Last night Elaine Paige made her long overdue National Theatre debut - and as she prepared to take a bow on the Olivier stage, I was beside her and she asked me to take her hand and join her in it. So it was a first for both of us to bow on that stage, though I’ve actually been on that particular stage a few times before now, previously hosting platforms with the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Peter Shaffer and Trevor Nunn, Emma Rice and Tom Morris.
But each of those talents had a direct connection to a show being staged there at the time; whereas last night I was hosting a platform interview with Elaine to mark the publication of Memories, a handsome picture book survey that looks back over her last 40 years on the West End and Broadway stages, and even to four years earlier than that with The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd that closed out-of-town in Manchester in 1964 - giving us, as I said near the start of the Q&A, some 44 years to cover in 44 minutes!
If it was better late than never for her to make an appearance here, surely a proper run in something is now long overdue?
Elaine has, after all, worked extensively with two former artistic directors of this theatre - Trevor Nunn, of course, directed her in Cats and Sunset Boulevard, and Peter Hall in Piaf in 1993, The Misanthrope in 1998 and a touring Feydeau farce Where There’s a Will in 2003 that never came in.
Though the National’s green room, where we convened before the interview, was a place she was at least familiar with from backstage visits to friends working here, it’s time for her to move centrestage here as she celebrates this latest career milestone. The turn-out of fans eager to have the book signed afterwards is testament to the popularity she is held in; but she is also a media personality now thanks to the weekly Radio 2 Sunday lunchtime show she hosts, which as she remarks in the book, more people listen to weekly “than would see a West End show in the course of a year. Yikes!”
That radio show is also further proof of the reinventions she has periodically made to her career that has kept her ahead of the game in other ways, too. Though she became an overnight star with Evita in 1978, she had served a long 14-year apprenticeship to get there: she had graduated from chorus roles in Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar to a principal role in Billy along the way. Had she ever been tempted to give up, someone asked her from the audience? Yes, often - but it was the encouragement of an actor that kept her on her path. That actor was Dustin Hoffman, who told her that she could sing.
No one now could ever doubt it; she has one of the most distinctive and impressive voices in the business. And it led to another reinvention: following the chart-topping success of “I Know Him So Well”, the duet from Chess that she performed with Barbara Dickson on the concept album that was released ahead of the show going into production, she developed a hugely successful solo recording and concert career. Though she claimed wistfully last night that she fears the recording career is now over - she hasn’t got a contract and the record business isn’t interested anymore, she said - she’s still touring, and in fact next week embarks on a new tour of Scandinavia.
After the platform, I ran into an old friend Christopher Luscombe, who is working with Elaine to direct that touring show; we were at University together nearly a quarter of a century ago now, and as he remarked to me now, if he had said to me then that I would be on the Olivier stage talking to Elaine - and if I had said he would be directing her - neither of us would have believed it possible.
So just as Elaine has come a long way, so have we! And Elaine and I will be reprising this double act on Saturday, when I interview her again prior to another book signing at Harrods in the Georgian Restaurant on the 4th floor at 2pm.
Genuine musical stage stars are few and far between and Elaine is one of them. But the type of musical theatre they were born for is , sadly, a thing of the past. Thanks in large part to the British mega musicals which don't need stars ( Sunset Boulevard being the exception) and the Disneyfication of the rest of current musical theatre "hits". The days when the audience would come to see a star just for the sake of seeing a star such as Elaine are gone. Would that someone would write something new for her . That's a challenge to be given to the new generation of musical theatre writers , if only they would rise to it.
Elaine's got a great track on the new Secret Garden album - 'Inside I'm Singing' (Secret Garden are winners of Eurovision 1995 and wrote/performed the original 'You Raise Me Up'). Secret Garden are normally an instrumental group but for this album they gave words to some of their past works. Elaine sings 'The Things You Are To Me'. Check it out via www.secretgarden.no.