When Lindsey Kraft opens her one-woman musical We’ve Been Here Before at Holden Street Theatres this weekend, there’s some truth in the title. Back in February, she performed many of its songs five minutes up the road to a sold-out Thebarton Theatre, opening for veteran piano shredder and onetime Adelaide resident Ben Folds.

In the show she plays Liv, a character who Kraft calls an “amalgamation” of her own life and experiences.

“It’s essentially a woman who’s kind of stuck in cycles, and she doesn’t really know how to get out – she doesn’t know she’s in a cycle,” Kraft tells InReview. “And through revisiting her past and her present, she’s realising that the songs know the truth before she does.”

Off the stage, it took Kraft a while to realise she was a songwriter at all. Spotted by a modelling scout at the age of 16, she describes a “bizarre childhood” juggling school with a career she tried to keep secret from her classmates.

It eventually led her to acting, landing small film and television roles in NCIS, Bones, Veep, Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory, along with that rite of passage for any New York actor: discovering a corpse in the cold open of a Law & Order episode.

“I ended up finding someone in the bathtub,” she recalls, adding that she also played an unrelated sex addict opposite Jeremy Irons in an episode of Law & Order: SVU a decade later.

Kraft was also a regular on Netflix’s Grace & Frankie from 2017-2022, but moving to Los Angeles for work also drew her into the world of musical improv. “I found improvising a little frustrating, because I just wanted to do my own thing,” she says. “Which is so selfish, but I realised it was because I was a songwriter – and I hadn’t discovered that yet.”

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Kraft’s family had a piano growing up, but she “never in a million years” considered herself a player or composer. Another handful of roles nudged her closer to the mark, including a guest spot on another police drama a guitar-toting musician. She began learning Billy Joel songs, naïvely finding her way around the familiar chords and melodies until she began to create something of her own. She was almost 40 when she started taking formal piano lessons – then the pandemic hit.

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“I had time to just be at the piano for 10 hours a day, and go down like wormholes on the internet,” she explains. “All these things seemed like a foreign language – it is a foreign language, until you start to learn. I learned a little bit every day, and I suddenly was understanding some of the things I was playing.”

Before Covid, Kraft had already begun working on a monologue performance, but as she grew more confident with her songwriting it soon evolved into a musical. “The musical started to write itself,” she says.

Folds was one of the friends she shared her early forays into songwriting with, and he eventually took her on tour.

Asked how the pair first crossed paths, Folds quips, “I was the dead person in the bath.” They’ve now played nearly 200 shows together, but when the curtain rises at Holden Street Theatres the usual dynamic will have flipped: he’ll be in the background supporting Kraft, juggling keys, bass and drums as co-director and backing band.

After workshopping the show in the US, the pair’s choice to stay in Adelaide between tour dates to fine-tune and unveil We’ve Been Here Before was part-timing, part-homecoming.

“The last experience I had was when Fringe was actually the fringe,” explains the Rockin’ the Suburbs singer and Ben Folds Five frontman, who famously lived in Adelaide at the turn of the millennium – and has the song to prove it.

“I mean, it was the edge of the festival. I just thought that it seems like the best place in the world to do it.

“This has always been a city where there’s such talent – it’s like a ship floating in the sea by itself. Stubbornly, Adelaide has remained a place where certain talent decides to stay.

"I come back after not having lived here for 25 years, and I see a really evolved place. It’s like seeing kids that you haven’t seen in 20 years and now they’re working the stock market, doing cocaine. They were just in strollers a couple months ago."

“I think there’s been real intelligence here for sticking it out, and as a result I come back after not having lived here for 25 years, and I see a really evolved place. It’s like seeing kids that you haven’t seen in 20 years and now they’re working the stock market, doing cocaine. They were just in strollers a couple months ago.”

Given the turbulent climate back home – a year ago Folds resigned from his advisory role at the Kennedy Centre, which has since rebranded as the ‘Trump-Kennedy Center’ – the pair seem happy to be bunkering down in Adelaide.

“It feels really nice to be here, really lucky and grateful that we have this time – it feels almost unfair,” Kraft says.

The pair have already made enough local connections that when they first dipped their toe into the Fringe – playing to a tiny room at The List Festival Party the night before the big Thebbie show – Kraft felt surprisingly nervous.

“It felt like a hometown show for me – which is so ridiculous,” she says. “I think because I came into music so late, it’s hard to find a community as a 40-something-year-old. Everyone starts on their path, and they’re all young and coming up. I’ve never had that, so I feel like I’m having that here in a way.”

Folds chimes in: “You know, a music career is full of all sorts of short-term ambition. You got to make your next album, you got to do your next tour, you have to have meat to feed the beast.

“But [Lindsey] comes in and starts writing songs at 40 years old, and they’re actually because she has to, and they’re about something. If you’re in a hotel lobby and there’s a piano there, she’ll sit down, start singing songs for people – it’s infectious.”

Lindsey Kraft: We’ve Been Here Before is playing at The Arch at Holden Street Theatres from March 7 – 22