Pair's double act is like father, like daughter

FATHER and daughter in one musical, father and daughter in the next - Stephen Tate and Caroline Sheen are in danger of becoming typecast as blood relations.

Last night both actors were expected to appear for the first time in the musical Les Misrables at the Palace Theatre, playing Thenardier and his daughter Eponine.

This is the second time in succession they have played father and daughter after Tate's appearance as Clyde Gabriel and Sheen's as Jennifer Gabriel in The Witches of Eastwick at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

However, a spokesman for Les Misrables said: "It's a total coincidence they have been cast as father and daughter in both musicals.

Just because they worked well together in one show doesn't mean they would necessarily do so in another."

In the tale of three witches who terrorise a New England town, Tate played a drunken newspaper editor and Sheen supplied the love interest with her trysts with a local youth.

In the adaptation of Victor Hugo's tale of Paris revolution, Thenardier is a grasping peasant, while his daughter dies on the students' barricades.

Ironically in both musicals, the daughter is a victim of her selfish parents who finds solace in a doomed love affair.

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