When Dolly Parton turns up as your fairy godmother...

The show is Here You Come Again, the new Dolly Parton musical, and it’s at Chichester Festival Theatre from Tuesday to Saturday, November 12-16.

Co-writer Tricia Paoluccio is our Dolly on the night, coming to the rescue of Kevin who has just separated from his long-time boyfriend Jeremy and is in quarantine during the first lockdown in the attic bedroom of his childhood home in Yorkshire.

Surrounded by precious belongings from his youth, he is reunited with a much-loved old record player and his cherished Dolly albums. He remembers the hard times those songs helped him through in the past and counts on them to help him once again. With her wit, humour and charm, Dolly teaches him a whole lot about life, love and how to pull yourself up by your bootstraps…

Playing Kevin is Steven Webb (Oliver!, Book of Mormon): “We originated the show at Leeds Playhouse. We did a four-week run before setting off on tour in May and then we've been up and down the country. Literally. It is never organised so that you do all the Scotland shows together. You can go from Newcastle to Blackpool and then back to Sunderland but it's been great. The response has been quite overwhelming.

“It is set during the first lockdown of Covid, but that's more of a metaphor really. It's not actually about Covid. It's about being able to represent this feeling of being cut off and isolated and alone, and by setting it then I think we can already relate to that. It was a worldwide universal experience that we can all remember and understand. But the show itself is ridiculously uplifting. I think people have pre-conceived notions when they hear that it's a Dolly Parton musical but it's not about her life. In this show Dolly Parton is much more of a fairy godmother figure. She's actually quite Mary Poppins-esque. And through her life lessons that she has learned she comes alive and is really relatable and really helps Kevin, my character. The last line in the show in the song is ‘Everything's going to be alright. It's going to be OK’ and that's what the musical is about. That's what everyone takes away from the show. Depending where you are in the country some audiences can start off a little bit reserved but by the end everyone is up and on their feet and absolutely loving it.

“The character Kevin has broken up with his boyfriend and he's lost his job and he is isolating back in his parents’ attic which is when Dolly bursts through a poster. It's a show that's got a bit of everything in it. Dolly is almost a supernatural being. She turns his wine into water. We call it doing a reverse Jesus. She is trying to help him from self-medicating. And you wonder whether it is all happening in Kevin's head, whether he is self-therapising. But there are bits in the show that hint in a certain way and clear things up a little bit.

“It is essentially a two-hander. I don't leave the stage for two hours. And again that’s subverting it. It’s the first musical ever to have the full rights to Dolly Parton’s songs but it is not a huge chorus-line musical with a 40-piece orchestra. It's this contained fly on the wall observation of this person who is having a really bad time. And the great thing is we can go from small theatres to big stadium-like theatres but it always works beautifully. You can go to 2,000-seater venues and there are still moments in the play when you can hear a pin drop.”