Peter Rix: The secret behind Marcia Hines’ career longevity
Her career has spanned five decades but it didn’t occur by happenstance. So what, or who, does Marcia Hines credit as being inside the engine room of her extraordinary career?
Wentworth Courier
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This article was first published in the Wentworth Courier in December 2019.
Singer Marcia Hines is clear how she has become one of Australia’s favourite singers in a career that has lasted 50 years
Lunch with Marcia Hines. Whacko. What a treat. I have been a fan of this lovely lady ever since she shone in Harry Miller’s production of HAIR, directed by Jim Sharman.
That was half a century ago. Can you believe it? Now 66, Hines’ career is still going strong.
To what does she attribute this remarkable longevity? Her answer is brief and brisk: “My manager.”
For those unfamiliar with the workings of showbiz, a clarification may be needed. Performers traditionally have agents to represent them in negotiations, to fix fees, to draw up contracts, to chase payments. Said agents usually have a string of clients, a melange of marquee names, up and coming artists and some who never upped and came and upped and went.
Managers, on the other hands, have a few hand-picked clients and, as the designation suggests, manage in the fullest sense of the word. Hines’ manager is, as he has been for 49 years, Peter Rix.
“We started to work together in 1971,” says Rix. “My requests for long service leave have been constantly rejected!”
If Rix has moulded and shaped Hines’ career, two other showbiz personalities, the late Harry M Miller and director Jim Sharman kickstarted it.
On the hunt for an African-American singer to star in the second incarnation of HAIR, Hazza and Jizza headed to the States. In Boston they heard, and hired, an outstanding young singer called Marcia Hines. Hines was a natural talent, just as her daughter Deni is.
She had begun singing aged nine in a church choir and subsequently studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. Boston has a long history of making and enjoying both traditional and contemporary music.
The Boston Symphony is one of the finest in America, the Boston Pops equally famous, and the annual summer festival at Tanglewood attracts musicians and audiences from all over the world.
Equipped with formidable vocal technique, Hines began singing with bands and even flirted with a name change. For a period, a mercifully brief one, she performed under the stage name of Shantee Renee. How far might she have travelled with a moniker like that is anyone’s guess.
Reverting to the name her parents gave her, she signed on with Miller and the rest is Australian popular music history. She was 16. To travel to Australia she needed a legal guardian and Miller took on in Sydney that responsibility.
Her Sydney debut in his legendary staging of HAIR made her the youngest person in the world to play a featured role in this epoch-defining musical. Since, she has released 22 albums and sold 2.6 million copies and has been inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame and become a beloved theatre performer.
We are dining at uber-chic China Doll on Woolloomooloo wharf. Earlier I had asked if she had a preference and she nominated a pizza parlour on Cowper Wharf Rd.
Given her diva status (in the true sense of the word, rather than the more modern, somewhat derogatory, usage) I felt this an inappropriate choice and proposed an upgrade. It transpires as handy as she lives in an apartment above.
She has arrived dead on time, smartly turned out in maritime colours, blue jeans and a navy and white striped top. Her nails are pale sky blue.
A success symbol in the form of a fetching octagonal emerald dangling on a gold chain as fine as fuse wire around her neck is her only adornment. She is pescetarian and, ergo, orders fish. She doesn’t drink, either, and sips a bitters and soda.
Metaphorically holding hands, we walk together down Memory Lane, recalling en route some of her fellow performers in the Miller years, included Doug Parkinson, John Paul Young, Reg Livermore and John Waters.
We move from HAIR: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, to give it its full name, to Miller’s other mega-success, Jesus Christ Superstar, in which she succeeded Michelle Fawdon in the central role of Mary Magdalene. It was another personal triumph, but one in which she also experienced what is every performer’s worst nightmare. She “dried”, forgot her lines.
“There I was on the stage of the Capitol [Theatre] and I blanked, totally blanked, just before starting to sing I Don’t Know How to Love Him. Somehow the conductor had a great big piece of cardboard and a texta pen and he wrote the first words and held them up to me. I hummed a little and then picked up the rest of the song.”
Such lapses are not uncommon in shows that run for an unconscionably long time. HAIR ran for three years, Superstar for two. Performers sometimes switch to autopilot.
But Hines finds long runs exhilarating.
“People don’t seem to realise that when you do a long run it can be really interesting because performers leave the cast during a run and others come in and bring their energy to the show. But the challenge is to maintain your own consistency.”
The stage may have been where Hines began her career but it has been maintained in other spheres.
“I loved being on Australian Idol. I had seven good years with that show,” she says, of the talent showcase on which she became a judge in 2003. And then there have been a slew of appearances with more direct contact with audiences than via the rectangular glass screen that the late Clive James referred to as the Crystal Bucket.
She’s played clubs throughout the country and is about to star as the dragon in the lavish stage version of the movie, Shrek The Musical.
Manager Rix puts a finger on Hines’ singular commitment to her work, referring in particular to her strength, which he compares to high tensile steel.
“Her physical and mental strength has been the key to her success,” he says, noting that in Shrek, she’ll be performing nine shows a week.
Does she have any regrets, any performers she’d like to have worked with? “Most of the things I’ve wanted to do I still want to do. I really wish I could have sung duets with George Michael, Prince and Luther Vandross.”
She now thinks of herself as being very much an Australian, but I ask if she ever imagines how her life might have panned out had she done her stints in those two landmark musicals and then returned to America.
“I don’t think hypothetically,” she says. “I don’t think what I’d have done if I hadn’t left [America] but I’m glad I did.”
A final career summation: “When you’ve been travelling coach [class] you really appreciate first class.”
How does she cope with recognition? This writer has observed her sweeping regally though Woolworths in Potts Point, gratefully acknowledging the greetings from fellow shoppers.
“I think it’s absolutely lovely. To all those people who give me a great big smile, I truly do thank you. And Merry Christmas”