She’s never worked as a solo actor before, she hasn’t previously worked with the composer; the internationally acclaimed Warren Willis. Yet Sikwila seems to see these challenges more as tools, working them to her advantage to learn and grow as she returns to her beloved Chapel Off Chapel.
“Chapel is like my second home,” says Sikwila. “But I also wanted to take this opportunity to push the boundaries of what I can do and push my skill set. This is the first show I’m going to be in where I’m the only actor on stage and that’s something I’ve never done before. I love music by Freddie Mercury, but I never had much exposure to David Bowie growing up. It’s been great learning all his songs and finding out about him – my character is someone who’s devastated by the death of David Bowie, so I’ve had to figure out who he was as an artist and what kind of impact he would have had on me to portray the right emotion.
“I’m really lucky that this is a show that hasn’t been done before, so I can mould her how I want her to be. She’s meant to be a person who’s living in South London, she’s a hard-working aspiring actor, singer, dancer – because I relate to her in a lot of those ways and she’s a bit of a primadonna and gets very dramatic about things – I feel like we’re quite similar. I don’t think it’s going to be difficult, the only thing I have to work on is the connection between me, Bowie and his death.”
Winner of the Carling London Best Musical Award after selling out two seasons of his hit show Genesis to Broadway, Warren Willis is an incredibly talented composer, and the re-imagined Bowie and Freddy Mercury tracks in the show are in more than safe hands.
“I’ve never worked with him before. He’s incredible – probably one of the smartest musicians I’ve met in my life,” says Sikwila. “He’s a motherfucker on the piano – I’ll watch him playing a section, writing out the chords and composing on the spot, playing with his left hand, writing with his right and playing this piece from start to finish while I’m singing the lyrics to this new composition he’s been working on. It’s mind-blowing.
“I got a phone call out of the blue a few months ago inviting me to work on this piece he was doing for Chapel and I said yes, even though I didn’t know who he was. I don’t say no to things that might make me uncomfortable, otherwise I won’t grow as a performer – and working with him has been incredible. It’s just him on piano for the whole night and he has a real way of painting a picture with the music. He knows how to set the tone. I think with me being unfamiliar with the music, I don’t have an attachment to it the way it was written, so I feel like I would be the right person to help with that vision.”
Being out on a night and hearing an old Bowie or Queen track can turn any stool jockey or bar fly with half a soul into a dancing flamboyant maniac. When Sikwila reveals that her character deals with somewhat darker issues such as self-harm and mental illness, she also reveals that Willis’ re-arranged compositions are far bleaker than the comparably bright originals.
“I think taking the dark path is what’s going to leave a mark and make it more memorable – that juxtaposition between a dark story and what a character is going through in contrast with these light songs,” says Sikwila.
“The way the music has been arranged and re-written shifts the mood completely and I think people are going to be really switched on to that. There’ll be songs that people know, the more popular songs, and songs that hardcore Bowie and Mercury fans would probably only recognise.
“It was a journey of discovery for me because I hadn’t heard half of these songs and I’m learning them in the context of what the show requires. Now, it’s my duty to convince people that this music can be interpreted in different ways and I’m having a really great time as an artist discovering ways to do that.”
