There is a gentle excitement building in theatre circles across the city, as we anxiously count down the days until the arrival (or should I say return!) of the smash-hit musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie to our theatres. Ahead of its opening night at the Lyceum, I chatted with Ivano Turco, playing the lead character Jamie New, about his role in this iconic show, and his past experiences being in some of the most well-known musicals on our stages.
Ivano Turco trained at Arts1 and The Urdang Academy, graduating in 2020. Straight out of college, he was cast as Prince Sebastian and made his West End debut in the global opening night of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella. He went on to be alternate Bob Marley in Get Up! Stand Up!, as well as Mordred in Lambert Jackson’s Camelot: In Concert and Salty / Dance Captain in Fangirls. He was nominated for Best Featured Artist at the 2021 Grammy Awards and was named Best Male Actor in a Musical at the Black British Theatre Awards.
What is Everybody’s Talking About Jamie? What is this musical about?
In a nutshell, because I could go on about it, it’s a show about identity and finding your place. It’s a journey of peaks and troughs. We have our hero is a queer young boy, and in this particular instance a queer young boy of colour, and it’s a wonderfully poetic journey of self-discovery. But he’s not a victim of the societal assumptions of being queer or victimised by his queerness, and it’s a wonderfully inclusive show. You don’t have to specifically relate to our hero to be able to relate to the story, and the concepts and themes we’ve got going on, but it’s also just a feel-good show! You come to be uplifted, you come to have your perspective changed, you come to have your life transformed. It’s a jack-of-all-trades really, but at its centre, that’s what it is.
You play Jamie New who is this drag queen in-waiting, who wants to go to prom in a dress. How do you even start to go from getting the call saying that you’re the next Jamie New, to opening night? What’s the process been like for you?
It was quite a long time-in-waiting for me because they had offered me the role when I was still doing [Andrew Lloyd Webber’s] Cinderella, so it was ages ago that I had said that I would love to be a part of this project. Then maybe about a year later, that’s when they started doing auditions for the rest of the team and the rest of the cast, and for people coming in and coming out because we’ve had quite a few changeovers. It was a really nice experience, I didn’t necessarily audition for it, they called me in and said “we’d love to do this”, so we started working on the material, and literally the next day they were like “so would you like to do it then?”, and I was like “yeah of course! That would be great”. It was quite a long period of time, and I was doing other shows in-between so I kind of forgot about it a little bit, but then when it actually came down to crunch time, I was so excited that it was finally here.
Why is this story such a powerful one, and why do you think it is so important to be told as it is today?
I touched on it a little bit but I’d like to expand, and I kind of say this to everyone that asks the question (I mean I probably feel like a broken record!) but it is so true. It’s important to not have a character that is victimised for their queerness. We see a lot of material and art that is produced where it cycles around the struggles and the hardships of being a gay person in this world, and [Jamie’s] just not like that; this show is not like that. That’s what drew me to it in the first place because it’s just a story about a boy trying to find his place in the world, who happens to be gay, and I think that is a beautiful filter over the message, as opposed to feeling sorry for this little young gay boy.
Aside from him, there’s not a lot of musicals or shows in which we have Muslim representation, and characters with hijabs and stuff like that. It’s beautiful for so many different reasons, we have different generations of characters and actors within the show. It’s interesting to see how those kinds of relationships intermingle and it is something for everybody and it’s so important, I could not stress it enough. I mean it’s one of your favourite shows! It’s a big turning point for queer characters, and I would love to see more things like this. I don’t think we have too much of it right now, at least in mainstream commercial musical theatre , so that’s why it’s even more important that we’re doing it now. We’ve just finished the West End run, and it’s been a while since we’ve had a queer hero like this on the West End and around the world.
I completely agree with what you’re saying. As a queer girlie myself, it’s nice seeing representation getting better, but there’s so many examples in the media where queer storylines are either sidelined and shoehorned in, or it’s a big ‘feel sorry for this person because they’re queer’. What you said about this being different to that is amazing.
And like you say, it’s filled with tokenism as well. More times, people will play the gay character for laughs, they play it for the audience, they don’t play it for the truth. And I think that we play it for the truth and that’s what sets this above everything else.
We’ve touched on how joyful this show is, what would you say your favourite moment and/or song from the show is, and why?
I think my favourite moment, which changes as the tour goes along, but my favourite for the longest has been the moment where Jamie calls Dean a w*nker (you probably won’t be able to write that in print! [Note from the Editor: We could!]). That moment where he has his altercation with Dean. I think we have to acknowledge the fact that sometimes there may be some homophobic people in the audience. Sometimes people who aren’t necessarily on Jamie’s side at that point because it’s still early on in the show and a lot of them, you can hear it on stage, are lads who side with Dean or they laugh at all of Dean’s jokes at the beginning and think “oh that’s so hilarious”.
But I think when it gets to that turning point where the house has really flipped and it’s Jamie really giving it back to him in that same way, to hear the roar of the audience in support of all of that, in that brief moment, it feels so much bigger than it just being a scene in a show, because there’s so many principles at play there. And then at the end of that, we’ve got everyone laughing and now everybody’s kind of on side, and we defuse energy there that anybody could potentially have against Jamie, because some people get dragged along by their kids, by their wives you know? Not everybody is necessarily there to come and celebrate the story, but I think that is a massive turning point, where their journey of acceptance of other people begins.
When people come to see Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, with that in mind, what do you hope people will take away from the show? What do you want people to be feeling?
I would want them to feel seen. Even though we’ve got a lot of different walks of life and everything like that represented on stage, we can’t represent every single person on stage. We wouldn’t be able to have that many people on stage! But also more importantly, I want people to respect that everybody else has the right to that journey of self-discovery as well. So I think above all else, kindness and being able to allow other people to walk their journey. If we all did that, the world would be a much better place, I promise you that now!
In your role, you’re following in some pretty big shoes as Jamie New, namely John McCrea, Layton Williams and Max Harwood in the film version, as well as all of the other people around the world in different productions who have played Jamie. How do you take this fairly established character at this point and make it your own? Have any previous Jamie’s given you any advice?
It’s funny you should say that, me and Max [Harwood] were in the same year at Urdang together. And he’s actually how I found out about the show because he was shooting it whilst we were in college, and he was telling me about this and at first I was like “what is he talking about? I have no idea what he’s on about”. Then I watched John [McCrea], so I had seen it and I was like there is so much potential here for great storytelling. I knew Layton [Williams] from before, we’d done work together and we were good friends. They’ve all been wonderfully supportive, and us girlies have been acting for a while now, so for me what I wanted to do was just to cover the ground that no one else had covered yet. I wanted to be the Jamie that I would love to see on stage, if that makes sense, and that was my angle for building the character. Obviously he’s queer, and every iteration of Jamie, every Jamie that has come before is never the same. I would go as far to say that I think mine is the furthest away from what the original was.
But I wanted Jamie to be able to have lad-dy moments, I wanted him to be able to just be very mute and not over the top, but then I also wanted him to be able to have those flairs, because he’s still the same Jamie that we love, and it’s still the same words, the same script, nothing like that has changed but I definitely wanted to bring so many more layers to the character. And I think in my mind, the thing that I always cycled back to is that even though it’s for the representation of everybody else, what I want to play the show for is the people who aren’t onside. A lot of the people who come to see it are onside with Jamie and they already love the show, they really love everything about it, and they love what it stands for, and it’s a beautiful message like we’ve already discussed. But I think what I wanted to do with my Jamie was to play for the people who aren’t onside and show them that he is not this other-worldly being of just campness, yas-ness, and who goes full throttle the whole way.
I want him to be a real person and to be able to relate to everybody in different ways. Without giving it away, when you come to see it, this Jamie here busts a move a lot harder than any of the ones before and I wanted him to have that star-quality as well, have that relatable banter side of him, because we’re so multi-layered. Even us, we’re queer girlies but I’m sure that if we had to get down we could! I wanted to cover the ground that no one else had covered, and I think we’ve done that. And everybody else who’s been in the show has been really great in helping me to aid that vision that I’ve seen for him, and I feel like we took a really, really dramatic turn because it’s so grounded, as opposed to it just being these larger-than-life characters. And that was my goal for what I wanted this to look like.
I can’t wait to come and see some of these moves you’ve been telling me about!
Oh yes babe, you’ll see them. You’ll gag!
I want to step back a bit and ask about some of your previous credits. I think that the one that people will most recognise you from is your time as Prince Sebastian in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, where you were playing opposite Carrie Hope Fletcher. What was it like working on a show that ground-breaking as your first major credit just after graduating from theatre school?
It was an absolute blessing. It took me a while to settle into it and come to terms with it and believe that this was just my life now. There was a little bit of a transitional phase where we were still in lockdown; we had cut the album, but we weren’t going to open until a year later, and we were just in this limbo of “what’s going on? What’s happening?”. But that was wonderful. It’s hard when you step out into the spotlight like that because a lot of people go through the motions, they pay their dues, they learn things on the job, they watch how other people do it and then eventually they ascend a couple of years or a couple of shows later. Then they get to have their chance to be like “Okay, I’m leading the show now” and they’ve learnt all these things already.
But for me, I didn’t really have that. I was learning these lessons in front of an audience every night, how to do eight shows a week, how to read a house and how to land things and do it. It was quite nerve-wracking, everybody wants that after college, everyone wants to come and do that and want to lead the show straight away but it was an incredible feat, especially with that team of people. You feel like “Am I allowed to say anything? Does my opinion matter?”. But they were very welcoming and the support was there when I needed it.
Contrary to what everyone else was saying, I had a brilliant time on that show. I think Andrew [Lloyd Webber] is a wonderfully talented person and he really, really looked out for me the whole time. It was wonderful and to see the impact on people from that show still now. A girl came to stage door at the penultimate show in London, and she had a tattoo of me as Prince Sebastian on her arm, and I thought “Oh my gosh!”. Sometimes, we get wrapped up in “oh it’s a job” and you can forget about how much it means to other people as well. Cinderella was great and I wouldn’t change that for anything. That’s what I wanted, I wanted to step to the front and start telling a story straight away, and the fact that Andrew [Lloyd Webber] gave that to me like that, I will be forever grateful.
You get cast in Cinderella, you finish drama school, but then the pandemic comes along. What’s it like waiting through something like that to make such a debut?
I was meant to be doing West Side Story at The Royal Exchange, because I was the first in my year to leave and go onto a show. I literally finished my third-year musical, said my goodbyes and then moved straight to Manchester and we started rehearsing, and that’s when lockdown happened. But if the pandemic didn’t happen, I don’t think that I would have found myself in the rooms that I then found myself in.
The pandemic began in March but then it was in July that I got a call saying “Andrew [Lloyd Webber] is seeing eight people for this role, would you want to come in, to this in-person thing?”. From there, I auditioned, next week got the job, the week after we were recording the album, and everything happened really quickly at first. Because I had known that that was happening, the pandemic for me was really about trying to re-centre, try to sharpen what I did know to take it to this show. It was the most anticipated show in the world at the time, and all eyes were there so the pressure was really on.
Also, the pandemic did really hinder some of the processes creating the show. They couldn’t import certain things, if people got Covid then everything shut down and then we had to start again and we’d have to rebuild from the beginning, so it was hard. But in the end, I’m glad that it worked out for me, not that we needed the pandemic. It was definitely an awful time but I’m grateful to God that [Cinderella] went the way it went.
You went to Arts1 and Urdang, but many people in the industry don’t go to theatre school. What would your best piece of advice be for any of our readers who dream of a performing lifestyle but haven’t been to drama school or studying a theatre degree?
This is interesting because when I first met Carrie [Hope Fletcher] and we started being friends and doing the show, she told me that she had never trained before, and I was like “oh my gosh”, I could not understand how you couldn’t train but get to this point. But I think you can learn a lot by watching. In films or TV shows or theatre, it’s all there, everything that you need is there in terms of what it looks like, what it feels like, you experience it, so I feel like your best bet is just to watch as much as you can and read as much as you can. There’s brilliant books by great practitioners, so you don’t necessarily have to go and spend a fortune to go to drama school to become an actor. I mean some of the greatest actors hardly train at all.
It’s about finding that feeling in your body, and then cultivating that feeling and letting that nourish into something else. You really don’t need to go [to drama school], because you can really make it work and there’s so many shining examples, like Carrie Hope Fletcher, there’s shining examples of people who get that without that kind of stuff. Just watch, your eyes are the best weapon you have for learning how to create art. Watch how other people do it. It’s an age-old tradition, monkey see monkey do, like we watch and then we replicate and we recreate and that’s all it is.
Finally, past, present and future. You were the original Prince Sebastian in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, you’re now touring as Jamie. What have you got coming up next? Have you got any future roles you might like to share with Forge Press?
I’d also just like to add Bob Marley in Get Up! Stand Up! if I could because a lot of people tend to forget that one, but it was a really big show and close to my heart because that was the first time that I had been able to be in an all-black cast. That in itself was such a liberating feeling, and I feel like that one isn’t always talked about as much, but it was such an especially pivotal time.
But in terms of what is next, I’m undecided. I’ve been consecutively in the West End for four years now. We’ve just finished our West End run and I’m excited to do other things but I need to be able to have the space to spend time doing those other things. We’ve got music in the works and big projects that I won’t stay anything about yet, but in terms of theatre, I haven’t decided yet but I’m listening to what the fans are saying. I’m hearing what they’ve been saying, I hear you guys! And you might just get what you want, that’s your little teaser there!
Ivano Turco is starring as Jamie New in the U.K. tour of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, playing at The Lyceum from April 9th to April 20th
