You could say they’re a fairytale couple: Prince Charming and the belle of the ball. Or simply, as the line in Frozen goes, that they finish each other’s sandwiches. Oliver Ormson is playing the fiendishly handsome Hans of the Southern Isles in the West End staging of that Disney juggernaut. His partner, Carrie Hope Fletcher, is the star of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, just up the road.
Fletcher and Ormson are a formidable musical-theatre twosome. They met on a tour of The Addams Family, moved in together before lockdown and, after a series of Covid curveballs, are relishing their roles in shows that both received five-star reviews in this paper. If Ormson gets booed most nights, well, it just “means you’ve done your job well,” Fletcher cheerfully reminds him.
We meet at Ormson’s workplace, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane – resplendent after a £60m revamp – in the plush “retiring room” that opens on to the royal box. Ormson admires the view; not to be outdone, Fletcher feigns disinterest and bigs up her own venue. The Gillian Lynne theatre has been reconfigured so some rows of Cinderella’s audience are rotated during its grand waltz.
The pair each got a night off to see the other’s show. As “the biggest Disney fan on the planet”, Fletcher would have seen Frozen a few times even without Ormson in the cast: “When I heard Oliver was going to play Hans I think maybe I was even more excited than him.” Ormson had a part in the original workshop for Cinderella as one of the buffed denizens who put the pecs into the impeccably groomed town of Belleville, created by writer Emerald Fennell. Ormson was “the head hunk” in the workshop, Fletcher notes. “You look like a Disney prince,” she laughs. “Your jawline could cut glass for god’s sake.”
Both shows upend fairytale traditions. “People expect Hans to be the hero, sweep Anna off her feet and save the day,” says Ormson. Instead, Hans ultimately “heightens the message of sisterhood and the importance of family and friends”.
When Fletcher was invited by Lloyd Webber to a top-secret meeting about his new musical, the composer told her: “This isn’t the usual version of Cinderella – she’s not Disney, she wears black, she’s a bit grungy, she wears Doc Martens.” As such, she’s a sore thumb in Belleville. Fletcher laughs remembering the outfit she wore to that meeting: black dress and Docs.
Fletcher’s grungy rebel enters a pact with the fairy godmother in a makeover scene that chills more than glitters because she is changing who she is. It’s a spin on the usual transformation which invites us to delight in plain Cinders magically becoming desirable. “You think: I really wish she hadn’t done that,” says Fletcher.
In Fennell’s version, Cinderella and her childhood pal Sebastian are surprised to find themselves falling in love with each other. The show is a hymn to friendship rather than any coup de foudre.
Fletcher and Ormson first locked eyes during auditions for The Addams Family which toured in 2017; she remembers him as “handsome yet terrifying”. The chemistry sparked on stage and off, they moved in together, then the pandemic hit. As the theatre industry was plunged into crisis, their shows were repeatedly postponed. Cinderella’s original cast recording, released before it opened, was partially done in a DIY studio in Fletcher’s bedroom. Ormson says Frozen’s lyrics about “opening up the gates” of the castle in Arendelle have chimed with its cast and audiences alike, wearily coming out of lockdown. Being back on stage has been a rush, if nervy. “We were all a bit rusty,” he says. “We all had our demons, thinking: do I still remember how to act and sing and dance?”
So have they been practising at home with a duet over breakfast? Fletcher insists she’s keener on resting her voice, as Cinderella has a handful of big solos. But Ormson warms to the idea. “That would be amazing … I’ll be Prince Sebastian for the night, we’ll have a singsong.” “I could be Anna,” she offers. What if her brother, McFly’s Tom Fletcher, currently starring in Strictly, makes it through to the competition’s musicals week? Surely they could make an appearance? “We could do Love is an Open Door!”
Both know how fortunate they are to have steady West End gigs at this precarious time. “So many people I know have left the industry,” says Fetcher. “They’re now tree surgeons, teachers, carpenters.” Even pre-Covid, acting was far from a stable job. The West End was alway’s Ormson’s dream: “For a working-class northern lad that was a big goal.” With his parents’ support, he would scrape together £50 train fares from Warrington to London for auditions, sometimes finding out on the way home that he’d been recalled for the next day – meaning another £50 ticket.
Fletcher, who also has a working-class background, says her parents’ encouragement was vital for her too. Her success stretches beyond theatre: she published a novel over lockdown (a sequel to Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes) and established a fashion line in partnership with Joanie Clothing. Today she’s wearing a green velvet jumpsuit from that range. A fan recently told her that she’d bought the same outfit for her bridesmaids.
The musicals she has been in – including Les Misérables and Heathers – have hardcore fanbases, Fletcher says. “They have tattoos [for the show], they wear the merch, they come in costume – sometimes their costumes are better than ours!”
The buzz is that Cinderella is bound for Broadway; she is crossing her fingers that “they’ll let me go with it”. Meanwhile, she and Ormson will keep performing in this new normal for musical theatre, where fans’ hums are muffled by masks and social distancing rules have made stage door a “bit bleak” for now. On the other side of this pandemic, “we’re going to be unstoppable” laughs Fletcher. “I’m going to start, like, licking people’s faces I’ll be so excited.”
Cinderella is at the Gillian Lynne theatre; Frozen is at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane
