‘They’re in love with no physical contact’: the socially distanced Sleepless in Seattle | Musicals

Kimberley Walsh and Jay McGuiness have spent the first part of their morning standing in a theatre foyer, waiting for their daily Covid-19 clearance before entering the auditorium for rehearsals.

They are at Troubadour Wembley Park theatre in London, which is putting on the first socially distanced, indoor production of musical theatre since venues went dark in March and it is quite an operation. Cast and crew are tested for the virus every day and one part of the foyer has been turned into a makeshift testing centre. It is big, bare, with segregated “bubbles”: those waiting for tests on the right, those for results on the left, and a queue in the middle that leads to a team of nurses taking swabs.

Walsh and McGuiness signed up for Sleepless, A Musical Romance long before lockdown and both felt apprehension on day one of their return, but all nerves have been dispelled by the Covid test, which returns results within the hour, alongside rigorous social distancing measures during rehearsals. “Even though things are different, I’m really comfortable with how organised it is,” says McGuiness. “It’s thrilling to be able to do this again,” adds Walsh.

The show is based on the 1993 romcom Sleepless in Seattle, in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan teamed up to play star-crossed lovers. He a widower, Sam, with a young son, Jonah; she a journalist, Annie, who listens in on a radio show in which he speaks about the death of his wife, which sparks a deluge of romantic propositions to him from single women across America.

The actors, whose tests have just come in negative, are now at the back of the room, reflecting on putting on a romance without any physical contact. How does that work? “It’s a little bit as if the stars aligned for us,” says Walsh. “There’s no other movie I can think of, off the top of my head, where you genuinely believe that these two people are in love without any physical contact.”

It is true that the romance has distance built into its storyline: Sam lives in Seattle while Annie is in Baltimore. One half of the cast never interacts with the other half and the stage here is so large that it would have led to a natural distance between actors, before it became a requirement.

Just as their characters’ destinies are written in the stars, so there is a certain serendipity at work in staging this show at this time, they say. “It’s a sign!” says Walsh, while McGuiness rolls up his sleeve and shows me a tattoo with reads: “Every Moment”. “This is something else that freaks me out. I got this tattoo about five years ago and I was a week into rehearsals when I realised that ‘every moment’ is also a repeating phrase that the chorus and cast sing in this show.”

But it may well have stayed ill-fated and unmade, had it not been for the herculean efforts of its producer, Michael Rose, to ensure the show goes on. An additional £60,000 to £70,000 has been spent on safeguards, including the reduction of audience capacity from 1,200 to 400, alongside one-way channels around the building, temperature checks, socially distanced seating plans with additional corridors in the auditorium, and Perspex screens along the bar. Creatively, its director, Morgan Young, has had to expunge one kiss and make sure that actors are not singing directly in front of each other.

Rose was driven to the decision after Cameron Mackintosh’s announcement that he would be shutting his theatres until 2021. “I absolutely understand and admire that position. However, the outcry of despair and depression on social media from people within our industry was overwhelming. This can’t be a financially viable way forward but it addresses getting people back to work in some form. [By staging it] I’m saying to bigger producers in the West End, ‘Open your shows’… or we won’t have an industry to go back to because so many people will have left it.”

McGuiness says this way has its plus points from an actor’s point of view, too. “You have to use your voice in more exciting ways and your body language has to be much more animated. Just doing that is making me a more engaging actor.”

While both Walsh and McGuiness are singers who have proved themselves as talented dancers (both competed in Strictly Come Dancing, McGuiness winning the glitterball in 2015 and Walsh a runner-up in 2012), there will be more singing than dancing in this show. Young, who previously worked on musical adaptions of Big (with McGuiness and Walsh) and Elf (with Walsh), said it became evident that “this wasn’t going to be a jazz-hands musical like Elf or Big. It’s more of a play with music.” But a splashy dance number does come at the end as a homage to 50s MGM films – and maybe a crowd-pleaser for Strictly fans, too.

The music and lyrics by Robert Scott and Brendan Cull are new but it has the same, big band sound as the movie, complete with a live, 12-piece orchestra. It is still set in 1993 and Michael Burdette’s book stays faithful to the original screenplay, co-written by Nora Ephron, David S Ward and Jeff Arch. In fact, Sleepless is among a crop of musical revivals of 80s and 90s films such as Pretty Woman and Back to the Future.

Are these finding refuge in nostalgia and is there an even greater desire for escape now, after the harsh realities of the pandemic? “It’s maybe about going back to a place where everything seems surmountable,” says McGuiness. However, Walsh thinks Sleepless is not just straightforward escapism. “The one thing that’s come out of this lockdown, if people didn’t already know it, is that family is everything. That is what this show is about, and also seeing love and affection on stage again. When Sam hugs his son, it’s going to kill people because so many feel they’re not even allowed to hug any more.”

The musical’s other big, resonating theme is mortality and a family torn apart by the loss of a mother and wife, says Rose. “The show, at its heart, is how you move on from that. It’s about mending and healing the family, and having a happy ending.”

• Sleepless, A Musical Romance plays from 25 August until 27 September.