Leanne Jones
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Age: 22. “I'll be 23 in March.”
Currently: Making her professional debut as Tracy Turnblad, the lovably large leading lady at the capacious heart of Hairspray, the Tony-winning Broadway show that has finally arrived on the West End more than five years after its New York bow. Jones caught the Broadway production last December, having first auditioned for it in 2005 while she was still at drama school—Mountview, incidentally, where Jones was a year below The Sound of Music's Connie Fisher. Hairspray‘s long-delayed arrival in London has only been good for Jones. "If the show had come in 2005, I wouldn't have been ready—I was still at drama school—but also people wouldn't have known what it was. I swear that our audiences in previews know the words and what's coming up because they've seen the film.”
Hometown: Jones is originally from Stoke-on-Trent in the northwest of England but moved to the Cambridge area when she was eight. She credits her father's remarriage last summer for landing her this West End role. "I started to lose weight when dad got married in July," she is saying, as people pop in and out of her Shaftesbury Theatre dressing room to borrow hairdryers, say hi, and the like. "And if I hadn't started to lose weight, therefore I believe I wouldn't have got the part. That's what I think," she laughs. "I don't know if it's true."
Hairspray stars Leanne Jones and Michael Ball
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Mama, I’m Not Such a Big Girl Now: Any Tracy has self-evidently to possess the physical heft for the role. "There are so many references to her being fat, and she has to be. It's not right to have a skinny or a slim Tracy." But as Jones goes on to point out, "at the same time you have to be able to bust your ass eight times a week." The net result is that she has lost nine or 10 pounds since rehearsals began, having already shed four stone prior to that. How much does she currently weigh? "I'd rather not say," Jones replies, before acknowledging that she has come down in dress size from a 20 or 22 to a 16 or 18. Jack O'Brien's production and, especially, Jerry Mitchell's choreography constitute what Jones calls "a two-and-a-half hour aerobics class eight times a week. I'm running around all the time, and when I'm offstage I just about have a chance to gulp some water before I'm running back on."
Timeless to Me: It helps with regard to Hairspray that Jones feels so complete a connection to the character, despite having never been to Baltimore, where the musical adaptation of the John Waters film is set. "To me Tracy's story is my story; that's how I feel. She's just confident and very innocent and not scared of anyone and she's excited. She's a bit of a sponge. She goes into every single opportunity with open eyes and goes, ‘Show me, show me, let me learn what you're doing.’ She's just this big wide-eyed puppy who's so cute. I love her."
Believe It or Not: After her first audition for the show, Jones was one of the few performers from Britain to get a screen test for the film. In the end, as audiences can see for themselves every night, she got third time lucky with Hairspray, having not made the cut in recent auditions for Footloose, The Sound of Music and Les Miserables (she went up for that one twice). "When I heard [the show] was coming this year, I thought, I didn't believe it. It's not going to happen to me, it was not meant to be. Then I finally got the gig. It's very surreal; a bit of a dream come true."