Coronation Street, the Musical: look back in leopard skin

As Coronation Street: the musical prepares to open, Simon Hattenstone goes behind the scenes and asks the cast – from Julie Goodyear to Bill Roache – how they plan to bring its bolshy magic to the stage
Julie Goodyear in Street of Dreams
Street smart ... Coronation Street, the Musical with Julie Goodyear as Bette Lynch (centre) PR

I can't move for childhood ghosts. In front of me is grumpy Albert Tatlock; to my left, battleaxe Ena Sharples and her mousey friend Minnie Caldwell; to my right, legendary busybody Hilda Ogden. We are in a huge warehouse in east London, for rehearsals of Street of Dreams (or Coronation Street, the Musical), and I am finding this time-travel strangely moving. I'm tempted to hug these characters, ask them how they've been all these years.

Like so many people (and especially Mancunians), I grew up with Coronation Street. Back in the 1970s, it was pretty much the soap. But it was also more than that. In its youth, the series was fantastically well written, often by its creator Tony Warren, the language and emotional reach putting it on a par with the BBC's Play for Today, more than today's soaps. It has created the greatest drama from the smallest events: its largest audience, 23 million, watched the 1987 episode in which the families ate Christmas lunch; Mavis got a bit tipsy and Hilda emigrated to Derbyshire.

The 51-year-old show has now been adapted for stage by composer and lyricist Trisha Ward. It's a production on an epic scale, intended for arenas rather than theatres; the set is so long it could double as a runway. While Corrie legends tell their stories on ground level, an orchestra plays amid the roofs and chimneys; in the sky above, massive video screens project original footage.

The musical was first suggested (possibly not entirely seriously) at an ITV brainstorming session a few years ago; the channel was exploring ways of taking their major brands beyond television. Ward says that, initially, she thought it was a terrible idea. Then she couldn't get it out of her head. "I thought, I know how to do this."

Successful musicals such as Mamma Mia! began with famous music; Ward started with famous characters and storylines, but no music. She has taken many of these stories, and some original dialogue, and fitted the music around them. The story is told chronologically, staged in black and white to start with, just as the series was in 1961.

Back in the rehearsal space, it is 1964 and Ena Sharples' friend Martha is dying in the snug of the Rovers Return. She is a working-class woman who has always dreamed of holidaying in Spain, and just before she dies, she launches into a hallucinatory sequence that would do Dennis Potter proud: "I've got me suitcase ready to pack/ I've got me sundress, me sandals, me mac."

Ward thinks it was Warren's writing for women that made Coronation Street so special. "In those days, you couldn't come out and say you were gay [as Warren is] and you couldn't put gay men into Coronation Street. So he gave gay men's lines to strong northern woman, and the women became these bolshy, strong people, saying fantastically pithy lines."

Such as? She cites Elsie Tanner. "Her son Dennis had just come back, and she goes, 'Dennis, I've got gorillas in the sink, strippers in me bed and I've gone out for half an hour and you've let the bailiffs in.' I thought I had to have that." She quotes Bet Lynch. "She said, 'This isn't a smile. It's a scream with a lid on it.' Don't you think that's brilliant?" She pauses. "And I'm allowed to use them," she whispers, astonished by her luck. "A very famous composer was interested in doing this about 15 years ago and they wouldn't give it to him," she says. Who? "I'm not going to name him!" You don't mean Andrew Lloyd Webber, do you? "Oh, I couldn't possibly comment." She giggles.

I tell Ward I stopped watching Corrie years ago. "Because it got a bit murdery?" she asks. Yes, I say; everything became so sensationalised. She nods. "I guess that's the way it's going now, isn't it? It was real. See, that's what I'm trying to do with this show." Mind you, she says, one of her favourite numbers features the Street's most famous murderer, Richard Hillman, whose confession to his wife, Gail, in 2003 was the third most-watched episode ever. "People are snobby about Coronation Street, but his performance in that episode ... Gail finds out and says to him, 'You're twisted, you're Norman Bates with a briefcase.' Well, that was a gift." She has turned the number into a homage to Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

Brian Capron, who played Hillman and sings the song in the musical, is modest about his crimes. "I only dispatched three people. I think the worst crime was trying to murder Emily Bishop. I whacked her over the head with a crowbar but she survived. I always say it must have been the hairspray on her wig. I also tried to drown Gail, but that didn't work out. To everybody's disappointment." That's a bit ungentlemanly, isn't it? "Yes, poor old Gail."

Capron first appeared in the soap in the 1980s, as a social worker. "I got to know all the iconic figures as they were dying off, as it were." He became a close friend of Peter Adamson, who played Len Fairclough and was destroyed by allegations of child abuse (despite being cleared in court). "He had the biggest demise of any soap opera actor of all time. And he was actually a lovely, lovely man. He used to sit in the corner of the room quietly doing the Telegraph, Times and Guardian crosswords, a very erudite man. His fall from grace was horrendous. I saw him in a touring play, The Relapse, and as he walked on stage there was this icy hush, and I thought, 'Oh my God', and that was the last thing he did. He died of cancer in some filthy little flat somewhere."

They were extraordinary times, Capron says. He talks about the Queen visiting the set; the late Doris Speed, who played pub landlady Annie Walker, had to be kept out of her way. "Doris got completely drunk." So she was a drinker? "Well, yes, she was. And they had to keep her away from the press. I remember her saying to the then producer, 'I'm not going back, you're a very naughty boy.' It was hilarious. She was on brandy, if I remember right."

Despite playing a psychopath, people are nice to Capron when they spot him. "The thing about Richard Hillman is he had two sides to him. I tried to make him the guy next door who washed his car and always said hello, but who had this mad side. So people loved to hate him" What did the show do for his career? "What a soap opera can do for a jobbing actor is raise your profile up just a notch. I've not had a stratospheric career since, but it's been very comfortable, thank you. I've had a lovely nine years because of Richard Hillman."

In the London rehearsal room, Ward tells me about a seance scene featuring the Street's only surviving original cast member: Bill Roache, who plays Ken Barlow, Coronation Street's intellectual lothario. "Bill's been wonderful. He's such a nice man despite the headlines about all the women he's slept with." (Roache recently admitted to sleeping with more than 1,000 women, on Piers Morgan's TV show.) "Did you see the Guardian ran this thing, saying tick this box if you've slept with Bill Roache?" She bursts out laughing. "He walked into it. Such a nice man."

When I catch up with Roache over the phone, I can't hear him clearly because one of his three Jack Russells is kicking off in the background. Barlow was a young teacher when the show started; he is now 80.

Why does he think so many people connect with Coronation Street? "Because it's about underdogs struggling against adversity," he says. "Everybody identifies with that. And then it's their loves and all the problems they have. They are not in a high social strata with lots of money.; they're people with all the problems the majority of people have."

Is he soap's most long-standing character? "Yes, I'm in the Guinness Book of Records, but I don't like the word soap," he says, a tad bossily. "Thankfully, it says I'm the longest serving actor in the world in an ongoing drama. That is my classification."

He thinks the word soap fails to do the show justice? "When it started there was a whole new realism sweeping through cinema. We were part of that surge: method acting, Marlon Brando, James Dean, John Osborne, Look Back in Anger. We were the cutting-edge drama of the day. It was highly prestigious. So it was very, very meaningful then."

Roache, who starred in the second most-watched episode (a showdown between him, his wife Deirdre and her lover Mike Baldwin) once sued the Sun, partly for suggesting he was "boring" like his character (the court found in his favour). Today, he says he is very different from Barlow. "I've always been much more adventurous than Ken – very sporty."

Has he ever got bored? "I began to wonder in the middle about my own future and what I was doing, but I never seriously considered leaving because it was so beautifully written. Every year I get two or three stories that are as good as anything I'd get anywhere else."

He's not surprised he's still going at 80. "I've always been like this, cracking on. I never thought I'd retire, whatever I was doing." I mention Martha, and the song she sings before dying in the Rovers. Would he be happy to pass away on set? Well, he says, he's certainly got no plans to get out early. "While I make a contribution and they want me, I'll be there."

Does the Street translate easily into a musical? "Anything that's real can be turned into a musical. Look at West Side Story. You could say, you've got kids fighting in New York, how d'you turn that into a musical? Anything that's genuine with a good story can be a musical – and the Street has a lot of good stories."