Philip Quast's Quantum Leap Forward

Philip Quast, who leapt to stardom at the Australian premiere of Les Miserables and was whisked off to the London show, has won the lead in Sunday in the Park with George at the National.

When Philip Quast took a phone call last week in his dressing room at London's Palace Theatre, where he is starring in Les Miserables, and heard "It's Stephen Sondheim here, Philip", he promptly dropped the phone.

The 31-year-old Australian has just won what is perhaps the most coveted role in musical theatre in Britain at the moment, the lead in the British premiere of Sondheim's Pulitzer Prize winning Sunday in the Park with George, to play at the National Theatre.

The maestro was ringing to have a chat with the handsome, talented young man he had heard auditioning and to discuss how he was thinking of tackling a fiendishly difficult role.

To be telephoned by the incomparable Sondheim, composer and lyricist of a string of Broadway hits, a cult figure, and the first visiting professor of drama and musical theatre at Oxford University, left Quast, as he put it, "dumbstruck".

"I was sitting here before a show when he rang and introduced himself. There were some people here and it was quite strange - they squealed and ran out of the room. I shut the door, turned down the tranny, picked up the phone and said: "Excuse me, Mr. Sondheim."

"I was not very articulate on what he began telling me about how to approach the material. I asked him where I would start."

Quast, who comes from Tamworth, NSW, where his parents have a turkey farm, knows he is taking a hop, step and a long jump into the big time; he is very apprehensive about what sort of landing he will make.

He auditioned four times, singing twice for Sondheim. He was never unaware of him for a second.

"He did not say anything...just sat out there in the dark. I could see him moving occasionally, laughing and talking. When he telephoned the Palace Theatre, I said I was sorry I hadn't met him at the auditions but he said that was okay, it was up to him to introduce himself but auditions were not that sort of situation.

"He is supposed to be shy but once he started talking about the work, he did not stop. He did say that it was his summation that I would not get sick of singing his songs.

Apart from Quast's respect for the Sondheim genius, he feels under pressure as a comparative newcomer who has captured a highly prized role, and that at the top of the venue, the National Theatre.

"I can't tell you how nervous it makes me, " he said convincingly in his dressing room before going on stage to play the vengeful Javert in Les Miserables.

"Of course my friends know that paranoia sets in, self-doubt and all that with me," he continued, flashing a smile that diluted his intensity.

Quast has been playing Javert for the past two and a half years, first in the original Australian production, directed by Trevor Nunn, and now in London at the Palace.

He leaves the show on December 2 after more than 400 performances and will have only a month before rehearsals for Sunday in the Park begin. He desperately needs that month for a holiday - although he will have to keep singing to keep his voice in shape.

There have been tough times, too, for him at the Palace. The show had been running there for four years before he arrived and the production and performances had evolved into something utterly different from the show Nunn shaped in Australia. "I found I had to bite the bullet, to stand up straight away and say how I'd like to do it."

"I can see now that they were quite right to resist. There was not time. I could not hog the rehearsal when there was a cast that had to perform again that night. But I can be arrogant and pig-headed. It almost came to blows at times."

Literally? "Yes, it could have at one stage. We are the best of friends and laugh about it now."

Who would have been his adversary? "Valjean, of course, the man I am hunting."