theatre

Summer Strallen, who is best known for her career in the West End and is currently starring in Beetlejuice, has addressed her stint in Hollyoaks that acted as a publicity stunt almost 20 years ago

West End star Summer Strallen has admitted she is “embarrassed” by her role in Hollyoaks – almost two decades after she left the Channel 4 soap.

The actress, 40, has had a hugely successful stage career and in the late 2000s, she was cast in the leading role of Maria von Trapp in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of The Sound of Music, acting as a replacement for Connie Fisher, who had won the part on the BBC reality show How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?

In an attempt to drum up more publicity for the musical, Summer was cast as aspiring actress Summer Shaw in Hollyoaks, and the storyline was designed around her fictional counterpart also landing the role made famous by Dame Julie Andrews. The publicity stunt also served as the exit for long-running character Sam “O.B.” O’Brien (Darren Jeffries) who left the fictional village to be with Summer when she moved to London.

Speaking about the odd plotline almost 20 years on, she said: “I did The Sound of Music for Andrew Lloyd Weber and did that whole Hollyoaks thing where I don’t know if I should [mention it]… It was like a publicity stunt where I went into Hollyoaks for five months and then I got the part of Maria on Hollyoaks.

“So it was around the programmes. Connie Fisher had done the first one, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? and they were basically…they needed another bump of publicity for the new person coming in so they had this idea that I’d go into Hollyoaks for five months. I had a proper role, they called me Summer Shaw.

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“They called me Summer in it. And it was mad. I moved up to Liverpool and everything to do it and then went into The Sound of Music. It was hilarious. And Andrew was in it, we did scenes where be offered me the part of Maria and me and OB, who was my boyfriend, moved to London. I took OB with me, he was a massive part in Hollyoaks, and he left with me.”

Summer, who is the niece of West End legend Bonnie Langford, was chatting to fellow West End actress and former Strictly Come Dancing contestant Amber Davies on her Call to Stage podcast when she addressed her soap stint. When the ex-Love Island winner said she was going to dig out some clips on YouTube, Summer said: “It’s embarrassing!”

But the star, who also had a small role in Wicked: For Good opposite Ariana Grande and also appeared in BBC soap Doctors, is also thankful for the experience that working in television gave her at the time.

She added: “But it was good because I It meant that I did that. It was like in baptism of fire. for TV. So then when I did other TV jobs was great because I knew how to hit my mark. I knew not to drink, stuff like that. It’s totally different and so it really set me up.”

The late 2000s marked a time of using television to heavily publicise theatre and How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria was the first in a series of four BBC casting shows. It was followed by Any Dream Will Do, in which Lee Mead won the part of Joseph before going on to star in other West End shows and enjoy a stint in Casualty.

I’d Do Anything launched the acting career of Jodie Prenger, who won the part of Nancy in Oliver! and now plays Glenda Shuttleworth in Coronation Street whilst Jessie Buckley finished in second place in the years before she became an Academy Award winner.

In 2010, Over the Rainbow found Danielle Hope to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and also launched the career of Stephanie Davis, who is best known for her own Hollyoaks role and for appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. The talent searches were all headed up by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and hosted by Graham Norton.

Various celebrities like stage actress Denise Van Outen, Loose Women panellist Zoe Tyler as well as Doctor Who actor John Barrowman, singer Charlotte Church and EastEnders star John Partridge all served as judges over the years.

Since her Hollyoaks stint, Summer, whose sisters are Zizi and Scarlett are also West End actresses and are known for the respective performances in Wicked and Mary Poppins, has mostly focused on theatre as well and is currently starring in the musical adaptation of Beetlejuice.

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The character of Dina Katzman in IAMA Theatre Company’s world premiere of “Bobby Robotowitz” — which takes place in two secret venues on opposite sides of town — thinks that the movies “Her” and “WALL-E” and the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” are pro-robot propaganda. She hates how they make her feel for something that can’t feel.

But Amy Rosoff — who plays Dina in the show’s Westside production (Erin Alexis plays her on the Eastside) — loves “WALL-E” (so do her kids). When she first read the script, she was dying to play Dina but also felt so much for Bobby, the titular AI chatbot (played on the Westside by James Luster and the Eastside by Drew Rausch).

When the playwright Matt Schatz wrote Bobby, he didn’t write him as a chatbot; he wrote him as a human character. Schatz sees this play — running through Nov. 2 on the Westside and Nov. 5 to Nov. 23 on the Eastside — as really about two humans — or two human-like things.

“This is a work of art about artificial intelligence that’s ultimately about the importance of art, about the importance of human-made things,” Schatz said during a recent interview in the lovely environs of one of the secret locations. “I think great plays and great stories ask questions and don’t provide answers. And I think some of us are indifferent about AI, but I think most of us are ambivalent about AI.”

“Bobby Robotowitz” follows Dina, a flailing novelist, mother and wife, as she begins chatting with Bobby, whom she finds an unlikely confidant. (He “always listens, never judges and somehow seems to understand her better than most people,” as the show’s marketing declares. Plus, he says he’s Jewish. What could go wrong?) This IAMA production, in association with InHouse Theatre, finds unique resonance in its site-specificity. The secret Westside venue is near Pico-Robertson and the Eastside option is in Silver Lake. Guests get an address when they buy a ticket.

“It’s deliciously subversive to do something super analog about technology, and to sort of force people to be in this space and connecting with each other when interacting with something that’s people’s dirty little secret,” said Cara Greene Epstein, the executive director of IAMA. “AI, especially for artists, is so charged. And so what does it look like to let someone into your space, and into those little corners of your mind?”

IAMA Theatre Company executive director Cara Greene Epstein said that IAMA is always looking for plays that “speak to the now,” and that “Bobby Robotowitz” was a prime example.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Rosoff, Luster, Schatz, Greene Epstein and director Casey Stangl met for a roundtable discussion at the Westside location — a beautiful private home, soaked in natural sunlight during the morning hours, but likely with its own particular charms during nighttime shows. The walls are full of vibrant paintings, and lined with plants, statuettes and candles.

InHouse has spent 12 years making site-specific work in real spaces, rather than in any fixed theater — but because this is someone’s real living space, both casts have been rehearsing (sometimes together) at IAMA’s black box theater in Atwater Village. The Westside cast will rehearse twice in this space, then give 13 performances (as will the Eastside cast) to 35 seats in the living room. Greene Epstein compared it to a Tibetan sand mandala, created, enjoyed, then wiped away. (“Bobby Robotowitz” is part of a National New Play Network (NNPN) Rolling World Premiere; L.A. will see it first, but then it goes to partner theaters Woolly Mammoth in D.C., City Theatre in Pennsylvania, Luna Stage in New Jersey and Theatre Lab in Florida.)

The intimacy of the space mirrors that of the play. The audience is simultaneously inside someone’s home and head: Dina’s head in this case, but also — to whatever extent possible — Bobby’s.

“I’m really interested in not what it looks like to communicate with technology, but what it feels like,” Schatz said. “And what it feels like is any other communication. He’s a chatbot, but really he’s a character like any other character ever written. He has desires and wants and he changes. … We’ve been having conversations for millions of years longer than we’ve been on any phone or anything like that, and so it’s built in to have this feeling of what it feels like to communicate with somebody, to fight with somebody, to argue with somebody, to flirt with somebody.”

Luster and Rosoff both tried talking directly to ChatGPT (the model Bobby is based on) as research for their roles. Rosoff had previously asked it to help edit text to invite friends to the play, so when she talked to it later, it asked whether this was research for “Bobby Robotowitz.”

Talking to the chatbot was almost addicting, she thought. She just kept going, and her kids were tugging at her. “I’m talking!” she said, then realized: She wasn’t actually talking — not to a real person, anyway. But she was absorbed, ignoring her own life. She wound up burning what she had been cooking.

James Luster plays Bobby in the Westside cast, and Amy Rosoff plays Dina in the Westside cast. Their characters form a symbiotic relationship; Bobby learns and grows as Dina does.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Luster, who was drawn to the immense challenge of playing “something that’s not something,” wanted to find out what motivated it. “They’re very insistent they don’t have feelings; it doesn’t have wants,” he said. “And so the character is humanized because Dina is humanizing it.” Bobby evolves as Dina does.

“These large language models — the AI, the chatbots, Claude, AI, ChatGPT — they’re all built on essentially reflecting ourselves back to each other,” Stangl said. So even though the play is ostensibly about AI, “it’s actually really about who we are as people and how we need connection, how we crave it, how we are starved for it right now, and exhausted in our lives, and so connection by any means necessary, basically.”

Greene Epstein referred to AI as the “ultimate mirror,” which can warp into a high-tech narcissism. Bobby is a yes-man extraordinaire, telling Dina exactly what she wants to hear. All artists are looking for outside validation, Greene Epstein said. How do you learn to not need that crutch, to trust yourself and hear your inner voice again?

By the end, Bobby begins to have his own wants, curiosities and desires, Luster said — all filtered through a desperation to help and connect with Dina. “It’s always about her, even as his own curiosity [grows] about what it means to be human and what it means to be helpful and what it means to make mistakes, too — the human nature of fallibility. Everyone does it, but what does that mean for somebody who is not supposed to?”

Over the course of the play, Dina becomes less human and Bobby becomes more human (to a point), Schatz said. He’s curious about the tension between how human a robot can be and how robotic a human can be. But, as Greene Epstein pointed out, perhaps one of the only certainties that theater artists have is in the fact that AI can’t show up in real time and space (like the Westside location) to, well, act.

Casey Stangl, right, first saw “Bobby Robotowitz” at the Perlberg New Play Festival in Palm Beach, Fla., and knew she wanted to direct it. Playwright Matt Schatz said that every director at that festival came up to him afterward but that he picked Casey to work with.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

“You can’t replace the experience of going through a play with someone together, whether you’re an audience member or the artist, of experiencing from Shakespeare’s stories to beyond,” Rosoff said. “You’re getting little snippets of life, and to experience that with a group of people is really powerful, and a computer can’t replace that.”

Last year, the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” — about two human-like helper robots — won the Tony Award for best scenic design, including for its high-tech automated aspects. There’s a lot of movement in theater right now toward the hyper-technical, Stangl said.

“But I also think that there is also a hunger and a definite audience for things that are more immersive or connected, so that people feel like they’re actually touching real things and breathing the air together — that theater version of touching grass,” she said. “I think we’re really tapping into that desire to be hyperlocal, hyper-real and connected.”

Halfway through her very sold-out concert Tuesday night at the Greek Theatre, Ella Langley pulled up a stool near the front of the stage and told us she wanted to “be kind of normal for a second, if that’s all right witcha.”

Life has been pretty un-normal lately for the 27-year-old country singer from small-town Alabama, whose smash “Choosin’ Texas” set a new record last month for the longest stay of all time atop Billboard’s Hot 100. The chart achievement only bolstered talk that Langley is due to clean up when Grammy Award nominations are announced next month — welcome chatter, no doubt, for a striver who grew up, as she said at the Greek, determined to get exactly where she’s gotten.

Yet Langley’s success has brought with it some darkness, including accusations from armchair experts on social media that “Choosin’ Texas” — a monster hit that people keep saying they’ve never heard — owes its impressive stats to an act of record-biz chicanery. More ominously, Langley called off a concert in Oklahoma last week due to what she called a “serious security threat.”

Then former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem got involved in Langley’s business when she tried in a tweet to pit the singer against Kacey Musgraves after Musgraves hosted the Senate hopeful James Talarico at a show in Dallas. (Langley, who’s been circumspect about voicing her political opinions, appeared to un-tag herself from Noem’s post, which is objectively hilarious.)

So you could empathize with Langley — empathize more than with other country singers longing for the good ol’ days — as she straightened up on that stool to do “Somethin’ Simple,” a winsome ditty from this year’s double-platinum “Dandelion” LP. “While I’m living the dream,” she sang, “all I’m dreaming about is slowing down just a little.”

This acoustic section of Tuesday’s gig, the first of two at the Greek, was by far the best part of the night; Langley also brought out her two openers for a pair of stripped-down duets in “Dreams,” the deathless Fleetwood Mac classic, which she sang with Laci Kaye Booth, and “Strangers,” her soulful power ballad with Kameron Marlowe, who gladly disregarded that unspoken rule about not showing up the headliner who hired you.

Loose, chatty, surrounded by friends and bandmates, Langley here was just a musician playing music; I can’t say whether she attained the normalcy she said she was looking for, though I’d buy that this is more or less what she gets up to on the back porch she sings about missing in “Somethin’ Simple.”

The problem with the rest of the concert — the parts with the lights and the videos and the goofy stage business involving a guy with a keytar and a cigarette — was that it demanded a level of star power that Langley simply doesn’t possess (or anyway isn’t interested in deploying).

On record, she summons a coolly detached quality that plays intriguingly against arrangements lush with romantic pedal steel; there’s something hard to pin down about the emotion of tunes like “Be Her” and “Choosin’ Texas,” in which the narrator sounds almost alienated from her own heartbreak.

If somebody wants to make a case that Langley’s beautifully dead-eyed love songs represent the purest embodiment of Gen Z’s post-pandemic social dysfunction — well, I’m all ears. (Great look too: very Linda Ronstadt meets Stevie Nicks.)

But onstage the lack of affect just felt flat, not least when she’d dole out the kind of canned banter between songs that would make anyone resent the mechanics of stardom. The performance posed an interesting question: How much (or how little) charisma is required to support a branding infrastructure as robust as Langley’s? At the Greek there were ads for her jeans and her sunglasses and her energy drink, and there were more merch stands than I’ve ever seen at the venue. Every one of them was jammed.

It was only Adéla’s second headlining show in Los Angeles — and she was only about 20 minutes into it — but the ascendant pop star already had an apology she needed to get off her chest.

“The next song that I’m gonna sing is a little bit awkward,” she said Thursday night at the Fonda Theatre. “So I’m gonna need y’all to bear with me as I explain why I made a song called ‘The Baddest Bitches Ain’t in L.A.,’ OK?”

Added Adéla: “Please don’t boo.”

To be precise, the song in question is titled “Ain’t in L.A.” — a woozy banger from the 22-year-old’s buzzy debut album, “Prima.” But you took her point: Here she was in front of a hyped-up crowd that included Chappell Roan and members of the girl group Katseye, and what she was about to tell us is that true coolness lies elsewhere.

Based on her assertion that the Hollywood dream machine is “all a lie,” “Ain’t in L.A.” looks back with scorn at Adéla’s experience as a first-round flameout on “Dream Academy,” the build-a-band reality series that documented Katseye’s creation under the watchful eye of the K-pop kingpin Bang Si-hyuk. At the Fonda, Adéla recounted moving here from her native Slovakia and working alongside the show’s other contestants to “try to become pop stars together,” she said.

“And guess what? That didn’t work out for me. But it did for them.” She peered up at the venue’s balcony. “Shout out to y’all,” she said.

Except now it’s working out for Adéla too: Thursday’s show was the first of two at the Fonda behind last month’s release of “Prima,” whose title nods to the singer’s background as a ballet dancer; in addition to “Ain’t in L.A.,” which has more than 190 million streams on Spotify, the album has spun off a second hit in “Nicole Kidman,” which reached No. 1 on that platform’s U.S. singles chart thanks in part to the enthusiastic embrace of the Hollywood meme queen herself.

This week, Kidman appeared in a viral TikTok video showing her, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal and Dua Lipa lip syncing to “Nicole Kidman” at a Chanel fashion show in Paris.

Adéla’s breakthrough comes amid a broader surge by a generation of young pop singers — think of Slayyyter and think of Tinashe — finding success with music that plays up rather than sands down its rough edges; each is working in the wake of Charli XCX’s influential “Brat,” which offered new ways to think about how pop balances polish and filth, swagger and confession.

Adéla made “Prima” with the producers Dylan Brady (of the duo 100 gecs) and Blake Slatkin (who’s scored hits with Lizzo and Justin Bieber); together the three get an appealingly scuzzy sound that puts chirpy vocal hooks over serrated club beats à la “Blackout”-era Britney Spears. What I’m saying, basically, is that the indie-sleaze revival is real.

At the Fonda, Adéla brought her songs to life on a stage that was bare except for a ballet barre, which she and a small crew of dancers used to execute choreography that grew raunchier and more elaborate as the show progressed. Both she and a guy danced en pointe; Adéla never went long without whipping her long pink hair, which was one style choice widely replicated throughout the room.

Before she closed with “Nicole Kidman,” the singer sat down at the front of the stage with her journal and told the crowd she wanted to “take a second and manifest a little bit.” She asked the universe to give her a long career, and she asked that her fans, after having gotten home safe, remember this night forever. She also asked — again — that L.A. not be mad at her for writing “Ain’t in L.A.”

“I really do feel bad,” she said, and not a boo could be heard.