‘I was told I may never sing again’
She’s theatre’s brightest new talent. But as a teenager, Guys & Dolls star MARISHA WALLACE’s promising career nearly came to an abrupt end. She tells Samuel Fishwick about the miracle that changed her life
Performing eight shows a week and seven songs a show, Marisha Wallace, 38, is living the life she thought she could never have. As the bombastic burlesque singer Miss Adelaide in Guys & Dolls at London’s Bridge Theatre, the actress stars in a showbiz hit so popular that people come back for second helpings.
‘Helena Bonham Carter came twice,’ says Wallace, her hot-pink playsuit and gold nails lighting up a gloomy hotel bar. ‘She brought her mum the first time, then she came back. We’ve had Mark Strong. Hugh Jackman. Kristin Chenoweth. Catherine Zeta Jones. When do you ever see them in the wild?’
It is a good time to be Marisha Wallace. Her performance as Miss Adelaide, a club singer who just wants to be married to
Daniel Mays’s feckless Nathan Detroit, is so accomplished she’s tipped to win gongs galore. (‘Seriously, give her all the awards right now,’ wrote the Evening Standard’s critic Nick Curtis.) She has a Christmas single out, ‘Little House in the Snow’, a smoky, pared-back piano ballad written with Grammy-winning super-producer Toby
Gad (who co-wrote Beyoncé’s ‘If I Were a
Boy’ and John Legend’s ‘All of Me’) about childhood holidays in North Carolina. It’s a long way from where she is now.
Wallace grew up ‘in the sticks’ in North Carolina on a hog farm, ‘working-class poor’, on the edge of the city of Goldsboro, a mile from any other house. ‘I never felt poor, though,’ she says. ‘It’s funny when you don’t have money and you don’t know what the other side is.’ Her mum worked in a textile factory; her dad was in the army, a brickmason and a musician (he built his own garden recording studio, where he’d invite her in to sing and write with him). And there were her two siblings, an elder sister and brother. ‘[Dad’s] big dreams are why I am where I am today.’
But her childhood was ‘chequered’. Her
‘PEOPLE AT MY CHURCH SAID MY VOICE WAS A GIFT FROM GOD. SO THEY PRAYED FOR ME’
father’s undiagnosed mental illness overshadowed her home life and ‘Little House in the Snow’ is a bittersweet lament to unhappy holidays: ‘My mum tried to put up Christmas trees and a wreath. He’d take them down. She tried to put up lights. He’d take them down. And my mum would put our presents in a bin bag to hide them from him. Then on Christmas Day we’d go into a tiny room and have secret Christmas. Everyone thinks of Christmas as a joyous time. But sometimes it can bring heartache.’
Yet there was plenty of joy, too. Life was church and cheerleading and glee club. She was the star of her school’s music and theatre department. However, that too almost fell apart. Aged 17, she lost her voice, nearly flunking her auditions to study at East
Carolina University. ‘I went to the ear, nose and throat clinic and [they discovered] I had a cyst on my vocal cord. They said that the only thing they could do to save my voice was surgery, and even then I may never sing again.’ She wept in the car.
Then, a miracle. ‘I was a choir director at a church and everyone was, like, “You can’t lose your voice, it’s a gift from God.” So they prayed for me. It was like 150 people put their hands on me before I went to the surgery.’ When she woke up from the operation, her mother was weeping. ‘She says the doctor went to take the cyst out and it was gone. He said it looked like someone had already taken it out. He’d taken out the scar tissue around it and said: “Now you have to heal.”’
This required rest. Wallace couIdn’t speak for three months. ‘I had to write everything on a whiteboard round my neck,’ she says, ‘and just be silent.’ She had to give up her job as a waitress and rely on her mum. ‘It was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.’
But she recovered. Aged 24, she was spotted at an open call for the first run of
The Book of Mormon in New York. The director, Casey Nicholaw, said: ‘I want to take you with me everywhere I go.’
‘He took me to Aladdin [on Broadway]. He got me my part in [the Broadway show]
Something Rotten. Then while he was directing Dreamgirls in London’s West End, Amber Riley got sick with pneumonia and they called me and said “Can you replace her?” I had five days to learn the part.’
Guys & Dolls director Nicholas Hytner spotted her in Oklahoma! at the Young Vic last year and asked her to join his upcoming show. She was torn: she had been nominated for an Olivier Award for
Oklahoma!. ‘In the end Nic took me to The Ivy and said, “I’ve never begged anyone to do a show before, but I think this would change your life.” In that moment, I was like. “He’s right, and he’s Nicholas Hytner and he’s taking me out to lunch.” So I took the role.’
Wallace is one of the most upbeat and warm-hearted people I’ve met. That has taken grit. Her sister suffered from depression and Wallace feels that support simply wasn’t there for her or her father. ‘If you’re from a religious background, mental illness is like – “Oh, you need to pray more. Or go to church more.” It’s not considered a medical emergency.’ Mental-health struggles have loomed over her loved ones. Her Australian ex-husband, to whom she was married for seven years and with for ten, living in a ‘dirt-cheap’ flat with four others in Brooklyn, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and attempted to take his own life.
‘I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was,’ she says. ‘We got him therapy and medicine. But the medicine wasn’t right. And in the States this was expensive. You want to keep going with it but it costs so much, then because of your illness you can’t work, then because you can’t work you can‘t function, and if you can’t do that you can’t get insurance, and if you don’t have money you can’t pay for the help you need. In the end he had to go back to Australia where the healthcare is free.’ They separated in 2019. ‘What I’ve learnt from it is that you also need to take care of the people that are taking care of the people with mental illness,’ she says.
‘It’s not just one person’s crisis.’
So when she says she’s happy now, she means it. She is feeling the fittest she’s ever felt, having lost 80lb and gained ‘a whole lot of
muscle’ on a two-year ‘fitness journey’ that started in lockdown after her separation.
Her workouts (four times a week at either PureGym or the upmarket Third Space) and a healthier diet (no processed food) aren’t a fad: even her chronic eczema is now under control.
She is also in love again. ‘He’s a bodyguard. It’s like Whitney Houston in the movie. He was Ariana Grande’s. And for Tom Cruise. And for Madonna. And he’s lovely.’
What’s more, she’s thriving: she wrote 25 songs with Gad in 2021 during lockdown after they were introduced by a friend over Zoom and is working on writing a musical. Guys & Dolls has been extended through to next summer and Wallace is flying her mum over. She hasn’t seen it but is afraid of air travel, so, says Wallace, ‘I’ll fly back with her.’
‘I’m manifesting Guys & Dolls on Broadway,’ she says. ‘I want an Olivier. I want a Beyoncé-level album. I want a number one. I’d love a TV or feature film,’ she says, laughing, a slight British inflection creeping in after six years there (‘I’ve got a lilt. I’m like Madonna’). ‘But I just want to keep making music, to keep making people happy and to just be happy. This is the happiest I’ve ever been.
Everything’s just come together.’
Marisha Wallace’s single ‘Little House in the Snow’ is out now