Tricia Paoluccio on the secret to playing Dolly Parton in musical Here You Come Again

“The secret to playing Dolly is to be very practical,” says Paoluccio, co-writer and star of the musical. To make the point, her voice goes up a pitch and her accent moves several states southwards. She has Dolly down to a tee.

“You said you needed me – what’s going on?” she says with a spot-on Tennessee twang. “Let’s get right down to brass tacks. What we have to do is get to the bottom of it. How can we solve this problem? How can we look at things clearly, squarely, all sides of it?”

Something else happens too: Paoluccio’s eyes well up. She has to take a deep breath before continuing. Reverting to her own voice, she says: “The show is about 50 different ways that Dolly is a really good friend. She’s patient, she uses tough love and humour, she listens, she’s like the best friend you could ever ask for.”

It is not the only time in our interview the actor comes close to tears. Despite singing them every night, these songs never cease to move her.

“It is a remarkable experience to stand on the stage, open my mouth and Dolly comes through,” she says, her extended fingernails an extravagant pink in readiness for the evening performance. “I really mean it when I say I don’t feel it’s me. I’m just opening up and letting her shine through me. It’s my honour to do it because I love her so much and I know audiences love her so much.”

When it comes to Dolly fandom, Paoluccio started young. So young, in fact, she knew no better than to imitate the singer’s every vocal quirk. To this day, she sounds uncannily like her.

“When I was five or six, I heard Here You Come Again on the radio,” she says, moved again by the memory. “I was transfixed. I said, ‘I need to learn this song.’ I was at my dad’s office and someone at the computer – a big TRS-80 – typed the words so fast for me. I didn’t even know how to read, but I memorised that song. I copied her voice from a very young age. I had to learn to come into my own singing voice, which is much deeper, with a different timbre, but I can still switch into that vibrato and scratch because I’ve just done it so long.”

She wrote Here You Come Again with husband Gabriel Barr (who also directs) and comedy writer Bruce Vilanch. To rework it for a British audience in readiness for its current lengthy tour, they brought in playwright Jonathan Harvey, the man who developed Coronation Street's first openly gay storyline and wrote the Kathy Burke sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme.

Now set in Yorkshire, it is about Kevin, a comedian-turned-investment banker who has just gone through a traumatic break-up with his boyfriend and, in the depths of lockdown, finds himself back in his childhood home. Turning on his old record player, he turns to Dolly, like a guardian angel, to help him come to terms with changed circumstances.

The format allows Paoluccio to run through a greatest-hits score, including Jolene, 9 to 5 and Islands In The Stream, without having to force the plot in awkward directions. “Sometimes they’re presented like a concert and sometimes in an organic way where Dolly is helping Kevin or teaching him something,” she says. “There are certain songs that the audience jump in and sing along with us and there are others they listen to and you could hear a pin drop. When I sing God’s Colouring Book, they are absolutely silent because they know Dolly is trying to teach Kevin the power of gratitude.”

Despite the lockdown setting, she and her collaborators wanted to create an upbeat celebration of the country star. “It’s a story that’s funny but that surprises you with the emotion,” she says. “During the pandemic, we were all undone. We had to let go of careers, apartments, homes, relationships, plans… Everything we knew about ourselves was jarred. Our show does not dwell on that, but we thought it was the perfect circumstance for somebody to swoop in and save the day. If you’re going to have an uberfan and their fantasy friendship come to life, why not have it come during a time of universal need?”

Singing songs every night that have a winning combination of melody, storytelling and directness, the actor has only become more enamoured of Dolly’s gifts. “Doing this show is almost like an act of meditation or prayer,” she says. “It is unbelievable to me how alive the messages of these songs are and if you just go moment to moment, you can get new revelations, ideas and inspirations. At the end of the show I sing I Will Always Love You and I’m looking out to 1200 people who are so grateful to be sung to and to be told I will always love you. It’s a message that we all long for. It’s very moving. That connection is a very powerful feeling.”

Here You Come Again, Edinburgh Playhouse, 23-27 July; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 30 July-3 August; King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 1-5 October.