Caroline O’Connor Was Born 100 Years Too Late

26 May 2015 | 7:06 pm | Paul Ransom

"I wanted to stay home and listen to Doris Day.”

When the SS America first sailed from New York to London in 1934, Caroline O’Connor was not on the passenger list. Indeed, the Irish-Australian performer had to wait another 28 years just to be born. Only now, 81 years after the show’s Broadway debut, does she get to climb aboard Cole Porter’s tap-crazy cruise liner as Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes. However, there’s no doubt O’Connor wishes she was around in the 1930s and ‘40s, rather than the Sydney of the 1960s and ‘70s. “When I was growing up in Rockdale as a little girl of Irish parents singing show tunes I didn’t really fit in,” she recalls. “Everyone was in their denim shorts and thongs and wanting to go down to Cronulla and I wanted to stay home and listen to Doris Day.”

Her passions were no doubt stoked by her parents’ decision to send her to Irish dancing classes. Tap, jazz and ballet lessons soon followed. “Secretly, all of my childhood, I’d listened to musicals on my parents’ record player and I’d sing along to them. I didn’t tell anyone though. It was a big, secret passion that I had.”

With West End and Broadway success, Green Room and Mo Award wins, O’Connor is ready, at last, to enjoy the era of Anything Goes. “I think there’s something to be said for nostalgia, but also you can’t get away from the fact that Cole Porter was a brilliant songwriter. He was also one of those people who was a bit cheeky. He was naughty and some of his lyrics are very naughty.”

Adapted from a work by P G Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, Anything Goes includes Porter classics like You’re The Top and Let’s Misbehave. As O’Connor notes, “It’s clever and fun – almost mathematical. But it’s also a farce.” For her, the lure is the sheer style of the era. “We get to see some glamour. People don’t behave in that way anymore and it’s wonderful to observe the various characters. Then again, we haven’t had a tap musical in Australia for about a hundred years. It’s been a long time since an audience sat there and watched a whole company sorta tap. It’s full-on. All that training I did and there’s been, like, two tap shows in 30 years. This one will be the third,” she laughs. “But the rhythms are absolutely fascinating to me. That you can make that sorta noise with your feet excites people. There’s something about banging your feet on the floor that just gets everybody going.”

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In the context of an eight-show-a-week schedule, the sheer physical rigour of high-energy dance numbers makes clear the challenge that awaits O’Connor and her shipboard companions, including Todd McKenney, Wayne Scott Kermond and Claire Lyon. Vigorous tap dancing may typically be a young person’s pursuit but, O’Connor jests, “All I can say is that make-up and wigs are marvellous inventions.”