JOAN BURSTEIN Browns' first lady of fashion - Mayfair Times

SHERIDAN SMITH’S
SUGAR-COATED
PERFORMANCE AS
ELLE WOODS IN
LEGALLY BLONDE,
THE MUSICAL HAS
WON HER FANS
AMONG CRITICS AND
SCREAMING
TEENAGE GIRLS
ALIKE. BUT SHE’D
RATHER PUT THE
SHOW’S SUCCESS
DOWN TO THE
CHIHUAHUAS, FINDS
NUALA CALVI
Pink lady
First one pink-collared Chihuahua appears. Then
another, and another. Soon, there’s a line of five, with a
greetings card-perfect bulldog keeping up the rear,
marching their dogwalker down the alley. It’s clear that
this is the stage door for the Savoy Theatre, currently
home to Legally Blonde, The Musical.
Inside, the Blonde – Sheridan Smith, aka West Coast
ditz-turned-lawyer Elle Woods – sounds very much like
her alterego, albeit with a Lincolnshire accent. “Oh my
God!,” she squeals, stealing the words from the show’s
signature song. “How gorgeous are the dogs? They’re
certainly the stars of the show. There are five
Chihuahuas now because they have, like, understudies.
How cute is that? I have to resist stealing them every
night. I take different ones home different nights, to
bond. I keep the Chihuahuas in my bed.”
On stage the night before, Smith banished all
memories of Janet, the trashy bird she plays in longrunning
BBC comedy Two Pints of Lager and a Packet
of Crisps, with a glossy, hot-pink performance that had
the critics on a sugar high. “Infinitely more likeable than
Reese Witherspoon in the film,” said one; “blessed with
vitality, warmth, great comic timing and sudden
moments of touching vulnerability,” wrote another.
The latter could be a description of 28-year-old
Smith herself, whose standard greeting is a friendly
hug, a mischievous laugh and an endearing selfdeprecation.
That the show has been both a critical and
commercial success is, she says, down to the cold
weather and the credit crunch. The story of a fashionobsessed
apparent airhead, who blags her way into
Harvard Law School to pursue her college sweetheart
and surprises everyone by ending up top of the class,
has a much-needed feel-good factor.
“We were worried people would be, like, ‘This is just
a big, fluffy, pink show’,” Smith says, earnestly. “Really,
you know, we could’ve been slated, and we prepared
ourselves to be. So the fact everyone’s taken to it and is
enjoying it as much as we are is brilliant.”
Every night, Smith spends up to an hour signing
autographs for the crowds of teenage girls that now
habitually gather for her, some of them dressed in pink
and sporting blonde, Elle-style wigs, outside the
theatre. Foremost among her followers are the SAS –
the Sheridan Appreciation Society – her nickname for
the hoards of friends and family from back home in
Epworth, who pay visits en masse, orchestrated by
Smith’s mum.
“Oh my God, they’ve been so many times,” she
laughs. “My mum came yesterday with a bus trip from
the village. Fifty people. All in pink, because she told
them that was the dress code. She’s got another bus
load coming in April, and another in May...”
It’s 12 years since Smith herself left the village, aged
just 16, to be in a National Youth Music Theatre
production of Bugsy Malone that transferred to the
West End. She had intended to return home when it
finished, but the work kept coming, and she never quite
got round to it.
“I moved in with five other 16-year-olds from the
cast,” she recalls. “We lived on jam sandwiches – it was
ridiculous. But we loved it. It was scary, scary – but
brilliant – and bless my mum and dad for letting me
go, because I don’t know if most parents would.”
As a country music duo who brought Smith up
listening to Dolly Parton (“She’s one of my idols –
there’s her calendar up there”), her parents
presumably understood her calling. But once
Smith was in London, she found there were
other people to convince.
“To move down to this industry, this
showbizzy world – I felt really out of
place and really judged because of
my accent and because I was from where I was from,
because I was working class,” she admits. In that way,
she says, she knows just how her Legally Blonde
counterpart feels arriving at law school in high heels
and a pink dress to face her snooty fellow students.
Nevertheless, a critically-acclaimed role in the
Donmar Warehouse’s production of Sondheim’s Into the
Woods followed, and soon a move into TV, with parts
including Ralf Little’s girlfriend Emma in The Royle
Family, Smithy’s sister Rudi in Gavin & Stacey, Brandy
in Benidorm and, most enduringly, Janet in Two Pints.
By the time Smith played Audrey in the West End
production of Little Shop of Horrors last year, she
hadn’t done any musical theatre for eight years, and
wondered if she would be able to break out of the Janet
mould. “I wasn’t sure if people would take me seriously,
because people start pigeonholing you,” she says.
When rehearsals for Legally Blonde started, she was
plagued with similar self-doubt. “At one point I thought,
‘Oh my God, am I really going to be able to do this
part?’” she recalls. “I started thinking maybe I’d bitten
off more than I could chew.
“I’m not your typical leading lady, I’m not like a
Christine in Phantom of the Opera. Usually a leading
lady is a soprano and also the leads are quite often
male – the women are either the girlfriend of, or the
mistress of, someone. It’s rare that you get a part like
this where she’s front and centre. I’ve got the two
boyfriends in this, which is great. It’s very girl power.”
The critics would disagree: Smith has more than
proved her leading lady credentials, but for some
Legally Blonde’s pink-tinted politics haven’t stood up to
scrutiny quite so well.
“Is it a good message, a girl with a Chihuahua in a
bag being a ditzy blonde?” Smith sighs. “I think people
can get too bogged down with that. I think the message
is about this girl just being true to herself. It’s a bit of
fun, you know – it’s not Chekhov or Shakespeare.
“Dolly Parton has a brilliant quote where somebody
said to her, ‘How do you feel being called a dumb
blonde?’ and she was like, (puts on American accent)
‘Well, I don’t mind – ‘cause I ain’t really dumb and I ain’t
really blonde, neither’.”
Legally Blonde, The Musical is at the Savoy Theatre.
Tel: 0844 871 7687.
THEATRE: Nuala Calvi nuala@pubbiz.com
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theatre