Jacinta Whyte told David Hennessy about the new musical COVEN, her long career that started playing Annie on the West End at the age of eight and has seen her star in shows such as Les Miserables, CATS, Blood Brothers, Miss Saigon and more..
Jacinta Whyte is about to star in the world premiere of the new musical Coven at Kiln Theatre in Kilburn.
Jacinta Whyte is one of Dublin’s most prolific stage exports.
Jacinta began her career as a child actress frequenting all of the major professional stages of Dublin and playing the title role in the original West End production of Annie.
Jacinta was subsequently cast as Eponine in the original UK and Ireland touring production of Les Miserables, leading to her being cast in the same role in London’s West End at the Palace Theatre and achieving notable acclaim as the first Irish actress to play the role professionally.
Since then, her many leading roles in the West End include Blood Brothers, Miss Saigon, with a plethora of major national touring credits including Aspects of Love, Titanic and Grease.
As well as her major London and touring stage work, Jacinta’s regional credits include West Side Story, The Card (For Cameron Mackintosh), Private Lives and Anne of Green Gables with Irish work including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Mary Makebelieve, Gypsy and Annie (which broke all Irish box office records).
More recently, she appeared in Matthew Warchus’ critically acclaimed production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, starred as the iconic Grizabella in the International Tour of CATS and originated the role of Angela in Thom Southerland’s gritty and visceral production of Angela’s Ashes at the Bord Gais theatre in Dublin as well as the UK/Irish tour and for the Irish Repertory Theatre (New York).
Jacinta is also a highly sought-after concert artist.
Written by Grammy Award-winning Daisy Chute (well known from platinum- selling All Angels) and Rebecca Brewer, and directed by Olivier Award- winning Miranda Cromwell, Coven is a new musical reimagining the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612.
It tells the story of Jennet, who at just nine accused her own family of witchcraft – and twenty one years later finds herself imprisoned and facing the same fate surrounded by the most feared women in town.
As the accuser becomes the accused, Jennet must confront a 250-year legacy of witchcraft and the dark secrets of her own past.
As she listens to the shocking stories of the women around her, Jennet’s faith begins to crumble.
Jacinta Whyte took time out from rehearsals to chat to the Irish World.
How are rehearsals going?
“Rehearsals are going fine.
“At the minute we’re currently learning dance routines, going into dialogue, changing dialog, changing harmonies that we learned on the first week.
“Because it’s a new show.
“It’s such a new piece.
“But everything changes.
“That’s the beauty of a new piece.
“It’s not a set piece like a Phantom of the Opera or a Les Mis.
“It’s changing and evolving and as people are working on it they go, ‘Well, you know what?’
“And suddenly there’s a new sheet of dialogue.
“It’s just getting your brain around it and you go home at the end of every day going, ‘Oh my gosh, my brain’.
“But it’s going really well.
“It’s a good team here so there’s no friction.
“There’s nobody vying for top notch spot.
“It’s quite a collaborative process which is really nice.”
What was it about the piece that first attracted you?
“I love the music.
“The music is really lovely.
“We’ve got two very young, innovative creative writers.
“Daisy Chute wrote the music.
“She’s great.
“She writes really good melodies and they’re the kind of melodies that you hear once or twice and you’re humming them which is always a good indicator.
“Some of them are really anthemic.
“One or two of the girls have got these great big ballads which are fantastic.
“Then we have these huge, big trials which are epic, they’re almost like a mini operetta.
“So for me it was the music and also the subject matter.
“I thought, ‘Oh, the Pendle Witch Trials’.
“And you start looking it up and you think, ‘Oh my God. This happened’.
“This really happened.
“I love a project that’s based on fact so it’s been really interesting delving into the history of that whole era, the whole area up north.
“The whole world was ruled by the men: The clerics, the religious orders, the judges.
“It was so corrupt, not unlike today really and I think that’s the thing we’re saying.
“In some areas, we haven’t moved forward.
“I think it was the subject matter that drew me to the piece as well as the creative team.
“And to originate something is really nice rather than take over from somebody in a show. That makes it really interesting.”
The story is completely reimagined, is that right?
“It’s a total reimagining.
“It is a new take on it.
“Although there’s historical fact underneath it all, most of the characters are characters that were there, that the writers have traced back.
“But it is a totally new stance on it.
“And there’s little bits of modernity.
“Some of the dialogue is a little bit modern so it brings it into today’s world as well.”
What can you tell us about your character, Maggie?
“Maggie seems to be almost the matriarch of the women in the cell along with Nell, who’s played by the lovely Allyson Ava-Brown.
“I’m a herbalist and also perhaps an ancient mystic which is why she’s thrown in the prison.
“They were all innocent, these women. Let’s face it.
“They used to dump the witches in the lakes and the rivers and if they floated to the top then they were innocent but they were dead anyway.
“But Maggie senses different people’s plots before they sense them themselves so it’s a really nice role.
“I don’t perhaps say as much as some of the others but it’s all about a look and a feel and a characterisation.
“She’s a very nice role to play.
“I’m just getting into her.
“We’re just starting to find our way into our characters.
“Jennet is the girl around whom the story is told and she was a living, breathing person because she was the one who, as a child, was convinced to send all her family to the gallows and exclaimed them as witches.
“And then 20 years later, when our story starts, she’s in the prison cell with us herself now being exclaimed as a witch.
“But she was a true person.
“Her testimony as a child was the instigation of children being used in trials to proclaim people as witches worldwide.
“It happened everywhere but it started with Jennet Device in Lancashire.”
You have done so much on the London stage but have you acted at the Kiln or, as it was previously known, The Tricycle?
“Never.
“I auditioned for something back in the day when it was The Tricycle and I didn’t get it.
“It’s such a fantastic space to work in.
“The staff here are great.
“There’s a real community spirit here and actually the show itself is about community, the women in the cell working together.
“So in that respect, it’s been really quite nice.
“It feels like a small little family already here at The Kiln.
“So looking forward to getting started.”
Your work on the West End goes all the way back to Annie. What was that like to be part of such a big production at such a young age? It must have been crazy..
“It’s crazy for any child.
“I just auditioned for it in Dublin, not really knowing what it was.
“I was in the Billie Barry stage school at home and we were always going for auditions.
“I just went along and then was plucked, very luckily came to London and that was the start of my journey.
“I’ve been going at it a long, long time.
“I keep thinking about retiring.
“Then I think, ‘Well I don’t know what else I would do’.
“I worked constantly at home in Dublin and then I came to the UK many times during my teens to work at certain theatres here and I’d always go back home to school and to my family.
“Coming to London I had to leave school for months on end.
“I loved being in the show at night but I missed my family and home very much.
“But I realised when I left school that I had gone about as far as I could go in Dublin.
“At the time, there were no musicals in Ireland.
“I did a couple of films at home in Ireland but the lure of the West End bit me so I packed my bag, came over and was really lucky.
“I went straight into Les Miserables when it was at the Palace Theatre, the original production of it, and stayed for a year.
“Then you just get on the circuit, then you go on to a tour of something.
“There was so much work over here for me that I stayed.”
You have been part of things like Grease, Blood Brothers, Miss Saigon, more recently CATS..
“I auditioned for CATS when I was very, very young and I didn’t get it.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh but that’s why I came to London. I wanted to be in CATS’.
“And then once or twice it came in and it wasn’t the right time in my life.
“And then just before COVID hit, I re-auditioned for the international tour.
“For me CATS was always the big one and I was offered Grizabella.. and then blooming COVID hit.
“I was thinking, ‘God, talk about the luck of the Irish’.
“But once COVID was over, they re-instigated the tour and they said, ‘Would you like to come and play Grizabella?’
“So I finally got to sing Memory which was a huge dream, one of the dream roles for me to have played Grizabella and I did a year on tour with that.
“So that was a wonderful experience.
“It’s a great show.
“You either love it or you loathe it but it’s got some great moments in it.
“That was another big one.
“And then I like to balance it with doing other things.
“I did Juno and the Paycock last year here at the Gielgud and that was a great experience because I’d love to do more Irish plays.
“I love Sean O’Casey.
“I love the Irish playwrights but I’m always in a long running show so you sort of never really get the chance or the opportunity.
“That was great.
“And then I still do a lot of concert work so I try and balance it with a bit of time in theatre and a bit of time in the concert world because I love to sing.
“This one sort of dropped on my lap and it just seemed like a really exciting project and a shorter project. It’s quite nice sometimes to do shorter projects so here we are at The Kiln and I think it will be good.
“It’s got some great moments in Coven.
“It’s very interesting.
“You can almost equate it to today’s society, what’s still occurring in many parts of the world.”
Obviously it’s the north of England but could it just as easily be Ireland, especially the Ireland of those times and what we know about the patriarchy there?
“Absolutely.
“You just sort of think, ‘Yeah, I understand this’.
“I left Dublin in the very late ‘80s/ early 1990s and it was a very different society over there very much ruled by the church.
“You think of the Catholic society we came from.
“It was a very different society to what we have now and very much a male dominated society.
“And today there are things happening across the planet.
“We’re going back to the Middle Ages.
“Is it one step forward and two steps back all the time?
“And I just think that’s the message that the writers wanted to put over.
“It will make people think about lots of topics.”
Obviously you started very early. Did you always know it was acting for you or were you doing it for fun at that young age and then decided later on to take it seriously?
“Absolutely.
“People ask me this and it’s a great question.
“People say, ‘Oh, did you always want to be in showbusiness?’
“And you go, ‘No, I was a kid’.
“Some kids went to learn Irish dancing.
“Some kids went to the gymnastics club.
“Other kids went to swimming class.
“That was never for me.
“I went to tap dancing lessons.
“And then when I went to Billie Barry’s a few years later, it’s just something we did.
“It’s something you do as a child.
“I was doing all the pantos with Maureen Potter of the Gaiety.
“We would be balled off to RTE to do the Christmas TV special with Red Hurley and Twink and all of those people.
“It was just a great day out.
“We had the run of RTE and our playground was the Gaiety Theatre.
“It was just something that you enjoyed to do as a kid and I think it’s later on in life you start thinking, ‘Maybe I could make a career out of this’.
“You sort of get bitten by the bug.
“But no, for me it was just something I loved to do.
“I love to sing.
“I love to dance.
“And when I was up on stage, I wasn’t being me. I was being somebody else.
“Actually, I was quite shy as a kid.
“People said, ‘Well, you couldn’t have been shy..’
“But I was.
“But when I was on the stage, it was like a release. You were somebody else.
“I think when I was coming towards my Leaving Cert I thought, ‘This is what I would like to do’.
“I’ve just been really lucky.
“At this stage of my career and my life I still think how lucky I am every time I get a job.
“I still get really excited about it.
“It’s a nice position to be in to go to work and enjoy what you do.”
What has been a highlight of all the great stuff you have done?
“When I came to London straight from school, I was so naive.
“Even though I had done all this work in Dublin, I had no agent, no nothing.
“I just hopped on a plane with 500 quid in my pocket.
“I auditioned for Les Mis and I got into Les Mis.
“My first night in Les Miserables at the Palace Theatre was a night I will never forget.
“The whole audience stood and I was like, ‘Oh my God’.
“That for me was magical.
“And then I repeated it.
“We did the first Irish UK tour and we played what was then the Point.
“For me that was a magical night.
“All my family were there: Sisters, parents, aunts, uncles, my grandmother Lord rest her.
“And that was at the Point. It’s now the 3 Arena but it used to be the train depot.
“My grandad was a train driver and that was the depot.
“It was just this magical moment of being in such a wonderful show.
“Les Mis has been a huge part of my life.
“I’ve hopped in and out many times.
“I met my husband when he was conducting the show.
“And then nights when you play with a big orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.
“You just sort of stand there thinking, ‘Pinch me’.
“They would be huge highlights for me, more than anything else in my career.”
COVEN is at Kiln Theatre until 17 January.
For more information and to book, click here.
