Ken Longworth

Newcastle Herald

28 February 2009 

Lisa McCune is in a relaxed mood dining and chatting at a Honeysuckle harbourside restaurant, the lights of the ships reflected in the dark water giving her a spectacular introduction to Newcastle.

It has been a long day for the four-times Gold Logie winner, who was filming final scenes for the new series of Sea Patrol on Sydney Harbour before shooting up the F3 to meet Weekender.

McCune is on the publicity trail for Guys and Dolls, a musical that begins a 12-week season at Sydney's Capitol Theatre on March 12, after a 20-week run in Melbourne last year.

The musical is set in and around New York's Broadway in the early 1950s, with McCune playing a Salvation Army-style crusader who gets tangled up with gamblers, gangsters and showgirls while trying to save their souls.

Her Sea Patrol co-star Ian Stenlake plays a smooth-talking gambler, and also in the cast are Marina Prior, Garry McDonald, Shane Jacobson and Magda Szubanski.

I discover that McCune is heading back to Sydney the morning after our interview to hop on a plane home to Melbourne.

"I have parent-teacher interviews to attend at my children's school in the afternoon," she explains.

That, she notes, is part of the challenge of a show-business career: trying to balance the demands of the job with family life.

McCune and her husband, Tim Disney, a film technician she met when they were working on Blue Heelers in 1996, try to arrange their schedules so that at least one of them is always with the three children, sons Archer, 7, and Oliver, 5, and daughter Remy, 3.

The start of filming of the new Sea Patrol series in North Queensland last October, for example, coincided with school holidays, so they were able to be together in the tropical north for part of the six-week shoot.

The same thing happened when the film crew moved to the Gold Coast for three months of studio work. They were together for the Christmas-New Year school holidays, then husband and children went back to Melbourne at the end of January, in time for the school year. McCune continued shooting until February 13, getting out of bed at 4.30am each day for make-up sessions, before flying to Sydney for final location filming.

Even when she got home after this Newcastle detour, Lisa McCune was to have less than a week there before heading back to Sydney to start Guys and Dolls rehearsals. And her six days in Melbourne included a performance at a bushfire appeal concert.

It is little wonder that she is planning to have a couple of work-free months after the Guys and Dolls season and spend the time at home.

Yet she wouldn't have her life any other way. In the 1990s, the first decade of her career, she was able to combine daytime filming and night-time theatre on occasions. Now, with a family life to consider, she does one or the other. That understandable change aside, there has been no diminution of her enthusiasm to perform.

Likewise, the Australian population's love for Lisa McCune, which arose from her six-year stint as Constable Maggie Doyle in Blue Heelers, shows no signs of fading.

While doing a Google search for details of one of her stage shows, I was amazed at the number of websites dedicated to McCune.

There are at least two that claim to be the ultimate Lisa McCune fan site, with photos galore. Another publishes the latest news on her from media reports around Australia. One purports to list the names of people the actress has dated, and you can even download ringtones onto your mobile phone that feature the music of songs she has performed.

While all of this adulation has occurred since the debut of Blue Heelers in 1994, the signs were there well before that McCune would be a special actress.

She was accepted straight from her Perth high school into the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts music theatre course, starting classes just before her 17th birthday in February 1988. And she was still two months short of 20 when she graduated at the end of 1990.

Her first two years as an actress were typical of those of a young performer, with appearances in several short-lived musicals in Sydney and Melbourne, plus a 12-month contract with Coles supermarkets that saw her appear in ads as Lisa, the friendly check-out chick. (McCune became the advertising face of Coles again in 2004.)

She suffered the disappointment in 1993 of winning a leading role in a television pilot, only to be replaced in the subsequent series by another performer.

As things turned out, that was a spot of luck. Within months, Blue Heelers and Maggie Doyle came along.

McCune is grateful to former Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director Roger Hodgman for offering her a key role in the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music in 1997. Her appearance in that was followed by other musical roles, including Cinderella in another Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, that she was able to juggle with filming for Blue Heelers.

"If not for Roger, I might have lost the opportunity to be in stage musicals," she says.

Eventually, the appeal of the stage and her fear that she would be restricted to a career in television, with no other performance options, led to McCune asking for her character to be written out of Blue Heelers.

When the episode in which Maggie Doyle was killed was telecast in 2000, it became the highest rating in the popular series' history.

The high ratings attained by the first series of Sea Patrol in 2007 showed McCune had lost none of her television appeal, despite having taken a year off after the birth of each of her children.

Less work for television, though, has meant more time on stage and she has been in several shows in Sydney since leaving Blue Heelers.

She was an acclaimed Maria Rainer in a touring production of The Sound of Music that opened in the NSW capital in 2000. She later headed north to Sydney in two musicals that had been big hits in Melbourne: Urinetown, a show which sends up the seriousness of socially conscious musicals such as Les Miserables, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a charming look at the lives of six 12-year-old finalists in a spelling contest.

Guys and Dolls co-star and good friend Marina Prior was in both and McCune recalls with a laugh that the pair occasionally got into trouble from a stern stage manager for having fun on stage in the light-hearted Urinetown.

Magda Szubanski, another friend and Guys and Dolls colleague, was also in Spelling Bee.

Guys and Dolls, which is based on stories by journalist Damon Runyon about some of the characters he encountered on his Broadway rounds in the 1930s and early 1940s, has been high on many lists of favourite musical comedies since its Broadway premiere in 1950.

The story has two romances at its centre. Gambler Sky Masterson (Ian Stenlake) makes a bet with broke fellow gambler Nathan Detroit (Garry McDonald) that he can make any woman fall in love with him within 24 hours. Detroit picks the uptight Sister Sarah Brown (Lisa McCune) as his target.

Detroit has his own romantic problems. Miss Adelaide (Marina Prior), the nightclub performer he has been unofficially engaged to for 14 years, is demanding that he give her a ring to make the match official.

The show's songs by Frank Loesser include Luck be a Lady, I've Never Been in Love Before, Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat, and Marry the Man Today.

McCune, using Sea Patrol-style naval speak, describes Sarah as a tricky one to navigate.

"When I took the role on I thought it would be easy. But Sarah is so strait-laced that her blossoming and blooming as a woman isn't an easy journey for an actress," she says.

"People sometimes underestimate the degree of acting skill that is required in a musical. You have to extend the story into the songs."

She also dismisses the view that that actors can become bored performing in a long-running stage show.

"When you do a show eight times a week, you become very intimate with it and you explore the roles," she says.

McCune has enjoyed Guys and Dolls, largely because she likes being part of an ensemble.

"I could never do a one-person show," she says. "I love working in groups of people.

"It is the same with TV. I don't like doing guest roles. I feel more comfortable as an actor working with people I am with regularly."

And after 18 years as a professional performer, she is as enthusiastic as ever about her choice of career. So, what would she do if she had the choice of working solely in theatre or television?

"If I did have a perfect life, I'd do six months of each in a year."

"People sometimes underestimate the degree of acting skill that is required in a musical. You have to extend the story into the songs." (