People and Personalities

When Milton Keynes mum Louise Roche staged her first play in 2000 little did she know that within the decade that same show would take her to the bright lights of Broadway in New York. 

The show was her comedy musical Girls Night, and when she staged that first time, with her friends at her local community arts centre -Madcap in Wolverton - she didn’t dream that the same wild enthusiastic response that the first Milton Keynes audiences had to her work, would be replicated all over the USA, and even further afield in Korea!

Girls' Night

Now, having visited Seoul in April, and more recently New York, Louise finds herself having to pinch herself hard to come to terms with the enormous success that her show is having. And as she sits in her kitchen in Milton Keynes dreaming up her latest potential hit, she ponders the big question – ‘where did it all go right?’

“Not many shows succeed off Broadway – the casualty rate is alarming” said Louise.
“That is what makes it so amazing what ‘Girls Night’ has done.”

It has been a long road from Milton Keynes to New York via Seoul, and a few more places in between.

She and her husband set up a theatre company in 2003 with the dream of seeing her plays performed on the stage of the Milton Keynes Theatre. They sent Girls Night on two medium scale tours in 2003 and 2004 to test the market – secretly wondering if the success they had had was simply a local phenomenon.  It proved not to be the case, as audiences as far afield as Dundee and Christchurch loved the mix of humour, pathos, and popular song that Louise saw as the essential ingredients for a good night’s entertainment. 

In 2006 they went for the big time in terms of touring in the UK when they recruited star names Lucy Speed and Gwyneth Strong for their first Number One tour.  Again crowds of mainly women flocked to theatres in Nottingham, Sheffield, Bromley and Truro amongst others.  As far as Louise was concerned this was it – five years dreaming had come to fruition. 

Then she got a call from a man in New York. At first she dismissed it as one of her husband’s mates messing around, but then she remembered that there had been an email from someone asking about the show. She arranged to meet the caller after he had been to see Girls Night at Wimbledon Theatre and the very next day, he agreed to purchase the rights to produce the show in the USA. Two years of touring the show around America followed before Entertainment Events decided the time was right to go for the big one – a New York opening!

The girls in Pushchair Theatre with Louise

The initial run of four weeks was sold out before the show even opened with very little press or marketing support and the first week of performances went down a storm. An announcement was quickly made by the producers that the run would be extended until the end of August. 

So what’s next for the successful playwright?

“I’ve been asked to write a new play for America, I’ve just done a really interesting project with a group of local teenage mothers, and I am working with a friend of mine on a film treatment of the Girls Night story – a Calendar Girls type thing – ‘Milton Keynes to Broadway’ – I think it has quite a ring to it, don’t you?”

If you’re in New York this summer, you can see Girls Night at the Downstairs Cabaret Theatre at Sofia’s (West 46th Street/Broadway, New York, NY).

‘Girls Night’ will tour the UK in 2010.