Back Over Here!: An Interview with Frances Ruffelle

In 1987, a British actress with a dirt-smudged face, clad in a shabby brown trenchcoat and newsboy cap, sang of her solitude. Breaking all but the stoniest hearts of the Imperial Theatre's audiences, she won numerous awards--including the Tony--before returning to the UK. Two decades later, Frances Ruffelle has come back to New York to perform a cabaret show.

This time, though, she's not breaking hearts, but making pulses race. Backed by the George Gee Swing Orchestra, Ruffelle will play two engagements at the Supper Club on July 10th and July 17th. The actress, who since Les Miserables has continued a successful performing career on the West End, will treat audiences to a program of standards and musical theatre songs set to smoky jazz and brassy big band arrangements.

Ruffelle says that her new show--which was a hit with both critics and audiences when it premiered as "Frances Ruffelle and Her Boys" at Ronnie Scott's in London--is a sort of return to her roots. "A lot of the music is the kind of thing I grew up with, listening to it with my parents. So there was a band in London called the BBC Big Band, and I sang with them. And I had never done a big band before, and it was just so fantastic and I had such a good time…so that's how it all came about," explains Ruffelle, who will perform numbers ranging from "Slap That Bass" and "It's Alright with Me" to "Nowadays."

When she first opened the show in London, Ruffelle found this new triangle of singer, band and audience a little nerve-wracking. Yet now, she feels quite differently. "It's fun! Just fun…I don't think of it as a cabaret act per se, I call it more of a gig, if that makes any sense," she says, conjuring images of laid-back "girl singers" such as Peggy Lee and Rosemary Clooney. "But it's certainly relaxing and I just enjoy myself. I think all the songs are interesting and I hope the audiences here will agree as well!"

Indeed, a BWW video preview reveals a show in which an unabashedly sexy Ruffelle is having a great time. She thinks that the show will offer a chance for fans to see a side of her that she hasn't always expressed on stage. She's also quick to acknowledge that her "Boys" were a big part of the London show's success, and is looking forward to working with the George Gee Orchestra--her new band that she will meet for the first time this week. "I definitely love to talk to my men...I want to see how I feel, how they feel." Ruffelle jokes that she'd be pleasantly surprised if there were a few women in the band this time around. The Ronnie Scott's concert has already been recorded, and will soon be released on CD (check her website for more information).

Her gigs at Ronnie Scott's and at the Supper Club will be terrific practice for her next musical--it was recently announced that Ruffelle will join Donna McKechnie and Diane Langton in the first West End production of Over Here!, a WW2-set musical with songs by the Sherman Brothers that originally starred two out of three Andrews Sisters when it opened on Broadway in 1974.

One might be excused for having first

Certainly the same held true for Ruffelle in both the London and Broadway productions of Les Miserables. In the Boublil-Schonberg show (which is returning to Broadway in the fall), she gave a breakthrough performance as Eponine, the luckless, large-hearted urchin hit by an unrequited love--and later shot down on the barricades. Wringing tears with "On My Own" and the duet "A Little Fall of Rain," Ruffelle won Olivier, Theatre World and Tony Awards, among others.