Ruthie Henshall

Ruthie Henshall

Ruthie Henshall was 11 years old when she first began to dance and has since become a triple threat actress/singer/dancer on both sides of the Atlantic. She has starred in the West End in Crazy For You and She Loves Me, winning a 1994 Olivier Award for the latter, and did the Cats/Les Miz/Miss Saigon circuit, appearing in Cats at the time that she was dating Edward Windsor, who is probably better known the world over as Prince Edward; the two are still friends. More recently, she's done numerous takeovers—on the road in the U.K. in Fosse and as Maria Friedman's Palace Theatre replacement in The Woman in White, while New York gigs have found her at Encores! (Stairway to Paradise in May 2007); acting in a David Ives piece off-Broadway (The Other Woman, opposite Scott Cohen, in 2006); playing Velma in Chicago (in London, she was the revival's first Roxie); and starring alongside Carol Burnett in Putting It Together. This month she opens at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in the title role of Marguerite, marking the first time in seven years that Henshall has originated a part on the West End. The last, Peggy Sue Got Married, introduced her to the Canadian performer, Tim Howar, whom Henshall went on to marry. The couple have two daughters: Lily, five, and Dolly, three. Broadway.com met up with Henshall one recent lunchtime to talk about opening a show from scratch, New York vs. London, and why her latest part in the new Michel Legrand/Alain Boublil/Claude-Michel Schonberg/Herbert Kretzmer collaboration feels nothing less than blessed.

You've been in New York recently, acting on and off Broadway, and of course Tim did a long stint in Rent. Was it Marguerite that brought you back to London or were you looking to come back anyway?
This just felt absolutely right, and I realized I didn't want to bring my children up in New York. I love New York as a place for a single person or even a couple, but I found it far too fast and the apartment living drove me crazy: not being able to open the back door and play in the garden, just a simple luxury like that. I found that you had to haul everything with you to Central Park for the day and had to make sure that you had everything: nappies, juice, this, that and the other. I didn’t find New York easy with children, though there’s no doubt that in other ways, it is my second home.

So you’ve come back to be a country girl?
[Laughs] We’re living at the top of the Essex/Suffolk border, 10 minutes from my parents, and I love the life there; I love the community. When I first moved out there, I thought, this is awful. Someone left a pie on our doorstep the first day and I thought, oh no, it’s going to be those kinds of neighbors. They’re going to want to know everything. [Laughs] But I love it now. I couldn’t love it more. You only have to knock next door and say, ‘I’ve forgotten some milk. Could you watch the children for two minutes?’

Ruthie Henshall in Marguerite

Even nicer, I would imagine, at least professionally, is to be creating a role afresh, which you haven’t done for a while here.
I had made up my mind six months before I came in to meet them for Marguerite that I’m not doing any more takeovers: Never say never, but I felt as if I’d been there, done that, and I don’t want it anymore. I didn’t get into this business to step into somebody else’s shoes, and unless something else comes along, I said to myself that I was going to think differently about my career—perhaps I would only do concerts instead, for instance. Then, six weeks later, the offer came to do a musical about a 40-year-old woman who is the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi officer: It was smack bang on my age—I was 39, about to be 40—and here I would be playing someone who’s an absolute star in her circle. Everyone wants to be with her and what have you, but under all that she’s had to give up an awful lot.

With all that comes the challenge of doing an original musical, which can be a risk.
You are going to love this, though, because number one, it’s in an intimate space [the Haymarket, as the final show in a three-production season from director Jonathan Kent] as opposed to a big, huge theater, and the set is beautiful. What [the designer] Paul Brown has done is unbelievable. It’s almost cinematic the way they’re doing all the scenes and the way the whole set works. It’s exciting, too, because the music’s fabulous. Just look at the pedigree of the creative team: if even one of them had said, ‘Would you come aboard?’ I’d have said, ‘All right,’ so to have them all together—I just can’t believe my luck.

I gather this is a proper book musical, which these days seems almost radical.
Yes, it’s a book musical with music and songs, each of which stand up on their own and could be taken out of the context of the show. Alain and Claude-Michel wrote the book in French, or wrote the lyrics and the book, and Jonathan’s actually written it in English, with Herbie doing the lyrics. But saying that, of course, Claude-Michel helps musically every so often, though it all has to be passed by Michel anyway, so he can always say no. Michel’s such a brilliant songwriter: we did one of the songs the other night at a concert for him as a kind of standard number and jazzed it up slightly, and it was as if it had always been around. It was one of those where you thought, oh God, I was sure that had been written 10 or 20 years ago.

It’s great to have you back in town, and above the title, but hasn’t your New York stuff made you thirst for that culture, which seems to generate many more stage musical divas than London ever does?
I didn’t even think that. I had an amazing trip over there, of being embraced, and I loved the theater community there which is so fun. We just don’t have that here. New York in itself is a community, everybody knows everybody, and that’s what I love about it. Over here there’s not that one place where all the theaters are and we don’t do as many charity things together.