Chichester: Liza Pulman and Joe Stilgoe offer Hooray for Hollywood

Liza Pulman and Joe Stilgoe join forces to celebrate their love of the music of the Golden age of Hollywood at Chichester Festival Theatre.

They will be offering Hooray for Hollywood at 2.30pm and 7.30pm on Thursday, October 29.

Liza and Joe admit they thought the show was going to be a doddle to plan... until they sat down with the enormously-long list of songs that they might possibly include. The choice was huge.

“Joe and I first collaborated on a show called A Couple Of Swells which we brought to Chichester,” Liza said, “and we just loved doing that show. It was the first time that we had worked together in that capacity. We were finding our creative feet around each other, and we just instantly gelled.

“Our lives and our backgrounds overlap big time. We had had amazingly similar upbringings. Our points of reference were the same, and we were motivated by the same things. We also make music in a similar way. We both love harmonies, and we both love creating arrangements together. Also we both love words, and I think we are both old-school entertainers. He loves an audience, as I do. We both feel very comfortable when we're on stage together in front of an audience, and I think that shared joy and that shared pleasure come across. He also makes me laugh a lot!”

And so they started chatting about the Hooray for Hollywood show: “It seemed a natural next step for us from A Couple Of Swells. We both love movies and grew up loving that Golden age of Hollywood movies. We decided to explore that so we sat down to talk about the show. We both thought it would be doddle because we both knew so much about that era. But we then sat down with an incredibly long list of songs because there were so many really amazing songs that we could choose from!”

Liza and Joe ended up choosing songs that they loved but also bore in mind the ebb and flow of the show: “There were some songs that we felt that we couldn't not include, and some that we picked because we needed something up tempo. We also wanted to have a Sondheim moment. We wanted to celebrate his place on the screen. We also wanted to represent Rodgers & Hammerstein because they are huge.”

In the show they will chat around the songs: “We give context but it's not a history lesson. And the context changes according to the moment in the show. There is a fluidity to the show, and there is a sense that anything could happen. It's a lovely blend. When we are working on arrangements, we don't really say ‘You do this’ and ‘I'll do that.’ It just works between us.”