Jaz Flowers nearly had the Hot Shoe Shuffle tap routines nailed the first time the show toured Australia. Only the carpet in her family’s Morwell home, and her age, hindered her progress. Her dad, Colin, fixed the carpet problem by laying slate in the lounge room. It was a far more satisfying surface for four-year-old Jaz and her brother, Dallas, to perform on as they split the show’s roles between them. Jaz always played Spring Tap, the role played by her idol, David Atkins.
The siblings tapped in front of the TV while watching a video of the musical their opera-singer grandmother had taped for them, and they improved their skills by attending mum Vicki’s Dancing Academy in Morwell, Gippsland.
Meanwhile, after a successful Australian tour, Hot Shoe Shuffle moved on to London, the first Australian musical to be exported to the West End.
The all-Australian cast travelled with it to London, then Japan, Canada and the US, and David Atkins and Dein Perry won a British Olivier Award for its exuberant choreography.
To mark its 21st anniversary this year, Atkins has brought back Hot Shoe Shuffle for another Australian tour. He is in the cast again – this time playing the role of father Dexter Tap.
On stage with him, playing April, will be that little girl from Gippsland, now an accomplished performer.
“I never thought that Hot Shoe would come back,” says the 25-year-old Flowers. “I never felt as passionate about a show as this one. Nothing in the past 25 years of my existence has influenced me as much as Hot Shoe Shuffle.”
Fresh from the success of her first lead role in a musical, as Tracy Turnblad in the long-running Hairspray (directed by Atkins), Flowers says she desperately wanted to win the only female role in Hot Shoe Shuffle, the Tap brothers’ long-lost sister, April, played by Rhonda Burchmore last time around.
Flowers says she was well rehearsed and perfectly placed to audition to be a part of the new Tap family, but she was far from confident.
“I knew the music, and the dancing was not complicated,” Flowers says. “But my first sing for Hot Shoe didn’t come out anywhere near as good as I wanted it to. I was shaking because my idol was sitting right there on the panel.
“The other daunting part was being in a room full of six-foot bombshells in four-inch heels.
“In the casting brief for April, it says she has to be beautiful but there’s nothing about height. I had it burned in my head that the part was made for Rhonda Burchmore, a six-foot two-inch glamazon.
“I told myself, ‘Jaz, you are more Marilyn Monroe than Rhonda’. Rhonda Burchmore and I are not similar in any way. Our voices, our bodies and our acting choices are all different.”
Flowers was in Sydney when she took the call that delivered the news “that made all my dreams come true”. She celebrated winning the part of April by toasting her success with a mojito at Darling Harbour.
“It’s a really incredible feeling to realise an actual dream you have as a kid is coming true. It was so unexpected to dance alongside my childhood idol,’’ she says. “It’s ridiculous; it leaves me bewildered.”
Flowers says that on opening night in Brisbane in May, she felt overwhelmed when she came off stage after a triumphant performance.
“I was just numb,” she says. “I gave it everything I’ve got. I realised that all my dreams had come to fruition. It sounds cliched but all my dreams have come true.
“I am most happy and comfortable when I am performing; that’s when life makes sense. I don’t know whether I was born to do this but I feel at home most when I perform. It feels right.”
Flowers’ first song-and-dance solo was at an eisteddfod as a four-year-old, and her first amateur stage role was at 12 as an orphan in Annie with Latrobe Theatre Company in Traralgon. The company recently staged its own Hairspray.
Dance classes continued for many years with her mother, who celebrates 40 years in business this year.
Training of Flowers’ low-C to high-G range began in earnest when she was 17 and in her final year at Kurnai College in Morwell.
“I didn’t like school much,” Flowers says. “I loved music and I loved drama and that was about it … I always wanted to be a performer.”
Every Saturday for six months her father drove her to singing lessons in Bentleigh with theatre performer Susan-ann Walker. It was a four-hour round trip from Morwell for a half-hour lesson.
He also drove her to Ballarat on a seven-hour round trip to see the University of Ballarat’s campus and learn more about its musical theatre course. Flowers says she returned home with a resolve to attain her VCE.
“NIDA [National Institute of Dramatic Art] and WAPA [WA Academy of Performing Arts] were too far away,” she says.
“Ballarat – I can deal with that. What was hard was the written side of things in a BA degree. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to focus time and energy on writing an essay.”
Since graduating in 2008, Flowers has kept on the move and on stage in major musicals: Shane Warne the Musical in 2009, Fame the Musical in 2010 and Hairspray in 2011.
She has leapt from ensemble to cast role to lead part, and her achievements have been noted by Atkins, who told those gathered at the Hot Shoe Shuffle Melbourne launch “a star is born”. “Her introduction to show business came through this show,” Atkins added.
Her parents, who attended the Melbourne launch and Hot Shoe Shuffle’s Brisbane opening night, say their daughter has the drive to get where she wants.
“Jaz is a different cat,” Colin Flowers says. “She moved out of home at 18 to go off to do the inevitable. She took the bit between her teeth, got an agent and did it on her own.
“An opportunity in life comes along and you grasp it. You learn from it and grow from it. If you are lucky it’s part of who you are and what you are.”
Flowers says she loves to return home between show tours to see her parents and her dog, Meeka.
“I have been living in Sydney for rehearsals, and off and on I’ve been back in Morwell,” she says. “I don’t really have a home base.
“If I could do the job I love so much in Morwell, I would. I adore being home, where there are only five restaurants to choose from instead of 500.”
Hot Shoe Shuffle moved from Brisbane to Sydney in July, and it opens at Her Majesty’s in Melbourne this month.
Flowers has returned to Morwell only between tours. It is hard to take time off from a long-running show that has eight performances a week.
“Doing a show in the same city for a year is tough,” she says. “With Hairspray I was in Melbourne for a 10-month run, not including rehearsals. I did one-and-a-half years with that show.”
For her performance as Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray she won a Sydney Theatre Award and a Helpmann Award nomination.
“I was pretty much on stage for the three hours of the whole show,” she says.
“It was difficult dancing in a fat suit and with that wig under lights, and dancing with 40 other cast members. It was hot but I got used to it. I am a sweater, and the fat suit I had to wear was made of wadding, pillow stuffing and Lycra.
“Hot Shoe Shuffle is easier in that I am not on as much as I was in Hairspray, but every time I’m off stage I’m into another costume. ”
Flowers has plenty of glamorous gown moments in Hot Shoe Shuffle, and sings big-band Broadway hits from the 1940s, including George Gershwin’s How Long Has This Been Going On and Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing.
“There’s nothing like singing with a brass band, it’s really cool,” she says.
“Give me a big belting solo with the lights on me; I relish that.”
Hot Shoe Shuffle opens at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Exhibition Street, Melbourne, on Friday, August 9. Details: hotshoeshuffle.com.au
