Marti Webb (actress and singer)

Marti Webb (born 1943) is an English actress and singer. She appeared on stage in Evita before starring in Andrew Lloyd Webber's one-woman show Tell Me on a Sunday in 1980. This included her biggest hit single, "Take That Look Off Your Face", a UK top three hit, with the parent album also reaching the top three. Marti Webb was born in Cricklewood in 1943. Her parents took her to variety shows and pantomimes as a child. Her father played the violin and her mother sang and played the piano. She attended dance lessons from the age of 3 and first performed in public at the age of 7, at the Scala Theatre, London, initially hoping to be a ballerina. After a school teacher suggested to her parents that her natural talent for singing and dancing should be nurtured, she was educated at the Aida Foster stage school from the age of 12, where she eventually became Head Girl. Her mother had to take an additional job to order to pay for the school fees. While training, she appeared in BBC Schools programmes. Webb later commented that, having come from a normal school, she found it a shock to be asked to perform in front of her classmates. The first musical she saw was Lionel Bart's Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be as some of her fellow students were performing in it. The school would send students for auditions regularly, which led to an audition for the original London production of Bye Bye Birdie, although she wasn't offered a role. She also auditioned for Oscar Hammerstein II for The Sound of Music, but being overcome by shyness, spoke very quietly and wasn't cast in the show. She was selected to take part in the television programme Carol Levis' Junior Discoveries, which was broadcast from the Hackney Empire, for which she sang "Musetta's Waltz" from La bohème. Aged 15, she appeared as Moonbeam in the 1959 Manchester production of Listen to the Wind by Vivian Ellis whilst still a student, before leaving school to make her West End debut in Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, a show that starred and had lyrics by Anthony Newley. She first discovered her belt voice while rehearsing for the show. Webb performed "Almost Like Being in Love" as her audition piece, before a group that included Newley, Lionel Bart, Lionel Blair and Alma Cogan. The group shared a joke during her audition which distracted her and at the end of the piece, she grabbed her music and went to leave the stage. Newley had to stop her to ask for another song and she was so embarrassed, she dropped her sheet music across the stage. Newley later remarked that he'd loved her from that moment on. The company would go out together to watch other shows and performers, including Lotte Lenya and Ethel Merman. Webb first came to prominence as Ann Pornick in the original London production of Half a Sixpence opposite Tommy Steele, citing her first leading role as a career highlight. The playwright Beverley Cross's father George was the company manager on the production of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off and recommended his son audition Webb for the role. She was offered the role after thirteen auditions and later dubbed the singing voice of Julia Foster, her replacement for the film adaptation. Webb later commented of Foster, "She has quite a notable voice, so it's not too hard to pick it up." She also played Nancy in the first UK tour of Oliver! where she met and befriended the show's assistant stage manager Cameron Mackintosh, who was to become one of the most prominent musical theatre producers in the world. Lionel Bart, the show's composer and lyricist, saw it numerous times whilst the production was in Manchester, where he was working on the notorious flop, Twang!!. When it returned to the West End Phil Collins, who later achieved fame with Genesis and had been one of the original Dodgers, rejoined the production to play Noah Claypole. On the production's transfer to the West End in April 1967, Barry Humphries played Fagin. In 1968, she appeared opposite Stuart Damon in the first British production of the musical Grass Roots, written by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, which was directed by Anton Rodgers at the Leatherhead Theatre Club. During the 1970s, Webb carved out a career as a respected, though not yet famous, West End actress and singer. In 1971, she was one of the original company of the London production of Godspell, the musical based on the Gospel of Matthew, opposite David Essex, Julie Covington and Jeremy Irons. The original London cast recording of the production includes her performance of "Bless the Lord". During the show's run, Essex formed a band with Jeff Wayne and recruited Webb and Covington as backing singers. She left Godspell to play Nellie Cotterill in the 1973 original London production of The Card, a musical written by Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent which chronicled the rise of the title character from washerwoman's son to mayor of a Northern British town through initiative, guile and luck. The production was short-lived but was followed by the 1974 original London production of The Good Companions, alongside John Mills, Judi Dench and Christopher Gable in which she played Susie Dean, a member of a touring concert party. She was flown to Manchester to join the show during its tryout when the original actress Celia Bannerman, whose voice had proved unsuitable for the role, left the production. After failing to land any stage roles as the decade wore on, by 1978 a somewhat dejected Webb was working in a travel agency and had stopped auditioning. A British lyricist came into the agency and encouraged her to start auditioning again, and within three months she was cast in Evita. In early 1979, Webb was flown to New York to audition for Harold Prince after Gary Bond, then playing Che in the show, suggested her to the producers of Evita as a successor to Elaine Paige who was, at the time, expected to transfer to the recreate the role on Broadway. Prince was impressed and persuaded her to cover while Paige holidayed and sign up as a regular alternate for the remainder of Paige's contract, performing two shows a week, in preparation for succeeding Paige as the star. This began an arrangement which existed for the remainder of the show's run, with Stephanie Lawrence appearing as Webb's alternate before succeeding her. At her original audition, show's composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had asked whether she would be interested if he wrote anything he thought appropriate for her voice. Assuming it was a kindly rejection, she was later surprised to be invited for a meal at Mr Chow, a London restaurant, with Lloyd Webber and the lyricist Don Black to discuss the concept of a song cycle inspired by the story of a friend of the writers who had moved from London to the United States to begin a new life. Webb was asked to collaborate on the piece when only two songs, the title piece "Tell Me on a Sunday" and "It's Not the End of the World", had been written, so the rest was created specifically with her voice and character in mind. Black, who became her manager and a close friend, said of her performance, "She was 'the girl', and that was it." Her tendency to, "Talk for hours about the most boring everyday things, like the gas or insurance", also inspired him in creating the narrative pieces in the song cycle which were letters to the character's mum. She worked on the piece with Lloyd Webber and Black each day before being driven from Sydmonton Court, Lloyd Webber's country house, to the Prince Edward Theatre where Evita was playing. An album was recorded and it was performed at the 1979 Sydmonton Festival, the composer's annual workshop for new works, where a BBC Television producer contracted the collaborators to produce a version for television featuring Webb backed by a band and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. A one-off performance in January 1980 was recorded at the Royalty Theatre, London. Black recalls, "It was fantastic on television because it was almost all filmed in close-up on Marti