A brand new Legally Blonde? No objections!

THEATRE Lucy Moss’s Six, about Henry VIII’s wives, was a smash. Now she’s bringing Elle Woods bang up to date, she tells Jessie Thompson

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LUCY MOSS admits it: she got Elle Woods-ed. Following Six, the musical colossus that she co-wrote with her friend Toby Marlow at uni, and which has

since made her the youngest female director ever on Broadway, when Timothy Sheader, artistic director of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, asked her if she’d fancy directing Legally Blonde the Musical, she wasn’t so sure.

“I was like, oh, I don’t know if that’s going to be my vibe,” Moss, 28, tells me. “It’s definitely unfair, but there’s a reputation of commercial film adaptations of musicals, of them just being made to make cash.”

Although she’d seen the 2001 Reese Witherspoon film, she’d never listened to the musical’s songs, or seen the hit West End production in 2011. When she listened she found that she had “deeply underestimated the musical much in the way that Elle herself is underestimated throughout.

“I was just so delighted and surprised. I was like, oh this silly chick flick thing, it’s not gonna have any artistic merit. That’s the worst prejudice that I shouldn’t have fallen into,” she says.