Nina, I'd vote for you if I could
'West End Star' finalist, Nina Söderquist
West End Star, the Saturday night talent show on Sweden's TV3 channel, will find the replacement for the Diva in
Monty Python's SPAMALOT - now playing at London's Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus. The Diva (The Lady of the Lake) is currently being played by the brilliant Hannah Waddingham, who will soon take over that role in the Broadway production of the show (played until recently by Marin Mazzie).
Peter Davison, Spamalot's King Arthur. Hannah Waddingham and
Marin Mazzie - Spamalot's current West End and Broadway Ladies
of the Lake and the 5 finalists (Nina third from right).
There now remain 5 Swedish finalists. Each week (starting tonight), one will be eliminated by phone vote, leaving the winner (on 2 Feb 07) to take over from Hannah in London on 11 Feb 07.
Being a long-time serious Python and (recently) Spamalot fan (seen the show 3 times already! - see previous blogs), I have been following this competition for a while via both
http://www.pythonline.com/ and
http://www.tv3.se/ (warning - no subtitles) , and ... no offence to the other contestants
, but for me,
the clear winner is the rock singer, Nina Söderquist.
You can see she is already tuned in to the Python 'thing', she has the power in her voice needed for this role, her stage presence is huge (another rather essential prerequisitttttte), I love hearing her sing and she is also
great fun. (Watch her auditions in some of the previous shows via the above links and you'll see what I mean. What did it for me was her own 'Python' version of Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive'. It was excellent!)
All we need now is for the Swedish-Saturday-night-TV3-viewing public, who own a phone, to see the bleeding obvious. Please don't make me have to fly over there just to make 5000 phone votes from my hotel room, all on my own!
OK guys, we're sorry about the Swedish Chef thing, so please now just
VOTE for NINA!
Nina's phone-vote number is
099 40 301 and the show is on at 9pm Swedish time.
Related links:
Nina is in the final!-
SvD - En av dem blir stjärna i London
-
Holmgren & Söderquist Vie for Lady of the Lake in UK 'Spamalot'
-
ITN
-
BBC TV
-
What's On Stage
-
Broadway World
-
Channel 4 News
-
Broadway.com
-
Stage News
-
Daily Telegraph
-
Nina's MySpace page
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Nina's AllEars page
-
TV3.se
-
Silverback (West End Show's production company)
-
Pythonline.com
- My previous Spamalot blog entries
1,
2,
3 and
4
