Friendships can be complicated, as Gorgi Coghlan and Anna-Lee Robertson know well.
The two entertainers, both stars of the stage and screen, first met in Year 7 at St Anne’s College in Warrnambool.
“We were two very innocent, bold, confident young girls at a Catholic girls college that very much helped us express who we were, particularly the incredible music department,” Coghlan said.
“We both had the same singing teacher, …so with Anna and me it was the classic cliche of 13-year-old teenagers, where we’d have sleepovers, sing with hairbrushes and discover all the artists of the 80s. We had quite a big circle of friends and it was glorious.”
But after high school they went their separate ways, and despite staying in contact their friendship waned, Robertson said.
“Gorgi was more of a contemporary girl (musically)…and then she forged this amazing career in television as a broadcaster while singing on the side,” she said.
“I went down a traditional path of studying music at university; I was operatically trained, and then I went into musical theatre.
“We came in and out of each other’s lives, but there was also a whiff a distance there, of competition and rivalry and misunderstanding – all of the things that come with being young.”
That loss of closeness and their subsequent reconnection forms the foundation of their new show, Songbirds.
Through the music of master songwriters from Irving Berlin and Cole Porter to the Beatles and Adele, Coglan and Robertson explore the closeness, separation and forgiveness they have experienced through their 37-year friendship.
Accompanied by stellar pianist Kym Alexander Dillon, the pair deliver a show that Robertson said felt like “a warm hug”.
“It’s for anyone that’s had a complicated relationship, and that’s all of us,” she said.
Songbirds is at Geelong Arts Centre at 11am on Wednesday 26 November.
