Dolly Parton tribute show is ‘brilliant fun’
Voted the UK’s best Dolly Parton impersonator four times running by the Agent’s Association of Great Britain – and the only Dolly Parton impersonator to be endorsed by the Parton family – West End star Kelly O’Brien regularly performs as the larger-than-life country legend in The Dolly Show.
Australian-born Kelly brilliantly captures the voice and warm, ‘down home’ personality of the little lady from Tennessee - something that became immediately apparent when I asked her to “do the voice”.
Listening to Kelly speak as Dolly, it was uncanny just how much she sounded like one of the world’s best-loved icons of popular culture.
She reveals that she has been portraying the singer for 17 years now, and has been touring this particular show around the UK for the past three years.
Kelly has toured Australia and has tours to Canada, Denmark and the USA coming up.
She says: “The family got in touch last year and said ‘We’ve seen what you do and we’d love to invite you to Dollywood as VIPs with your family and Dolly really loves what you’re doing’.
“So hopefully next year I’ll get to go over and meet Dolly again. I’ve met her once but you can never get sick of spending time with Dolly Parton!”
How did Kelly end up performing as the singer? “I grew up listening to Dolly,” she replies. “I’m Australian and in Australia my parents were always playing her records - and I’m quite small.
“I’m like five foot, the same as her. And I was in Sydney doing these talent competitions and I’d dress up as her...
“I’d started singing country when I was probably about 10, so the country voice and the fact that I was so tiny, people just really liked it.
“So it was kind of a no-brainer, when I first heard of tributes in the UK; I came over here and somebody said ‘Can you do Dolly?’ and I was like ‘Yeah’.
“But I didn’t quite understand what a ‘tribute act’ was because we didn’t have them in Australia.
“I just thought ‘Oh, well that means being an impersonator’ so that’s why from start to finish, there’s a fourth wall where I just pretend to be her the entire night.”
The one and only time that Kelly met Dolly was in 2011 at the back of the O2 in London, though as she mentioned, that may change next year if she takes up the invitation to visit the famed Dollywood theme park in Tennessee.
Kelly notes that the non-singing parts of The Dolly Show are partly scripted.
“It’s very interactive,” she explains, “I walk out to the audience, I’ll shake people’s hands, I’ll get somebody up to sing and be Kenny Rogers for me…
“And I have lots of little kids that come to the show dressed up; lots of little girls love to dress up as Dolly and so sometimes I might chat to them.
“But I tell anecdotes from Dolly’s life story, jokes, she’s got so many ‘Dolly-isms’… I would hope it’s like having Dolly in the room with you for the evening.
“There’s six costume changes and I kind of go through each decade, picking favourite songs from each decade, telling a bit about what she does, and it’s brilliant fun, I’ve got to say!”
Fans are surely in for a treat when Kelly visits the Haverhill Arts Centre in July. Expect to hear bona-fide country classics like 9 to 5, Jolene, Islands in the Stream, I Will Always Love You and many more performed by a singer who is as close to Dolly as you could possibly get, without it actually being the woman herself.
Even Jonathan Ross was quoted on Channel 4’s The Last Leg as saying “I thought it was Dolly!” Kelly’s other TV appearances include This Morning, Lorraine and BBC Breakfast.
The Dolly Show will be coming to the Haverhill Arts Centre on Thursday, 25 July. Tickets, priced £26, are available from haverhillartscentre.co.uk. For more on the show, go to thedollyshow.com.
