SEQUIM – To ready herself for the stage, the singer draws a line down the middle of an empty page.
On one side, she writes the lyrics of the song, say a beloved classic penned by Stephen Sondheim or Jerry Herman.
On the other, Carol Swarbrick Dries lets her inner voice warm to the task. She writes out the song’s story as it applies to events in her own life, making it “something I really know how to relate to.”
This way, “when you sing those words, they’re much fuller . . . a song isn’t just notes and syllables,” she said. “It should be a story. If it’s not, why sing it?”
Swarbrick Dries, who performs in theaters from New York City to Seattle, will soon make a rare appearance on a stage near her home in Sequim.
For the past three weeks, she’s co-starred in the Seattle 5th Avenue Theatre production of “Sunday in the Park with George,” a Stephen Sondheim musical about French pointillist pioneer George Seurat.
Among other things, the show is about finding your voice as an artist.
“Anything you do / let it come from you / then it will be new,” goes one of Sondheim’s songs, sung to one of Seurat’s descendants, a struggling post-modern artist.
In “Sunday,” Swarbrick Dries plays “Old Lady,” a stately woman who comes to a park near Paris to reminisce about how it used to look. She asks Seurat — her son — to “make it beautiful” again.
And though she’s been a member of the Actors’ Equity union for 41 years, Swarbrick Dries admitted this role, with its no-nonsense name, surprised her. A lot.
“When did this happen?” she asked with a smile.
“Suddenly you wake up and you are, appropriately, playing a character named ‘Old Lady.'”
“I feel gratitude,” she added quickly, “that I’m in a business where there will always be parts for me to play.”
The role in “Sunday” was particularly rich because it reconnected her with her mother, Natalie Swarbrick, who died last year at 92.
“This brings her back,” she said. “It’s art imitating life.”
Swarbrick Dries didn’t used to tell reporters her age. But this time, she went ahead: 61, and it feels fine. In a production such as “Sunday,” she does eight shows a week – something that’s doable thanks to “practice, practice, practice.”
And it doesn’t faze her at all to be driving home to Sequim the morning after her closing performance next Sunday — Mother’s Day — to sing in a Broadway revue at the Dungeness Schoolhouse.
The 75-minute show, presented by the nonprofit Readers Theatre Plus, will feature 23 songs, with Broadway veteran pianist Jim May accompanying Swarbrick Dries and local singers Pamela Hamill, Shawn Dawson and Ron Graham.
Proceeds will go toward scholarships for art students — visual artists, musicians or other performers — administered by the Sequim and Port Angeles education foundations. Admission is a $10 donation.
“We’ll have a basket for supplemental donations,” said Swarbrick Dries, adding that those contributions are tax-deductible.
Among the numbers Swarbrick Dries plans on singing: Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” and “The Madam Song,” plus a duet with Hamill of Herman’s “Bosom Buddies.”
Allen Fitzpatrick, who plays an artist named Jules in “Sunday in the Park with George,” called the Dungeness Schoolhouse event “something not to be missed.”
“Her humor, her grace, her ability to interpret a song, are almost impossible to find in one package,” he said in an e-mail from Seattle.
“She possesses great magnetism,” Fitzpatrick added, noting that he co-starred with her in the 5th Avenue’s production of “Sweeney Todd” and in the Broadway production of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
Swarbrick Dries has also sung on Broadway in “Side by Side by Sondheim” and “42nd Street.”
Later this year, she’ll appear in a movie, “The Whole Truth” starring Eric Roberts, as Mrs. Baroskita, an elderly Russian woman who makes a living with her performing parrot. The screwball comedy will be screened in Seattle in about a month, Swarbrick Dries said.
Right now, however, the singer is eager to bring Sondheim to Sequim. While the 5th Avenue is grand, the historic Dungeness Schoolhouse offers another kind of rich theatrical experience.
“There’s an intimacy there,” she said. “You can’t lie.”
_________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
