Taylor Swift photographed during a concert in New Jersey. (Image courtesy: AFP)
Pop star Taylor Swift has leapt to the aid of a Sydney theatre company suffering an 'artistic emergency' by giving the cast of 70-somethings permission to dance to her chart-topper
Shake it Off.
Sydney's Belvoir Theatre took to Twitter with the hashtag "greygrey4taytay" to appeal to the American singer for permission to use the song in a play due to open Wednesday night.
Theatre director Anne-Louise Sarks issued this tweet-appeal to Taylor:
She was referring to the play
Seventeen, which features veteran Australian actors playing 17-year-olds on their last day at school.
The song,
Shake it Off, was an integral part of the production's climax scene. Yet, at the last minute, one of the song's publishers denied the cast permission to use the song.
"Is there anything at all you can do?!!" Ms Sarks pleaded to Taylor.
The response was quick with the singer giving the green signal in a tweet:
Taylor Swift is a global superstar with more than 61.5 million followers on Twitter, but her work was largely unknown to the cast of the
Seventeen until they began rehearsing the play, which was written specifically for them.
"These actors weren't, until these rehearsals, familiar with Taylor Swift - or much pop music - so we introduced them to this track, they learned all the words - it was kind of a big process," Ms Sarks told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"So it was quite a big deal to get denied those rights at the last minute," she added and also stated on Twitter later that Taylor's support for artists was 'a thing to behold'.