Kelly Price

Kelly Price grew up in Wigan in greater Manchester, well away from the hustle and flow of London's West End, but the capital is where she has been making a solid mark of late, via a series of high-profile musical roles that have landed her in the long-running Chicago, playing Roxie Hart. Price was the first Sarah Brown to actually play a performance in the recent Michael Grandage-helmed revival of Guys and Dolls, when Jenna Russell fell ill prior to the first preview. Russell quickly returned to a co-starring role that was later taken up for keeps by Price, who found herself sharing the Piccadilly Theatre stage with Patrick Swayze and Adam Cooper. From there, it was a shift across town to the Novello Theatre for the ill-fated West End premiere of Desperately Seeking Susan, a show that might have been all but forgotten had it not introduced Price to her live-in boyfriend, Scotsman Alec Newman, who played Dez opposite Price's Roberta, the Rosanna Arquette role. ("He's pretty hot," she says of the actor, with whom she lives in north London's Finsbury Park.) Now, it's on to Chicago for an eight-week run through October 25th as the latest in a ceaseless lineup of merry murderesses; Anna-Jane Casey is Price's Velma. Broadway.com caught up with the exceedingly amiable, articulate Price early one evening, as she was settling into her second week of performances as "the name on everybody's lips"—namely, Roxie.

Welcome to Chicago, which by this point must be less a West End show than the very best sort of musical theater assembly line.
Yes. It is that thing of not being able to put your own stamp on the role, or so you might think, except that we have very much started from scratch looking at who Roxie was. There's been no pressure to reproduce what anyone else has done. The creative team are so brilliant here that they like everyone to have their own approach to the characters. It's a very slick show but it's all about detail, and the American creative team still have the same enthusiasm and passion for the show that they've had all along.

How aware were you beforehand of what the demands of this show are?
Well, I'd seen it twice, with Claire Sweeney and Jill Halfpenny—no, three times, because I also saw [Dancing on Ice star] Suzanne Shaw. I don't remember specifically what any actress has done, unless maybe subconsciously I have. The casting on this show is so varied that I think any performer, really, can tap into whatever she needs to play it. Roxie's quite naive yet also ambitious, which is why she's such fun to play, and she really goes on a journey; she really learns a lot. Essentially, she's a bad person—after all, she kills her lover. But the audience is there rooting for her; they want her not just to try to better herself but to improve herself.

There's that amazing line during the extended number, "Roxie," where the character remarks, "I'm older than I ever intended to be." How do you play that at your young age?
The girls the show is based on—the real-life Roxie and Velma—were in their early 20s: Roxie was 23 when these things happened. So I think any age can play it. I play that song from the point of view that throughout the number, Roxie is gaining the confidence that comes with having her own act and being the star rather than the chorus girl. I know sometimes people laugh because they think, “What a silly thing to say.” But there are certain lines like, "I'll get a boy to work with, hell, I'll get two boys," that show Roxie in the process of being transformed. That's why it works with different Roxies from different backgrounds and particularly different ages and all shapes and sizes. It's as if she kind of refines herself throughout the show: by the end, she finds herself completely on her own again and lost and she has to start from scratch. Whatever age you are, that's quite tragic.

It’s entirely different from anything you’ve previously done.
Tell me about it [laughs]. Fosse has a very specific style, so I wanted to try and work hard to get the style right. I find it shows when not everybody is in the style of it—maybe not to the general public but we can tell. Apparently, it’s not the most technical form of dance—it’s not balletic, but it still requires a different feeling, which is why it does look very sexy when you watch it.

Do you find that type of dance suits you?
I’m 5’8”, so I’m good for this style of dancing particularly, or so I’m told, and there’s an interesting dynamic between myself and Anna-Jane [Casey], who plays Velma, because she’s quite small and I’m really tall. The storytelling in the choreography is just so fantastic. Even just the little movement of a finger can tell a story, or the isolation of a shoulder, or the movement of a foot: everything counts.

Desperately Seeking Susan stars Kelly Price & Emma Williams

Ah, but do you do the famously challenging Roxie cartwheel near the end?
[Laughs.] Yes, I do do that. I haven’t cartwheeled since I was about 10 years old—it’s quite fun, quite liberating to do a cartwheel. You don’t often get asked to do things like that. Last year in Desperately Seeking Susan, I had to jump backwards from a 12-foot-high platform. They made a bed kind of thing like a very small mat for me to land in, which lifted me up.

What’s your sense of that production now almost a year after the fact? At the time, people were certainly rooting for you and [co-star] Emma Williams to take the town.
It’s interesting. What you fear most in this business is being in a flop and actually when it happens, it’s a good lesson to learn, especially at the early stages of your career, that it’s not the end of the world and it doesn’t mean that you’re not talented or that you don’t have a career ahead of you. You just have to get out there and start working.

Could you see the writing on the wall?
Well, I’d been in Mamma Mia! while I was still training at Mountview and then Guys and Dolls—these two huge hits—and then there we were playing sometimes to fifty people. People had put in so much hard work, and I don’t know what happened: somewhere along the line, something went wrong in the chemistry. That was a real shame and all of us felt very sad but we weren’t sad when it closed. It wasn’t selling very well, so I think by th