By Helen Musa

One of Canberra’s favourite stage performers, Amanda Bishop, will soon be back here on the stage of The Playhouse, playing Truvy, the owner of the fictional hairdressing salon at the centre of Steel Magnolias.

And, yes, although she has no intention of doing a copycat version of Dolly Parton’s portrayal of Truvy in the 1989 film, she will be wearing a spectacular blonde wig.

Bishop, best known to Canberrans for her 13 years with The Wharf Revue, is cemented in local memories for playing Julia Gillard singing Bizet’s Habanera from Carmen, complete with red wig.

“Not just Julia,” she reminds me when we catch up by phone in Sydney, but also Jacqui Lambie, Tanya Plibersek, Julie Bishop, Katy Gallagher and, more recently, Allegra Spender.

Canberra is her favourite place to go out and spend money – she mentions Fyshwick, Braddon and NewActon. She has lots of good friends here who work in DFAT, including at least one ambassador, and she loves performing on what she says is the best stage in the country, The Playhouse.

It’s only just over a year since The Wharf Revue officially folded, but she’s very happy to have been associated with it over 13 years, in and out of the show, describing it as “an amazingly rich education ground”.

Especially exciting was working with writer-performer-directors Drew Forsythe, Jonathan Biggins and Phil Scott as they created the show.

“Those boys had such a passion for politics,” she says. It meant eight months of full-on rehearsing, but for the boys, who had to write the scripts, it was more like 11 months between each show.

But all good things come to an end and, she says, actors always have to reinvent themselves and she’s gone back to what she knows best.

Bishop, born in Merriwa in the Upper Hunter, went to boarding school in Sydney, then on to the University of New England in Armidale to study science and arts. But after falling under the influence of the renowned ethnomusicologist Prof Catherine Joan Ellis, inaugural professor of music at UNE, she switched courses and graduated instead with a Bachelor of Music.

In Armidale she learnt four different musical instruments and took part in packed out local music hall shows with local identities, including politicians.

“I knew music was going to be my career,” she says.

Then she auditioned for John Milson’s new Musical Theatre course at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts by singing The Last Rose of Summer.

The rest is history.

Lately, she’s been performing in Canberra playwright Mary Rachel Brown’s Chicken in a Biscuit at the Old Fitzroy, on the feature film Fangs, starring Joel Edgerton and Toni Collette, and in the Ensemble Theatre’s premiere of David Williamson’s The Social Ladder.

She’s thrilled to be playing Truvy, but she’s quick to remind me that the 1989 film was based on the 1987 Broadway hit by American writer Robert Harling, who appears twice in the movie as the church minister. Bishop also believes real-life doctors and nurses were used in the film.

Truvy, of course, is the owner of the home hair salon in which Steel Magnolias takes place. The play is set in the late 1980s, at Truvy’s in-home beauty parlour in a fictional Louisiana town, where a group of women, as delicate as magnolias but as tough as steel, regularly gather.

Truvy, Bishop tells me, makes space for everyone to come and tell their stories.

“It’s hilarious, yet heartfelt,” Bishop says, adding that she’s tickled pink to be performing with fabulous mature actors such as Lisa McCune, Belinda Giblin and Debra Lawrance.

Although some of it is very sad – it’s no secret the play was based on Harling’s experience of his sister’s death – it’s still hilarious.

“The one-liners are such that you could assume it had been written by a modern Shakespeare,” she says, quoting lines like: “I’m not crazy… I’ve just been in a very bad mood for 40 years,” and, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me!”

One of the main themes in Steel Magnolias is time itself, as in Truvy’s line: “Time marches on and eventually you realise it is marchin’ across your face.”

True enough, Bishop says.

The last time the play was seen professionally in Canberra in 2009, Jackie Weaver played Truvy, while in an earlier professional production here in 1988, Maggie Dence took the role.

“I’m following that tradition,” Bishop says.

Steel Magnolias, The Playhouse, June 17-21.