Lee Ormsby
|
Age: 34
Currently: Helping bring the crowd to a frenzy as the Big Bopper in Buddy, the jukebox musical favourite that has just reopened at its third West End theatre.
Hometown: Bristol
The Big Time: Buddy marks “a big London job” for the exceedingly amiable Ormsby, who studied performing arts at Middlesex University before getting a Judi Dench scholarship to attend the yearlong postgraduate course at Mountview Theatre School; recent Producers’ leading lady Amanda Minihan was also his year. Since graduating in 2000, he’s been employed more or less consistently, ”touch wood.” Credits include two separate productions of Sweeney Todd, playing Sweeney and the Beadle, as well as Roger in Grease, the part that comes with the number “Mooning.” Ormsby spent a year in the Faith Brown-led UK tour of Sunset Boulevard, following which he appeared in the BBC Symphony/Radio 2 concert version of that show in Ireland, alongside Petula Clark, Michael Ball, and an 102-piece orchestra.
Rock On: Ormsby was first cast as Jiles Perry (J.P.) Richardson, Jr.—aka the Big Bopper—for a recent tour of the musical, which started in April in Wimbledon before being ”freshened up,” as the performer puts it, for this latest West End stand. Before signing on, he says, “I was semi-familiar with the Buddy story but didn’t know the ins-and-outs of the musical version, and I had the preconception that it was for older people: a blue-rinse brigade musical.” Now, Ormsby laughs, “Having worked on it and seen the audiences, the age range is phenomenal. We’re getting 17- and 18-year-olds through to old-age pensioners, and by the end of the show, everyone’s up” on their feet. “It’s a phenomenal testament to Buddy’s music.”
Lee Ormsby & Dean Elliott in Buddy
|
Family Ties: Richardson, as rock ‘n’ rollers know, was killed, age 28, in the same February 1959 plane crash that cut short Buddy Holly’s life. That April, his widow gave birth to a son, Jay Perry Richardson, who to this day carries the torch for his dad musically by dint of his annual recreation of Buddy and Co.’s legendary Winter Dance Party. “I e-mailed the son when I got the job to see if there was any information he could add, since Jay is very forthcoming and is quite a character himself, I’m told,” Ormsby says. Because Jay Richardson never knew his father, “He only went by what his mother could tell him,” including a report that the Bopper coined the term “music video.” If the elder Richardson had lived, ”He’d have been making music videos; that was his intention.”
Top This: Ormsby says he is one of the few in the 15-strong Buddy company to physically resemble the person he is playing. ”They’ve made me look like [the Bopper] as well, with the platform shoes and leopard jacket,” he says. “I always feel if you’re playing someone that was historical, you should be as close to them as possible. I’m meeting people who are in their 70s who actually knew the Big Bopper and have said, ‘You nailed him: his mannerisms and all.’ It’s great when you get feedback like that.” Thanks to YouTube, Ormsby has been able to study footage of the real Big Bopper to a degree that wasn’t possible when Buddy first hit London nearly 20 years ago. “I’ve watched him perform ‘Chantilly Lace’ and have studied it right down to the haircut—that very severe flat top.” Has Ormsby, follically speaking, followed suit? “Yes, unfortunately.”
Weight a Minute: The production’s galvanising climactic concert is helping Ormsby—who weighs in at 16 stone—shed the pounds. “The Buddys and Ritchies [as in Valens] come off absolutely soaking wet at the end of the concert, and I’ve lost about half a stone; we have three sets of costumes for just that reason.”
That’ll Be the Day: Ormsby may be getting an aerobic workout eight times a week, but he speaks proudly of a career lacking in the embarrassments that are sometimes hidden in an actor’s CV. “It’s been pretty solid,” he says of a professional life that began upon leaving Mountview with a gig at the old Players Theatre in a show called The Bluebird of Paradise. (As an eight-year-old, he had been in an embryonic stage version in Bristol of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, playing young Jeremy Potts.) “There hasn’t been anything where I’ve thought, ‘I don’t want to do that again’; touch wood. There have been some jobs in London that I turned down because I saw the show, and I thought, ‘I can’t bear to have that [part] for a year.’ But I did Sunset Boulevard for 18 months, and I miss it now; I could have done another year on it.” He laughs: ”Mind you, I have heard stories of people who’ve dressed up as bananas. Who knows? Next year, I could be dressed in animal skins giving out leaflets.”
Special Relationship: Has Ormsby clocked the ongoing fascination in the London theatre with all musical sounds American? “Look at the audience: they seem to get lost in the show from the concert through to the end. There’s an animal instinct where they don’t care who’s watching them—some wild feral thing you can’t put your finger on. The director keeps saying there’s no real explanation as to the effect Buddy’s music seems to have on people. Let’s just say that six months in, I’m still loving the show as if it were the first day.”