WEST End theatre star Lucie Jones is heading back to Belfast for her first solo concert next week and she can’t wait to “click back” into just being herself again and having a good old chat with the audience.
“I absolutely love Belfast,” gushes the former The X Factor finalist who has just finished a run of Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London.
“I’ve been to Belfast with maybe four or five different tours over the years, but I’ve not actually done a solo show, so I really wanted to come back and say ‘Hi’. Everyone is so friendly; it’s such a great place to visit.”
Lucie Jones Live in Concert will be an intimate show, she promises – unusually, just herself and a piano - and a set list of “beautiful songs” taken from shows she has starred in, among them Les Misérables (Fantine) Wicked (Elphaba), The Waitress (Jenna), Legally Blonde (Elle Woods) We Will Rock You (Meat), Ghost (Molly) and Rent (Maureen), as well as some she would like to be in, with a few personal favourite pop and rock numbers thrown in.
“I’ve been wanting to go back to Belfast ever since I was last there with Waitress,” says the singer, actress, presenter and one-time Wonderbra model. “As well as the music, people love to hear stories, so I’m going to be telling some stories about my past year, about who I am now... it’s going to be quite special.”
She will be picking out some funny moments too – like the time the dog in Legally Blonde broke free and wandered on stage too early and Lucie’s character had to spontaneously work around its non-scripted action. “It was just a bit of a mishap – there are so many stories like that,” she reveals, “and I will be regaling the audiences in Belfast with a few of them.”
Theatre, she maintains, is the perfect escape, showing – as in The Baker’s Wife - “normal people living normal lives… making mistakes, hoping for redemption and forgiveness: the things we all have to deal with.”
“That sums up a lot of the characters I have played to date,” she muses. “I think that is what theatre does really nicely - it gives people an escape; it gives them something they can see themselves in, safe in the knowledge they are not going to be judged or damned for it.”
Now aged 33, the Cardiff-born singer who represented the UK in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest in Ukraine, is thankful for the springboard that appearing on The X Factor in 2009 gave her, but insists “hard graft” has kept her at the top of her game ever since.
“X Factor absolutely gave me a start in the business and I am so grateful for that,” she says. “I was only 17 and it introduced me to my agent and when I left the show, I started working straight away. I was in Les Mis just after my 18th birthday and I’ve been grafting and grinding ever since, really.”
In many ways, it was the proverbial baptism of fire for the just-turned 18-year-old who admits she didn’t know how to read a rehearsal schedule properly after first joining the “nurturing and supportive” cast of Cameron Mackintosh’s Les Miserables in London.
I’ve been to Belfast with maybe four or five different tours over the years, but I’ve not actually done a solo show, so I really wanted to come back and say ‘Hi’
— Lucie Jones
Being thrown in the deep end and learning on the job also made her realise she needed to say ‘No’ to some things and try to manage expectations more realistically: “I was excited by all these opportunities, but I was trying to do too much. I was doing photo shoots, writing an album… I was working a full day and doing a show afterwards - and then I got sick.
“Cameron Mackintosh really helped me and gave me the medical care I needed to get back into the show. Since then, I focus on what needs to be done. You can’t learn these things in college – you only figure it all out when you’re on the job.”
Waitress has been one of her favourite musicals to date - when performing in the West End, co-star David Hunter (Dr Pomatter) would hand her character a prescription featuring a little doodle to make her smile, which she collected and pinned to her dressing room walls. Three years later, they all made it into a book - Doctor’s Orders - which charts behind-the-scenes stories and illustrative memoirs from time spent on the show.
The Asian tour of Ghost, meanwhile, was the most difficult – not least because of a visit to a Chinese hospital just before a two-day show when she suffered an allergic reaction. But proving hard work brings its own reward, Lucie looks back on a “gruelling” rehearsal schedule on American Psycho (in which she played Victoria) and only remembers the “real team bonding”.
Now, she passes on her wisdom to others via the Lucie Jones Academy, set up out of her love for teaching which started over Zoom during the 2020 lockdown period. “I loved connecting with students and actors from all over the world and working with them was a true joy for me,” she says. “I wanted to bring it into the real world, so the academy has been created for in-person workshop-based education around the country.
“We cover on- and off-stage disciplines, working through careers that the theatre industry has to offer and building skill sets for people from all backgrounds.”
It has been a busy year so far for the singer who also performed in the 50th anniversary concert in London of the Stephen Schwartz musical Pippin (as Catherine) alongside Patricia Hodge who originated the role in the West End premiere of the show in 1973.
Next up on October 1 is a special one-off concert of Ghost the Musical in which she will reprise her role as Molly before - at last - switching back to ‘Lucie’ and heading to Belfast.
“It’s a completely different thing, seeing someone in their own right rather than seeing them in a role,” she adds. “That’s the great thing about doing shows like this – I can just be ‘Lucie’ for a while instead of a character in a show. It’s going to be great.”
