“I’ve grown up!”

The Return of Nikki Webster

It’s been a hectic few months for Nikki Webster. After finishing up the Sydney season of her musical The Wizard of Oz, she headed straight to the studio to record her second album, before jetting overseas to promote her first single “Strawberry Kisses”. Now she’s back home and not only is she starring in Oz in Melbourne, but she’s also releasing her brand new single “Something More Beautiful” . . .

How far off is the new album?
I’ve finished recording it, it’s in the stages of mixing now. They’re getting it all together and putting in all the drums and stuff. It’s an exciting time, but I haven’t heard much of it yet!

How have you managed to record it while juggling everything else?
I did it at the end of The Wizard of Oz season in Sydney. I went into the recording studio about two weeks after. We’d blocked out three weeks, but it only took a week to do the whole album. We did about three songs a day which is pretty good, and then I went off to Europe, and now I’m doing The Wizard of Oz in Melbourne!

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Old and young troupers bring fresh wizardry to Oz

THE WIZARD OF OZ, Book by L. Frank Baum, music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, Regent Theatre

It’s a shock to realise that The Wizard of Oz turns 100 next year, its 1903 New York production the first of many stage and screen versions of L. Frank Baum’s book. In all its forms, Baum’s story of plucky Dorothy’s fantasy adventure in the land of Oz is as much a classic as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan – probably even better known, thanks to video versions of the film.

So a new stage version has to offer something special. In this case it is a well-known and well-loved cast, starting with Australia’s Olympic opening ceremony star Nikki Webster, and including entertainment and stage figures better known to parents, including Bert and Patti Newton, Pamela Rabe, Philip Gould and Doug Parkinson.

The stage show includes musical numbers cut from the film, such as the Jitterbug interlude in the haunted forest. These return The Wizard of Oz to the genre of musical, but they also shift the focus away from the film’s emphasis on Dorothy.
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Have we been fair to Nikki?

Nikki Webster is not about to be cut down by the tall-poppy syndrome. She has a burgeoning showbusiness career to get on with, reports Anne Crawford.

The Wizard of Oz rehearsal is set to begin in a large hall in Prahran. Toto the dog has had a final brush. Artistic directors position themselves on long tables facing the action. All eyes are trained on the slight teenager with the big voice.

Nikki Webster, the girl who flew at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics as the world watched, is playing Dorothy. Forget what you might have read about her success since, what you see is a small, pale girl with big brown eyes and strawberry blonde hair. Irrepressibly perky, bubbling with self-confidence. Wearing hip sters and a midriff, like any number of other teens outside in Chapel Street. Sort of.

During breaks from acting, she stoops to play with Toto or gravitates towards Bert Newton who plays the Wizard, chatting easily with the veteran performer. Webster’s face lights up constantly. She clasps her hands as she giggles. She apologises if she fluffs a line (which is rare) and follows directions eagerly. She is never late for rehearsal and never comes unprepared, says Newton, who first worked with Webster when she was six. The cast, apparently, have given her the thumbs up. No one has a harsh word to say about her.
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Good Morning Australia

GMA004

BERT NEWTON: Nikki Webster and Nancye Hayes. Don’t want to make this an unabashed plug for the show, but I just thought it might be interesting. I made the comment that it’s a big show for a director. Now from people away from, from theatre, they might say is big simply the number of the cast or the size of the set? What do you mean by big?

NANCYE HAYES: Well there’s a lot of elements involved. As I say there are things that we have to make happen that are much easier to happen on film than they are on stage. As we know, the witch has to melt, and we have flying involved, the witch flying, and you flying in the balloon and all those things. We have a, a little Toto that has to do so many things and be with Nikki the entire time.

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Acting Up!

The theatre is Nikki Webster’s second home and she’s returning to the stage over summer in The Wizard of Oz. Nikki invited Smash Hits down to rehearsal to see how the show is coming together…

What’s the first thing you do when you get the script?
Basically I just read through it and highlight all my lines.

How do you learn your lines?
I read it a couple of times and then the night before I came in to rehearsals I asked my Mum to read the other parts for me.

What’s your standard day at rehearsal?
When we first came in, we just started blocking, which is getting told where to stand and what actions to do, when to run and when to not run. Then we started running scenes together to see how it flows through and then we did a full run through.

Things were still being changed in rehearsal today. It looks like it’s an ongoing process?
Definitely. Things are always chopping and changing. They still might change when we get into the theatre depending on how it looks from above and below.

How do you get into character when you’re rehearsing out of costume?
It’s quite easy, you just snap into it. You just have to get into the character and play the character the way you think it should be played.

What do you normally do in the five minutes before you go onstage?
I’m standing by the stage ready to go and getting into character. I’ll think about my first lines and what’s going to happen onstage – going through it all really quickly in my brain.

Have you ever forgotten a line in a show and what happens if you do?
No I haven’t…touchwood. When you’re working with other people, there’s always someone who’ll jump in to help you out and improvise.

How does stage acting compare to screen acting?
Well, you just have to give it a lot more because you’re trying to get it across all the levels where people are sitting. You just have to act it as big as you can. And you have to go straight through, too.

Is each performance different?
It definitely is. As you get into the run of the show, you get to know everybody better and you bounce off each other. Also, you get different reactions from the audience. Some things that you might not think are funny, they laugh at. Also, having performances at different times of the day means different types of people come to each show.

What’s the first thing you do after you come off stage?
I unzip my costume coz I’ll be really hot, and take my mic off. Then I take my make-up off and have a drink of water.

What sort of things do you have in your dressing room?
Up until now I’ve always shared a dressing room because I’ve been with a lot of other kids. I don’t think I’ll be sharing this time so I don’t know what I’ll have in there. I’ll probably put up some fun stuff – maybe have a lolly jar, a CD player. A few bits and pieces.

Do you remember the first time you saw The Wizard Of Oz?
I don’t remember the first time I watched it but I never really understood that the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow were the men who worked on Dorothy’s farm. I thought it was actually happening and it was new things happening to her as she went along.

Were you a fan of the film when you were younger?
I was very into Dorothy. I had the ruby slippers and I had the dress made up as well.

Who is your favourite character?
I like them all because they’re all different in their own way – and with the actors playing the parts now, they do it so well, it’s like they’re the first ones to do it.

What’s your favourite song from the show?
Definitely Somewhere Over The Rainbow but I like a lot of the character songs like We’re Off To See The Wizard with the Munchkins – that’s a lot of fun.

What’s your favourite part of the show?
Oh gee, that’s hard because I love it all. I can’t wait to see what everybody looks like in their costumes in Munchkinland. They’re going to have such bright costumes and lots of colours. I think when Dorothy’s house lands in Oz, that’s going to be a great scene.

Is the play going to be exactly the same as the movie?
It’s the same storyline as the movie but there are so many new bits and so many exciting bits that are going to happen, and a few secrets! There’s quite a few funny bits with the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow – well we think they’re funny anyway. I can’t wait to get the audience into the theatre.

Is it hard to work with a dog?
Oh, they’re very good and have a trainer who helps me as well. They started rehearsals when we did and sometimes I think “They’re better than me! They know what they’re doing.” I have to be aware of them, that they don’t get stepped on by the cast, but I’m learning to control them and stop them from jumping up.

Source: Smash Hits magazine
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Nikki Follows Yellow Brick Road

WITH a career that’s flown over the rainbow in a little more than 12 months, teenage star Nikki Webster needs no wistful refrain like Dorothy’s to guide her future.

The 14-year-old has leapt from her centre-stage performance at last year’s Olympics to the starring role in a stage version of The Wizard of Oz, which reaches Melbourne next year.

Webster will be in good company as she follows the yellow brick road, with the likes of Bert Newton, Pamela Rabe and Philip Gould to guide her to the Land of Oz and back.

The mammoth $6 million show opens at the Regent Theatre in June, when Melbourne dog lovers can flinch at the Wicked Witch of the West’s vows to get Dorothy – and her little dog, too.

Source: Herald Sun

Small Poppy

Nikki Webster aims to silence her critics with The Wizard of Oz

Nikki Webster is being swept off her feet. Two weeks into rehearsals of The Wizard of Oz, choreographer Kelly Aykers is nutting out a complicated dance number that sees the pocket-size Dorothy spun from partner to partner when one’s hands slip and Webster is flung into the air. She’s caught just before hitting the deck, but everyone gets a fright. “Be very careful with that young girl, please,” shouts Aykers over the piano that plays on in the rehearsal rooms at Gala studios in Sydney. “She’s very precious.” In fact, that this production is opening at all is due solely to the star power of this 14-year-old schoolgirl. “If she had said no, we wouldn’t have done it,” says Oz co-producer John Frost of the $6 million show, which opens on Nov 24 in Sydney before touring Melbourne and Brisbane early next year. “It has been done especially for her.”

Such high praise is fuel for the growing band of knockers who delight in making her the butt of public jibes – The Chaser satirical team has even included a Nikki Webster dartboard in The Chaser Annual. “Those of us who saw [the Olympic Opening Ceremony] will never forget her saccharine-sweet delivery, annoyingly precocious poise and overall utter vomituosness,” says co-editor Julian Morrow. But Webster isn’t letting it get to her. “I never thought my dream would come true so early,” marvels the polite and polished performer, who soared to fame as the “Hero Girl” of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympics. “If there’s pressure there, she’s not showing it,” says Frost, 49. “She’s a real pro.”

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Stars outshine the magic along the way

The Wizard of Oz reviewed by Bryce Hallett

“We’re off to see the Wizard” will be a familiar catch-cry this holiday season whether it’s the Yellow Brick Road quest of Dorothy on stage or the magical adventures of Harry on film.

This latest stage incarnation of L.Frank Baum’s musical faithfully adapts the movie featuring Harold Arlen and E. Harburg’s fine score and such catchy tunes as The Wicked Witch, Merry Old Land of Oz and, of course, Over the Rainbow the show starter and stopper.

The colourful production designed by Roger Kirk could do with a few more marvels to propel it more spectacularly along, especially in the second act, but the energetic cast make the most of the big musical moments they are given.

Nikki Webster, who shot to fame in the Olympic Games opening ceremony, travels down the immortal Yellow Brick Road and takes her own distinctive, confident and irrepressible route. She receives top billing, her profile and drawing power among young people good reason to present the much-loved work, especially for a new generation.
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Friends of Dorothy

A brain, courage, heart: it has taken the lot to stage The Wizard of Oz, as John Shand discovered during the rehearsals.

Week one
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Portia, I mean, Toto…”

The real Wizard of Oz is not the mighty necromancer who bestows courage on gutless lions or gives brains to straw-headed scarecrows. It’s not even the vaguely Bert Newton-like chap who can transport a little girl lost back to Kansas. No, the real Wizard of Oz is Nancye Hayes. It is Hayes, the show’s director, who establishes the mood on day one of the five-week rehearsal period. Always softly spoken, she introduces a calming resolve, good humour and clarity of intent to go with her non dictatorial style.

It’s a late October morning and, inside a spartan Glebe rehearsal studio, a slightly nervous Hayes gives a welcoming speech that charms the company and – like the Good Witch she played in a Melbourne production of The Wizard of Oz a decade ago – casts a spell of contagious optimism.

By contrast, straight-talking choreographer Kelly Aykers lays down the law about fitness. “It’s professional theatre,” she tells me later. “These guys should all be trained in singing, acting and dancing. They know that if they’re going to be dancing, their fitness level has to be up.”

Finally, dog-trainer Lindy Coote decrees that only Nikki Webster (Dorothy) – around whom the production was conceived – is allowed contact with Spirit and Portia, the two cairn terriers that will share the role of Toto. Coote says it is vital that the dogs be able to pick Webster out on a stage crowded with Munchkins or monkeys. “If everyone else ignores them, they don’t ever think, ‘Hey, you gave me a piece of your ham sandwich the other day. You might do it again.’”

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A Chat With… Nikki Webster

Nikki Webster chatted to us about the stuff she loves and her role in The Wizard of Oz

If you were stranded on a desert island, what three things would you take?
My dog, Star, water and my – friend, Kaylie.

What is your favourite season of the year?
Summer – because of the beautiful weather.

If you could be in any movie, what would it be and which character would you play?
I’m not sure – it would depend on the script!

If you were an animal, what kind would you be and why!
I’d be a dog or a horse – they’re my favourite animals and they have great characteristics.

If you could shop till you drop, where would you go?
A big shopping centre to get a little bit of everything!

What three words best describe you?
Happy, fun and loud!

What are your favourite foods?
I really love fruit and vegetables.

When you were younger, what did you get in trouble for?
I [got/get] told to clean my room!

What makes you laugh?
When my record producer tries to sing and learn the Strawberry Kisses dance!

What makes you cry?
Moulin Rouge – when Nicole Kidman’s character dies.

If you weren’t Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who would you most like to be?
The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, or Glinda the Good Witch.

Which is your favourite scene!
When all the characters are together with Dorothy and they are all having a laugh!

The Wizard of Oz is as the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, from June 21.

Source: Disney Mania (?)