Close-up: Siân Brooke
The new Dorothy has barely had time to click her heels three times
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Your support makes all the difference.Siân Brooke is excited – she's just tried on the ruby slippers for the first time. Made especially for her turn as Dorothy in the new London production of The Wizard of Oz, she's "hoping they may end up in my handbag at the end of the run!"
The 28-year-old Rada graduate has been much in demand of late. Her role opposite Sheila Hancock in the highly praised The Birthday Party at the Lyric Hammersmith ran into her work on The Commander for ITV, which in turn ran into rehearsals for Oz. But she's grateful for the variety: "I'm a bit greedy; I like to do a bit of everything."
This is her first big musical, but it's not her first time as Dorothy. Theatre trips while growing up in Staffordshire caught Brooke's imagination, leading her to join her local youth theatre. "I was lucky to be taken under the wing of my local am-dram society, where I was mentored," she says. "I played Dorothy when I was 13, at a time when I thought I would like to do this as a profession."
For Brooke, one of the attractions of working on Oz is that children visiting the theatre for the first time might catch the acting bug themselves: "I hope it will do for them what it did for me."
Though The Wizard of Oz is part of our collective cultural consciousness, Brooke isn't worried about being compared to Judy Garland, who, at the age of 16, made the role of Dorothy her own. "I can never emulate her," she says. "I just have to use what I have and approach it like any other role."
And what will this industrious actor do when she reaches the end of the yellow brick road? "Go on holiday!"
The Wizard of Oz is at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (www.south bankcentre.co.uk) from Wednesday
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