Sisters' story embraces Sondheim songs

SISTER ACT: Georgia Jamieson Emms, left, and Francesca Emms have woven together songs from Stephen Sondheim in a single story titled Happily Ever After? PHOTO/SUPPLIED

FEATHERSTON opera star Georgia Jamieson Emms is returning to her first love - musical theatre - and "going home" with her latest production to where her stage career began.

Jamieson Emms said she and her sister, Francesca Emms, an actress who also works in production for Radio New Zealand as a script editor and writer, have woven together a medley of about 20 songs from celebrated American songwriter and lyricist Stephen Sondheim titled Happily Ever After?

The show will be staged at Greytown Little Theatre next week, on July 3 and 4.

"I trained as an opera singer so I tend to think of myself as more a classical singer than a musical theatre singer, but musical theatre really is my first love, and my first ever lead role was at Greytown Little Theatre as Varuca Salt in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. So I guess I'm literally going home as a performer."

Sondheim, feted as having revolutionised American musical theatre, has produced a significant body of work including the lyrics for West Side Story, and music and lyrics for A Little Night Music, and films Into The Woods and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

"I adore Stephen Sondheim, just like Francesca, and we took some of our favourites songs of his and wrote a story that brought them all together," she said. "We wanted initially to do a concert of Sondheim music but a storyline emerged out of the songs, so Francesca and I came up with a plot involving two couples and a love triangle, set in about the 1960s when everything seemed perfect but below the surface something else was going on.

"The first half of the show sort of establishes a picture perfect exclamation mark, and the second half turns it into a question mark. You know, is this really Happily Ever After?

"It's very character driven and very dramatic."

Jamieson Emms, a mother-of-one and old girl of St Teresa's School in Featherston and St Matthews's Collegiate in Masterton, said the company she founded, Wanderlust, was producing the show, which reprises a cast including her former Victoria University classmates Megan Corby, Craig Beardsworth, Matt Landreth, and Hugh McMillan.

The friends last performed together in an earlier production from the same sisterly team titled Noel & Cole, which was a runaway success at the Kokomai Arts Festival last year and was also staged in New Plymouth.

Happily Ever After? has already been staged in New Plymouth and Wellington, and after the Greytown dates, the cast will return to the capital for a show at Bats Theatre, and a Wanderlust workshop.

Jamieson Emms has been a member of New Zealand Opera's Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus and debuted professionally in 2008 as Fiordiligi in Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte with Opera Otago.

The New Zealand School of Music graduate spent five years as a soprano in the New Zealand Youth Choir, twice touring internationally, and has since taken roles in musical theatre, opera and operetta productions throughout New Zealand.

She also has seized success in classical singing arenas throughout the country and worked several years at the critically-acclaimed independent opera company, Opernloft, in Hamburg.

Happily Ever After? plays at Greytown Little Theatre on July 3 and 4. Tickets cost $25 and are available online at eventfinder.co.nz. Door sales will be made available if possible, Jamieson Emms said.