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This Liverpool performer is bringing her traffic-stopping ‘topless’ Fringe hit home
33 seconds ago
When Liverpool singer and actress Holly Lovelady took her one-woman Scouse show to the Edinburgh Fringe she managed to stop traffic on the Royal Mile.
Performed on an open-top bus, Topless the Musical (it’s the bus that’s topless, not Holly!) became a huge, unexpected hit.
Now the 25-year-old is bringing the show back home, minus the double decker but with all the humour, heart and audience interaction that made it such a success.
She’ll stage Topless the Musical at the Epstein Theatre on Friday July 31, taking the role of Liverpudlian tour guide Sandie and more than 20 other characters encountered in her recollections along the route.
Holly, who has sung with Chris de Burgh and opened on tour for Nathan Carter, says the show has had an incredible ride on the way to its Liverpool debut.
She explains:
“I’ve always loved making music and performing, and I was going to go to drama school but then my nan and grandad both got dementia at the same time, and I didn’t want to go away for three years and miss out on important time to be with them.
“After my nan passed away, I told my mum I’d love to do my own one woman show. I’d been writing and releasing my music for years, and I just wanted to do something on my own that I could put my songs into.
“My mum remembered a LAMDA exam I’d done where one of the pieces was called Topless, set on an open-top bus. I thought that sounded perfect, so I tracked down the writer Miles and emailed him with what I’d like to do: to modernise the story a bit – the original was 1999 – put my songs to it to make it a musical and take it to the Fringe.
“He came back the next day, said he liked my songs and that’s how it started three years ago.”
The next hurdle was for Holly to find an open-top bus to use for her Fringe run and it was there that fate intervened.
“It was going to cost about £20,000 a month to hire one which I didn’t have, so I told my uncle Tommy I needed one and he said, ‘leave it with me’. Two days later he phoned me up and said he’d been in the pub with a friend who had an open-top vintage bus in his barn in Southport!
“We went to visit him, he slid the doors of this barn back and inside was this beautiful vintage double decker. He said if I MOTed it and put a set of tyres on I could take it to the Fringe, so we did.
“I drove it to my dad’s in the Lakes to rehearse and from there we drove it to Edinburgh and, after a tip from a traffic warden, I parked it for a month where all the other buses were right in front of the Parliament building in the centre.
“The first week nobody was interested, but then we drove it around with me singing songs from the show on the top deck and we ended up stopping the Royal Mile! It just went daft, everyone started coming, and I ended up on ITV and STV.”
Betty the bus, who accidentally became famous, is now living in a bus museum in York where she’s much admired, but Holly has adapted the show for a theatre setting so tour guide Sandie can still interact with the audience.
Holly says she’s excited to be giving Topless the Musical its Liverpool premiere, and to introduce audiences to a local heroine.
“This is the first time I’ve performed it in Liverpool and I’m nervous but really buzzing because it’s a proper Liverpool show.
“It definitely has a Shirley Valentine feel to it. It’s very funny, it’s really emotional and a bit dark in parts but to me she’s the epitome of a Scouse woman.
“I’ve always been inspired by Blood Brothers, that’s such a famous Liverpool show, and I’d like to have something that’s really female empowering, a bit crazy and just so Scouse.”
Topless the Musical is at the Epstein Theatre on Friday July 31.
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