Topless the Musical transfers to London

With her mum’s encouragement, she set out to make it happen. Almost instantly, Topless, by Miles Tredinnick, came to mind. When she was 14, Holly performed a monologue from the show for a LAMDA exam and “loved it”. Still, she never thought she’d get the go-ahead from Tredinnick. “I found his email and said: ‘Hello Miles, this is Holly. I’d like to make your play into a one-woman musical and take it to the Edinburgh Fringe.”

To Holly and Barbara’s surprise, Tredinnick said yes. Topless the Musical was full steam ahead. Telling the story of Sandie, the eccentric guide of an open-top bus with a “bad egg” husband, Duncan, the show is full of drama, dark comedy and razor-sharp songs by Holly that veer between heartbreak and hilarity. “The lines between the tour and Sandie’s personal life start to blend,” says Holly. “The whole show breaks the fourth wall.”

Their experience in Edinburgh was nothing short of a whirlwind. “We took a bus to the fringe and we became a venue,” says Barbara. “We did everything on it: rehearsed on it, slept on it, performed on it. When we weren’t doing the show, we drove it around.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, it began to attract attention. “People started to come. And then more people started to come. It went from one or two people in the first week to being absolutely rammed by the end,” says Holly.

The pair tells stories from their weeks at the fringe with excitement. There was bad weather to grapple with, a seagull that swooped down during a performance to grab a sandwich Holly held up as a prop and people constantly mistaking them for an actual tour bus. “It was a great, great experience,” Holly beams.

Still, Holly and Barbara never stopped wanting greater heights for Topless. 

After the fringe, they saved up money in the hope of coming to London for a transfer. “We approached Underbelly Boulevard and said: ‘Hey, look, will you take us?’” Barbara says. The answer was a resounding yes. “Holly’s been working on Topless ever since, making it better for the stage.”

“Adapting the show for London has been a process of peeling back the layers of what the audience really needs. Maybe more is less. It leaves things to the imagination.” Holly Lovelady

It’s clear Holly and Barbara are a solid team. But they’re keen to point out they’re not the only people involved in Learn My Lines. The mother-daughter duo works with a team of people with learning disabilities, some of whom come on to the Zoom call to say hello. “Vulnerable people don’t have a lot of choices,” Barbara says. “We’ve come into this because we’re passionate about other people who can’t make decisions. We try to let them make some decisions for themselves.”

“They love Topless like it is their project, too,” she continues. All together, they form the creative team for the show; they’ve helped design the set, made the costumes, and will be accompanying Holly and Barbara on the London run. “We’re all about including people. They’re going to be with us the whole way on this journey.”

They reference Sonia Friedman, who they say has championed diversity, as a huge inspiration for their company. “We’ve looked up to her for a really long time, we look at her and think girlhood,” says Holly. “For us, slowly, slowly wins the race.”

So, what will the show look like in Underbelly Boulevard? “As mad as it sounds, the set-up on stage is very similar to how it was on the bus, it has just expanded,” says Holly. She describes the aisle that will fit in the middle of the theatre, just like it did on the bus, and the bus seats that will still be there, too. “It has been a process of peeling back the layers of what the audience really needs. Maybe more is less. It leaves things to the imagination,” she adds.
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Something Holly has poured all her efforts into is the music. She has “always written” songs. But how exactly did she come up with the ones in Topless? 

“Weirdly, I looked back at my catalogue of songs and I realised that songs I’d written 10 years ago fitted into the show; I’d written songs that didn’t relate to me personally when I was much younger, but they do relate to Sandie.” One song, titled How’s My Hair? How’s My Shoes?, is about a young woman who feels very self-conscious going out with her partner. “It fitted in perfectly to Sandie’s life.”

Going to a venue located in London’s West End is a “complete dream”, the pair admits. “Just to be able to say: ‘You know what? We’ve done it.’ It is just great,” says Holly. Mainly, they just want “everyone to like it”. But Tredinnick has two more plays in the Topless series, Holly mentions. “Who knows? I could write a Topless musical trilogy.”

Visit: learnmylinesproductions.com/topless-the-musical/