And that’s on top of almost 20 venues booked around the country for this song and dance act of a show, on the road until the end of April.
Lorraine Keane is one of five Irish stars in ‘Girls Night The Musical’. She was in town last week and on a high with this smash hit, doing press in the Clarion Penthouse for this gig. She shares billing with actor/ dancer Hilda Fay (‘Fair City’); actor/ singer Sorcha Furlong (‘Fair City’); actor/ singer Jacinta White (‘Annie’) and actor/ singer Sharon Sexton (‘Over the Rainbow’). Surely with Lorraine’s background in AA Roadwatch, as tv3’s ‘Ireland AM’ host and then red carpet fixture for ‘Exposé’, she is the odd woman out?
Warming up after the dawn drive from Dublin, she is a live wire of enthusiasm.
“I am out of my comfort zone with this job,” she admits with a laugh, “but the girls have been really supportive. The producers of the show are Scottish and English and didn’t know ‘the name’ Lorraine Keane when auditioning. I had to sing two songs and read five parts, and I’d taken regular dance lessons as a teenager”.
She got the part.
Granted, “the bit of a profile helped” but then, same girl was picked by Dublin Grand Opera Society when touring schools for auditions and was twice on stage in the Gaeity, for ‘Carmen’ and ‘Turandot’.
“I really thought that’s what I would go on to do, opera, but in the end, decided to go with media and trained as a journalist. My Dad Eamonn Keane is with ‘The Indians’, one of Ireland’s oldest bands and 40 years together this year. He did not encourage us professionally to go into the business. Dad knew about the long tours and hard life, and he had six daughters and one son. He wanted something else for us”.
Whizz through about seven hard-working years with AA Roadwatch and weekends with RTE before arriving at fulltime television work in entertainment. Years later, Lorraine had a public split with TV3, leaving the daily ‘Eposé’ but says, reasonably, “I left the day job becuase it was evening and weekend work as well. I was a mother of two small children. For the past three years I have been able to work from home and have been busy, but seemed to have an abundant amount of time compared to any previously for stuff like the school run with Romy (5) and Emelia (8)”.
Being married to rock musician Peter Devlinof The Devlins has its perks, he now writing and recording from home and minding the childer as she tours with ‘Girls Night The Musical’. The live stage and applause are hers now but all in her stride – 5″ heels upping her fine-boned beauty. (This woman is gorgeous).
She is also an ambassador for Trócaire. “I made two serious documentaries on its work for RTE, travelling to Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Haiti. This work means a lot to me”.
She has penned a Bridget Jones-style look back on her time as an Ents reporter, ‘Working the Red Carpet’: “Look, I poke fun at the scene and at myself. It’s a humourous take on that life”.
Name her all time favourite stars to meet, and one whom she would rather never meet again.
“All time favourite? Bono. Has to be Bono. Not because he’s Irish and is the greatest rock star in the world. Because he is a gent and for all the on-stage persona with huge ego, he has none of that in person”.
Paul Newman, Bill Clinton and Prince Charles rate too. So who is in the dog house? Mick Hucknall of Simply Red.
Reader, we drop a veil over that encounter and raise curtin instead on the Andrew Lynford production of ‘Girls Night The Muscial’, March 13-15 at UCH, 8pm. Irish women are crowding out the audiences there, for laughs, for the music and for its celebration of 30-somethings, 40-somethings growing up together, the good times and those inevitable other times. www.uch.ie
