Loretta Swit brings 'Shirley Valentine' to Stage West

When you ask Loretta Swit about playing Shirley Valentine, her face lights up. “I love her. I love this script,” she says emphatically. “You don’t have to be from Liverpool to understand her.  There’s a little bit of Shirley in everybody.”

Shirley is the housewife who spends her time talking to a wall while preparing her husbands chips and eggs. She discovers her true self on a vacation in Greece.

Swit first played Willy Russell’s popular comedy nearly twenty years ago. “I opened Shirley Valentine in 1991 in Chicago for six months, and then I did the Gold Coast tour playing Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach.  I did the first national tour and then I did a smaller tour in Canada, went to Hawaii and took her as far as Guam,” she says proudly adding “Shirley was a big hit in Guam!”

Russell’s play seems to have been a big hit everywhere starting in London in 1986, followed by a successful Broadway run and film. Though the movie was a big box office hit, Shirley is really most at home on stage, as is Ms. Swit.

“This is what I trained for,” she insists adding that when she began her career, television was still in its infancy and her focus had always been to become a stage actor. Her first big break came with a tour of the comedy Any Wednesday, but she also wanted to do musicals.

“Mame was my first big musical”, she recalls. “I went on a tour with the National Company playing Agnes Gooch.” Years later when her agent called with an offer to take on the starring role she turned him down. “I said, you know Gooch is really the part in that show for me,” she recalls with a smile. The agent quickly set her straight pointing out that “Mame is the title role. You’ve done Gooch. You’ve had your fun, now its time to graduate to the big time.”

Which indeed Loretta did winning rave reviews and dazzling audiences who only knew her from the long-running TV series M*A*S*H. The series ran eleven seasons and Swit appeared in all but a handful of the 251 episodes. It made her famous, but her first love has always been the theatre. “I Love the stage. I Love the Audience,” she beams. “I’m a people’s actor.”

Loretta Swit stars in Shirley Valentine at Stage West Dinner Theatre to November 21. To book the dinner/show package go to www.stagewest.com or call the box office at 905-238-0042.