Ruby Turner

Ruby has just completed a successful run in ‘Simply Heavenly’ in London's West End after selling out The Young Vic last year. The musical has won several awards and was nominated for the most Outstanding Musical at the Laurence Olivier awards on February 19th, where Ruby performed a Cole Porter song. The story line is as follows :

Simple sure leads one complicated life. With a wife awaiting an expensive divorce, a girlfriend awaiting a fiancée's ring, and an indefatigable weakness for the local goodtime girl, things could certainly be less troublesome. But when faced with choosing between temptation and responsibility, he doesn't always pick the right path. Celebrating the soul of 1950s Harlem, Josette Bushell-Mingo's production is bursting with heartfelt blues, gospel, R&B and jazz.

Lyn Gardner Wednesday October 27, 2004 The Guardian It is a long way from paradise, but you would have to be a complete grouch not to fall for the charms of this musical set in Harlem's black community in the 1950s. Here in the local bar, surrounded by his friends, Jesse Semple is trying to grow up and achieve maturity but keeps being distracted from his one true love - sweet but strait-laced Joyce - by the attentions of good time girl, Zarita, who has more wiggle in her walk than Marilyn Monroe.

Written by the black poet Langston Hughes, the book is for the most part romantic piffle, but David Martin's alluring score moves through jazzy riffs to the desolate blues and has some soul-stealing, foot-stamping moments of such ebullience that it makes you feel happy to be alive. The whole thing is delivered by a sensational cast and includes show-stopping turns from Clive Rowe as the lovelorn Melons and Ruby Turner as the larger-than-life object of his affections. This pair know how to put the viva into diva.

If the show lacks sophistication, and Hughes doesn't seem overly concerned about perpetuating the black stereotypes that one of his character's criticises, there are signs here of an awakening black consciousness: Semple notes that no black man would make it on to the front page of the newspaper unless he had committed a terrible crime or seen a UFO. In one of the evening's best scenes, starving guitar player Gitfiddle is beaten up by the police for daring to play on the street. His bluesy rejoinder is a lament for all the injustices meted out by white people on the black community. It is a little show that hails from a far away and more innocent era, but director Josette Bushell-Mingo's production plays to its strengths and ensures that every single character is a character. Not heavenly, but rather nice.

The Young Vic, turfed out from its home in the Cut while it is being refurbished, is maintaining its London presence in a ‘Walkabout’ season of revivals of recent hits seen there with the return of Simply Heavenly, now presented under commercial auspices in the West End.

To follow, the Young Vic’s circus version of Romeo and Juliet transfers to the Playhouse next month, Sleeping Beauty is revived at the Barbican in December and A Raisin in the Sun returns to the Lyric, Hammersmith in February. Together, these are a bracing testament to artistic director David Lan’s eclectic regime but in terms of sheer discovery, the unearthing of Simply Heavenly - a 47-year-old Broadway flop that ran less than two months when it was first seen - is hard to beat.

Josette Bushell-Mingo’s fresh and funny production - premiered at the Young Vic in March 2003 - has been gloriously re-imagined as a joyful West End hit, with most of its original cast happily intact.

While novelist, poet and columnist Langston Hughes’s evocative slice of Harlem life may be much stronger on atmosphere than plot as it details the convoluted love life of its lead character Jesse B Semple (Rhashan Stone), the show comes alive in the frequently sensational musical numbers, wittily and energetically staged by choreographer Paul J Medford.

In a remarkable ensemble cast that utterly inhabit designer Rob Howell’s superb evocation of Paddy’s Bar and the apartments of Jesse and his long-suffering girlfriend Joyce (Allyson Brown), Clive Rowe, Ruby Turner and Nicola Hughes do the scene-stealing honours. Mark Shenton

Charles Spencer reviews Simply Heavenly at Trafalgar Studios

Simply Heavenly is simply heavenly, the warmest, most touching and vibrantly performed musical on the London stage. When the magnificent cast comes together for the big production numbers, you feel truly blessed by the exuberant consolation of great popular art.

If you wanted to cavil, you could. This account of 1950s Harlem, in those far-off, innocent days before Black Panthers, crack cocaine and gangsta rap, is at times sentimental. And the story - decent young black guy falls in love with sweet religious girl, only to find himself temporarily led astray by a vamp - is hardly the stuff of high drama.

But Josette Bushell-Mingo's superlative production, first seen at the Young Vic 18 months ago and now triumphantly transferred to this hot new West End venue, sweeps all such peevish objections aside. Instead you are swept along on an irresistible wave of joy.

First seen on Broadway in 1957, the piece was written by Langston Hughes (1902-67), "the poet laureate of Harlem". It features his character Jesse B Semple, known as Simple, a likeable Everyman figure who appeared in a series of short stories and expressed the everyday concerns and frustrations of black Americans in racially divided, post-war America.

The action is mostly set in Paddy's Bar, splendidly conjured in Rob Howell's atmospheric, split-level design, where the Harlem residents come to drown their sorrows and belt out David Martin's terrific score of jazz, blues and hot gospel music.

The boozy setting and ensemble of characters might remind one of O'Neill's harrowing masterpiece, The Iceman Cometh, only the tone here is consistently one of humour and human sympathy.

Simple may bewail the fact that black people only seem to get mentioned in the newspapers in stories concerning murder, robbery and rape, and dream of a day when blacks officers will command white troops in the US Army.

But there is no militant anger when he is laid off from his factory job, no suggestion that the white man is responsible for all the black man's ills. If the play preaches anything, it is the need for stoical self-reliance.

But the point is largely made through music rather than speechifying. There is an astonishing scene when the bar's hobo guitar player is beaten up by a white cop and, bloodied and despairing, is urged to sing about how he feels.

He begins with a mournful, broken-down rural blues, but it is taken up by the bar's habitués, and turned into an astonishing, full-voiced anthem of resilience and survival. It is a moment that penetrates the heart of the blues, where suffering is miraculously transformed into something strong, defiant and beautiful.

Rashan Stone is hugely likeable as Simple, a jack-the-lad with a heart beneath his mischief, while Allyson Brown has a sweetness that never cloys as his virginal, ultra-respectable girlfriend. Nicola Hughes is sensational as the bad girl intent on scuppering their chaste romance, a brassy, bosomy bottle blonde who struts her stuff to electrifying effect in a show-stopping, aptly-titled number called Let's Ball Awhile.

But though the whole ensemble is superb, two stars shine especially brightly - Clive Rowe as a portly, courtly watermelon seller, and soul diva Ruby Turner as the equally plump, initially reluctant, object of his desire, Miss Mamie.

When this delightfully wobbly pair bump and grind their way through Paul J Medford's exuberant choreography with a delicious, nimble-footed delicacy, their soaring voices combining to thrilling effect, one feels as close to paradise as this sublunary world allows.

Simply Heavenly, Trafalgar Studios, London reviewed by Paul Taylor

Transferred to the West End from the Young Vic, Josette Bushell-Mingo's production of Simply Heavenly is a joyous blast of a show and boasts a brighter assemblage of musical talent than you'll find, at the moment, on any other London stage. But is this 1957 Broadway hit too feel-good for its own good, given its setting among the poor black habitués of a Harlem bar? A sniffy visitor declares to the regulars, "You're all stereotypes", whereupon Boyd, who is a surrogate for the author, Langston Hughes, responds, "In the book I'm writing, they're just folks." Is this a case, though, of trying to have it both ways in order to appeal to a mixed audience?

While the piece certainly can't be said to have smoothed the path for Malcolm X and Leroi Jones, it never lets you forget that its characters' lives are controlled by the off-stage white folk. The resident blues guitar-player is roughed up by the cops for trying to play in the street. Whites keep laying the hero, Jesse B Semple, off work. In one of the most pointed scenes, a draft card arrives for the youngest male, and Jesse launches into a visionary speech about how in the next war, the army is bound to be integrated. But as he warms to his theme, the festivities crumple and the other men start sloping off in silent scepticism. And Hughes keeps up the mischievous digs. Why is it, someone asks, that black people make the front page for rape and murder, but that no black person has ever been reported seeing a flying saucer? The show is wonderfully good-humoured but no sell-out.

The bits between the brilliant numbers tell the rather schematic story of a likeable factory hand, Semple (the gangly, irresistibly charming Rhashan Stone), who yearns to wed his churchy, ever-so-proper girlfriend, Joyce (Allyson Brown). It's a plot about the need for maturity. Will Jesse succeed in saving the money he needs to divorce his first wife and be able to resist the temptations of the witty Nicola Hughes's implacably predatory Zarita, the bar's bottle-blonde vamp? There aren't many surprises on the bumpy road to rose-tinted happiness. When Zarita and chums invade Jesse's bedsit for a boisterously bopping birthday celebration, you can rest assured that Joyce will arrive on cue, righteously returning his clean laundry.

The show regularly blows the roof off with its explosions of communal emotion in the ensemble numbers, backed by a superb quartet of musicians on sax, piano, double bass and percussion. When Clive Rowe, as the lovelorn melon man, and Ruby Turner, as the fiercely independent Miss Mamie, let rip in the sensational "Did You Ever Hear the Blues?", every hair on the back of your neck stands to attention. And the amply proportioned twosome are adorable, dancing cheek to cheek like a couple of dainty hippos. David Martin's score and Hughes's lyrics aren't over-burdened with originality, but this high-jiving cast infuses the proceedings with such infectious energy that the deficiencies are easy to overlook. After several escalating encores, the audience floats out of the theatre on a cloud of bliss.

Simply Heavenly at the Young Vic

Simply Heavenly, Langston Hughes’ flop musical now revived at the Young Vic, is exactly what its name suggests. Yes, the plot is so thin it’s nearly invisible, but the show carries you out on a high because of its unfaltering charm and heart. To boot, Josette Bushell-Mingo’s intimate, atmospheric production has a uniformly stellar cast with voices which raise the Young Vic’s roof, despite some of the material being fairly weak.

Clive Rowe and Ruby Turner as Melon and Miss Mamie are electric in their numbers together and they both have charisma in spades. Nicola Hughes is wonderfully vampy as Zarita but also reveals her hurt, tender side at the right moments.

Rob Howell’s bar setting makes clever use of the space, making the audience feel included and cleverly recreating the atmosphere of 1940s Harlem.

A fun and heart-warmingly enjoyable piece of musical theatre.

Benedict Nightingale at Trafalgar Studios, SW1 CAST the great Clive Rowe as a watermelon salesman so rotund that he makes his own produce look as slender as early-season carrots, pair him with the gloriously spherical Ruby Turner as a feisty fellow-Harlemite called Miss Mamie, and what do you get? Creased chins and tummies bumping each other, yes, but also a sort of elephantine delicacy as feet nimbly move — and rich, soaring chords as the two of them launch into jazz, gospel or blues.

Together, they make you forget the limitations of the play Langston Hughes wrote and David Martin put to music back in 1957. The plot is a bit thin and predictable. The piece has certainly dated, involving (as it does) Afro-Americans pretty much resigned to their second-class status and set (as it is) in the decade before Malcolm X and LeRoi Jones came angrily crashing out of the American oubliette.

I enjoyed the piece even more than when I saw it at the Young Vic last year. After all, who can cavil when Rowe and Turner are peopling the subplot, he crawling towards her with a rose in his teeth, she resisting his portly advances, both letting rip with their majestic voiceboxes? Not me, that’s for sure.