limo.

The Australian actor laughs when I mention it.

"It was loads of fun and I'm always surprised when teenagers come up to me at the supermarket and ask me if I was in that movie. But I also think: 'Oh ... you've missed my career!"'

Turner, who is in Auckland this week leading the Canterbury Opera production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, is synonymous with Australian musical theatre.

She made her name playing Velma Kelly for two years in Chicago and was Mrs Lovett in the first Australian production of Sweeney Todd.

Yet she confesses to a special fondness for the role of Nancy in Oliver! ("She's not a brash girl like Velma. You get to be vulnerable, killed in the end and everything.")

The actor had just played Petra in the first Australian production of A Little Night Music in the late 80s when she met Sondheim.

He came to Australia with Harold Prince and Alan Jay Lerner for a musical theatre conference, Turner remembers.

"It was the sort of thing you read about in books. A note was brought round backstage asking me to join them for supper."

A friendship was born, one that has given a unique authority to her two successful CDs of Sondheim songs.

What's so special about New York's favourite music man?

Turner likes the way he "writes for character, because I'm an actress. I love the fact that people are always trying to find a way of doing his songs, when in fact you don't need to. He's done it for you. Just follow the punctuation marks and bring your personality to it."

But it's not necessarily as simple as that.

"You do have to have enormous clarity and I think that people who don't have clarity shouldn't try Sondheim. You really have to punch it out, plant the gags, and give the audience a road map."

Turner admits that A Little Night Music is an all-time favourite and Sondheim's "most appealing score in a GP [general public] way. In fact you could do Hugh Wheeler's script without the music and it would be a fantastic play. It's witty, it's moving and it's a good story."

A Little Night Music offers bittersweet reflections on life and love as seen through three generations of women in the Armfeldt family. The journey from innocence to experience is one of the musical's themes, and Turner finds her role of Desiree, the disillusioned actress, close to her heart.

"Desiree's a bit like me," she says. "Ageing is something that you have to come to terms with and it's very hard. As an actor you can have a lot of fun, tour around, have affairs and then suddenly you're older than you intended to be, to use a line from Chicago. I've seen a lot of my friends go down that road.

"Desiree is wealthy and that helps a little. She's also had a daughter with her great love, but she's sick of being on this carousel that's going round and round and round.

"But wait a moment, we're getting serious, airy-fairy even, to use a phrase that falls off my subject's lips."

Another punctuating laugh and she reminds me of the legendary four ages of the actor: "Who's Geraldine Turner? Get me Geraldine Turner! Get me someone just like Geraldine Turner! and Who's Geraldine Turner?"

And where does she see herself? "Hopefully I'm still at the 'Get Me Geraldine Turner stage'."

Performance

* Who: Geraldine Turner

* What: A Little Night Music

* Where and when: Bruce Mason Theatre, Saturday and Sunday, April 10-11, 7.30pm