Rebecca Thornhill may have starred in some o f the West End's biggest musicals but she's more than happy to swap them for a tiny Harrogate venue, she tells Steve Pratt.

LES Miserables, Cats, Singing In The Rain and Me And My Girl - just four of the big London West End musicals in which Rebecca Thornhill has appeared. But over the coming month, instead of playing to audiences in their thousands, she'll be performing nightly to a handful - just 40 or so - in Harrogate.

Olivier Award nominee Thornhill is swapping the role of sexy murderess Roxie Hart in hit show Chicago for the intimate space of The Studio at Harrogate Theatre for this year's dinner theatre production.

The idea, put together by artistic director Hannah Chissick, was so successful last Christmas that it's being repeated. Last year's Side By Side By Sondheim is followed by Stephen Sondheim's second musical revue, Putting It Together.

Thornhill joins a cast that also includes Hadley Fraser, who played Marius in Les Mis in the West End, as well as Sophie Bould, Mark Hilton and Richard Pettyfer. Audiences begin the evening with champagne and canaps, followed by a two-course supper, prepared by Bower's Bistro, and then it's on with the show.

"It's tiny," admits Thornhill of The Studio space, but that doesn't put her off. Quite the opposite, it excites her. "I've just done a cabaret on my own and that venue wasn't much bigger. That was quite frightening, so I've got the feel for this sort of performance," she says. "It's quite good to see people's reactions sometimes because you know they are getting it. Of course, it's not so good if it's a reaction that they're not quite so sure about it."

She was also slightly put off by seeing a man writing during her show. Presumably he was a critic who likes to make notes.

Thornhill says she's a Sondheim fan, although qualifies that statement by adding that she doesn't like everything he writes. "But I've been a fan for a very long time. I've had the album of Putting It Together for years and have always wanted to do it, but never had the opportunity. Not a lot of people put it on. They usually do Side By Side By Sondheim, which I don't know as well as Putting It Together," she says.

She became aware that The Studio was "a pretty small space" when she auditioned for Chissick, who is directing the show. "I saw how intimate it was but I quite like being frightened," she says.

Thornhill arrives in Harrogate fresh from fulfilling a five-year ambition to play Roxie Hart in the London production of Chicago. "That's a massive show and a big stage. You have the security of being far away from the audience. With cabaret, it really is just you. When you're doing something like Roxie Hart, you can become a character."

Dancing came before acting as she took lessons to strengthen weak feet. She decided she wanted to carry on, doing amateur dramatics and loving it so much that she went on to train at Arts Educational. Leaving college, a summer season in the South of France - "sunshine by day, a show in the evening" - earned her an Equity card. On her return to this country, she did her very first show and has been adding musicals to her CV ever since.

She's appeared as Fantine in Les Miserables several times, including a Danish tour which she loved because it was totally different to the London staging. "That was very exciting and very creative because you got to do what you wanted to do," she says.

She was in London productions of Ragtime, The Full Monty and Oklahoma!, as well as the original cast of The Witches Of Eastwick as one of the witches, Suki, who got to fly over the audience. "I tend to get cast in little comic parts and that was the first time I had sung so much," she says. "But I loved the flying, I love physicality."

One of her biggest successes, which won her an Olivier nomination, was playing silent movie star Lina Lamont in Singing In The Rain, first at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and then in the transfer to London's National Theatre.

Thornhill was also Babette in the original cast of the London staging of the Disney extravaganza, Beauty And The Beast. The production introduced her to the man she later married, singer Earl Carpenter. He's shortly to take over as the masked man in The Phantom Of The Opera on the London stage but was playing something rather different when they met. He was understudying the role of the Beast.

Phantom is one musical that Thornhill hasn't done. "I went for the role of Christine when I was 25 and was told I was too old," she says.

* Putting It Together is in The Studio at Harrogate Theatre until January 2. Tickets (01423) 502116.

Published: 04/12/2004