“So for her, Dickens’ London isn’t a big stretch to what she faced when she was growing up,” says Bathurst. What the Dickens? … Robert Bathurst and Carole Stennett in rehearsal for Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol. Her parents, illiterate sharecropper Robert Lee Parton and Pentecostal preacher’s daughter Avie Lee, were hit hard by the Depression and many of Parton’s early songs refer to living through extreme poverty. You can visit a replica of the cabin at Dollywood, Parton’s theme park in nearby Pigeon Forge, and see just how small the home truly was. “It’s set in the Appalachian mountains, where the Depression arrived early and left late, so in terms of need and want and deprivation – which Dickens was drawing our attention to – it’s all there,” he says.īorn in 1946 and the fourth of 12 children, Dolly Parton and her siblings were raised in a one-room cabin in the hamlet of Locust Ridge. Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol’s unique “Tennessee twist” and move away from Victorian England also had a bearing on Bathurst’s involvement. “But I remember feeling rather underemployed in that role”. “I was also a shepherd at my convent school nativity in Ireland,” he adds. It’s a completely left-field, exciting and odd thing for me to do.” It marks Bathurst’s first festive acting gig since the late 1970s, when he was studying law at Cambridge’s Pembroke College and appeared as Widow Twankey in a Footlights production of Aladdin. “But that’s what I love about the whole project. So how much on-stage dance experience does Bathurst actually have? “Precisely nil,” he admits. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and I really liked the idea of that,” he says of his first-ever musical role. For Dolly, Dickens’ London isn’t a big stretch to what she faced when she was growing up Robert Bathurstīathurst has a string of theatre roles to his name, but he is the first to admit that Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol is a new challenge. The stage show stars Cold Feet’s Robert Bathurst, who will be following in the footsteps of Alastair Sim, Michael Caine and Bill Murray to play one of literature’s biggest wrong ’uns: Ebenezer Scrooge. While anyone expecting to see Parton treading the boards on the South Bank will be disappointed – she does not appear in the show – the experienced West End cast has been personally signed off by the star, whose third Christmas movie, Dolly Parton’s Magic Mountain Christmas, will also air in the US this December on Peacock. Her original string band score pays homage to the pre-bluegrass sound of 1930s Appalachia, weaving together gospel and traditional country with the singer’s own easy way with a catchy chorus. ![]() Set in the midst of the Great Depression – a decade before Parton’s birth – the family-friendly festive extravaganza features a host of seasonal songs written by Parton. Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol sees her staging a full jingle bells-and-whistles show at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, relocating Charles Dickens’ classic tale of redemption and oversized turkey to the East Tennessee mountains where she was raised. The country music icon’s latest trick is to go the full yule. It was an honour she initially declined, but went on to accept in a respectably metal fashion by donning a black PVC catsuit and duetting with Judas Priest’s Rob Halford in what will surely become known as the definitive version of Jolene. I s there anything that Dolly Parton cannot do? Singer, songwriter, actor, author, philanthropist and, in her most generous stab at superwoman status, Covid vaccine-funder, she was also recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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