Frances Ruffelle performed Paris Original at the Crazy Coqs, London
Frances Ruffelle performed Paris Original at the Crazy Coqs, London.
Almost 30 years on from creating Eponine in Les Miserables, Frances Ruffelle is back in Gallic mode for her Paris Original show in a sold-out week at the Crazy Coqs and a first-night audience not short of celebrities – Tim Rice, Trevor Nunn and fashion designer Julien Macdonald, who just survived his recent Strictly Come Dancing dance-off – gave her a standing ovation.
Ruffelle clearly adores all things French and she offered a rich mix of the familiar and less familiar including the title song, from the 1960s Frank Loesser musical How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
And she has much to be grateful to France for.
‘Hymne a l’amour’, the Piaf classic she sang at her Les Miserables audition, won her the part of Eponine and started her on a journey that took the strong-voiced 19-year-old Londoner to Broadway and a Tony Award as one of only two members of the London cast to be head-hunted for the New York version.
After recalling how Trevor Nunn, who was directing her in Starlight Express at the time, recommended she go for a part that was made for her in Les Mis, Ruffelle reprised her moving audition to a rapt Crazy Coqs audience and it was not difficult to see what won this raven-haired gypsy that iconic role.
Earlier she had given us another song in which she had a personal interest, ‘Speaking French’ (“What is love if you don’t speak French?”) from the Lynn Ahrens/Stephen Flaherty comedy musical Lucky Stiff in which she played the West End lead in 1997.
She also included a composition from Songs From a Hotel Bedroom, in which she portrayed a French cabaret singer in a 2010 touring production, and with a name like Ruffelle, she is often thought of as French, an idea that pleases her as she’s been going there ever since she was six.
Only a few months ago she was running through the Piaf classics every night in an acclaimed Leicester Curve revival of Pam Gems’ musical play based on the waif-like Parisian legend’s tragic life. Naturally, there was no shortage of Piaf songs in this show, not only ‘Hymne a l’amour’ but, among others, the insistent ‘Padam Padam’ and, bringing a jam-packed 90 minutes to a climax, the inevitable ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’.
Yet the one song that resonated most with me was ‘Les Trois Cloches’ – which many people here perhaps know better as the Jimmy Brown song – a big hit in France for Piaf and a group of nine guys from Lyon called Les Compagnons de la Chanson who sang a cappella behind her.
Why so special? Well, it’s a terrific song anyway, but it happens to have been the first record that I bought in 1954 to play on the gramophone (strange word these days!). I had saved up out of my 11-shilling-a-week newspaper round.
Of course, we also got Cole Porter’s ‘C’est Magnifique’, but the Parisian connection with Paul Simon’s ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ was lost on me, unless it was the fact that the song reached number two in the French charts!
Wearing a variety of outfits, mostly black, the most stunning, glittery and shortest one apparently a Julien Macdonald original, which she unveiled after doffing a contrastingly off-white raincoat, Ruffelle looked a million dollars. Anyone coming up to their half-century would probably like to know what pills she’s taking as they would all like to have some.
Not everything worked. The accordion she had painstaking been practising for months packed up on her, she was undoubtedly nervous and tried a bit too hard at times, and some of the less familiar material left the audience a little restless without any explanations of what the songs were and who had written them. Some of these elements may of course improve as the show beds in.
But there was no disputing the graft that Ruffelle had put into devising the programme with Matt Ryan, her producer Danielle Tarento and MD Ben Atkinson. The accordionist who shared the Piaf stage with her in Leicester, Romano Viazzani, made a guest appearance and she was surrounded by willing musicians in Steve Cooper, Nick Morton-Smith and Damian Fisher, as well as a boy soprano called Cole who duetted with her on the haunting ‘Les Trois Cloches’.
No doubt Paris Original will soon be off to Manhattan where she recently reprised an earlier creation called Beneath the Dress at the prestigious 54 Below nightspot.
Jeremy Chapman
www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs
French Connection – An Interview With Frances Ruffelle
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