Bosom Buddies with Nancye Hayes and Todd McKenney at the Playhouse

Two stars of the Australian theatre - Nancye Hayes and Todd McKenney - are teaming up for a show unlike any they've done in their careers.

Nancye Hayes has been a star of the Australian stage for more than half a century. She made her name in the title role of the 1967 Australian production of Sweet Charity.

It was, she says, the beginning of an era when Australian theatre was beginning to cultivate its own stars rather than simply importing actors from British or American productions to play lead roles in musicals. She notes that other performers like Jill Perryman, Toni Lamond and Hayes Gordon - an American "import" who remained in Australia and established the Ensemble Theatre, among other achievements - were among those who became established in this period.

The success of Sweet Charity set her on an illustrious multi-award-winning career that's included such musicals as Chicago as well as many plays and a parallel career as a director and choreographer, working on shows like the 1979 premiere of The Venetian Twins, which she choreographed, and a 2001 production of The Wizard of Oz, which she directed. In 2014 the Hayes Theatre in Sydney's Potts Point was opened and named for her in recognition of her contribution to Australian musical theatre.

She's worked numerous times in concerts and in musicals as well as a play with fellow Australian stage legend Todd McKenney, who played Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz among other roles and was an outspoken judge on TV's Dancing With the Stars. They're friends as well as well as colleagues and their relationship has developed over many years and a number of opportunities to work together.

Hayes says, "The first time was in 42nd Street, 30 years ago - he played the juvenile lead, Billy and I played Dorothy Brock, the diva."

They were reunited on the musical stage in Annie in 2012 where she played the nasty orphanage director Miss Hannigan and he played her villainous brother Rooster.

More sympathetic were their characters in the play Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks: she played a Baptist minister's widow and he played a gay dance instructor.

"We did that show in 2006-7 and revived it in 2016," she says.

It proved very popular with audiences - so much so that many people asked if they were going to do it again. But instead of remounting that show, Hayes and McKenney have come together once more, when their schedules finally permitted, for something a little more personal.

In Bosom Buddies, they will sing and dance and reminisce about their lives in show business, both on stage and behind the scenes. Together Hayes's career spans more than half a century of Australian theatrical history: she went from being in the chorus of My Fair Lady in 1961 to playing Mrs Higgins in a 2008 Opera Australia production and Lady Bracknell in the State Theatre Company of South Australia's The Importance of Being Earnest in 2014 - "The last time I was in Canberra."

She also created a cabaret show for herself that she performed at the School of Arts Cafe in Queanbeyan in the early 1990s.

"We'll show some clips that people won't have seen - there's one of me on Bandstand in 1967."

Audiences might also be treated to a snippet of This is Your Life where Hayes was greeted by that TV show's host, Mike Munro, during the curtain calls of a performance of the musical Show Boat in 1998,

"It was done in quite an extraordinary way," she says. Her family and friends were in on the preparation but, as was obligatory, she had no idea. When she saw Munro approaching the stage she knew something was afoot.

"It was a genuine surprise. ... I was playing opposite Barry Otto and turned to him and said, 'It's for you' then heard the words, 'Nancye Hayes - This is your life.""

The resulting retrospective, she says, was "quite spectacular" and she didn't know who was going to turn up next to talk about her.

"Todd was one of the people and I was one of the guests on his [This Is Your Life]."

The result of all this time together, she says, is "We do a lot with each other, we work well together, we feel very safe with each other and we have a lot of fun" - and she hopes this goodwill will communicate itself to audiences.

As well as Broadway blockbuster musicals, Hayes has appeared in new Australian musicals though none of the shows she's been in has had the success of McKenney's The Boy from Oz or Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - two of the few Australian shows that have been hits both here and overseas.

She says of a show like Eureka Stockade, "There were a lot of good things in that, but it didn't make it."

As for why so few Australian musicals succeed, she's philosophical - "If we knew that, we could fix it - it's always a gamble" - but ever hopeful, thinking there are always people willing to keep trying to create new shows.

She's justly, if quietly, proud of her reputation as one of the great troupers of Australian show business and says she takes very little time off during a production. One story she relates is that a lot of people who understudy her tell others, "Don't understudy Nancye - you never go on."

But in Bosom Buddies there will be no understudy - how can there be, when Nancye Hayes is just being herself?