A former Wilmington child star, this actress and singer returns to revisit her roots
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Leigh Jones hasn't been on stage in front of an audience at Wilmington's Thalian Hall in nearly 20 years.
That all changes Thursday, when Jones steps onto that historic stage as part of the ensemble cast of "Ring of Fire," a jukebox musical based on the songs of country legend Johnny Cash. Thalian is a stage Jones grew up performing musicals on as a child in the 1990s and as a teenager in the early 2000s before she moved to New York City for college in 2004, later re-inventing herself as a folk singer/songwriter out on the West Coast.
But the theater never quite left her blood.
"I've been kind of itching to get back into theater," Jones said recently over caffeinated beverages at Bespoke in downtown Wilmington. "It was such a huge part of my life for so long, it was kind of like what I believed I would be doing with my life. Until I veered off in another direction."
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Following the run of Opera House Theatre Co.'s production of "Ring of Fire," which ends March 5, Jones' Wilmington friends and fans will get to see another, more intimate side of the performer. On March 10, Jones plays the downtown music venue Bourgie Nights, singing her songs under the moniker Eugenia Riot, her folk-music project from Portland, Oregon, where she currently lives.
In person, Jones comes across as warm and friendly, with a quick and easy laugh. If she has any disappointment at not (yet) becoming a world-famous performing star, as some thought she might when she was a teen, it doesn't show. To hear Jones tell it, she just loves to sing, and will do almost anything to make that happen — including switching from musical theater to folk music, and traveling all the way across the country to sing on stage in her old hometown, where she still has family.
"My number one passion, the thing that brings me the most joy in life, is singing," Jones said, and her voice is as sweet and as pure as they come, capable of gentle, softly sung expression but able to swell and fill up the biggest rooms with its power.
Returning to the stage in a country musical that dovetails with the rootsy style she's been performing for the past decade is "kind of the perfect re-entry point" into the theater for her, Jones said.
Not that it won't be a challenge. One of the highlights of "Ring of Fire" is that the seven-person cast — which includes regular Wilmington performers Brian Whitted and Michelle Braxton, is led by guest director Chris Blisset and features other out-of-town guests — sings, acts and plays their own instruments. And so, Jones will be up there playing guitar, drums and even stand-up bass (a first for her) when she's not singing such Johnny Cash standards as "I Still Miss Someone," "Jackson" and a gender-bending version of the rockin' murder ballad "Cocaine Blues."
Interestingly, "I honestly didn't grew up listening to Johnny Cash or folk music. I grew up listening to musical theater soundtracks," Jones said, laughing. "And then, like, whatever top 40 radio was on."
As a child, theater was her passion and she performed regularly on the Wilmington stage, playing Wendy in "Peter Pan" for Opera House and rocking the title role in "Annie," even playing against type in the spoofy musical "Ruthless" as an evil, bad seed of a child star. There was a dramatic role in “The Crucible” and by the time she graduated from Hoggard High School in 2004 she'd done such grown-up shows as "Hair" and "Chicago."
Doing so much theater meant spending lots of time around and working with adults, and "I think it really caused me to mature in a certain way. In a good way. I guess it gave me a confidence," Jones said. "I felt like I was treated as a human being, not necessarily as an adult, but like it was an equal playing field."
Later, that confidence would come in handy when, a couple of years after graduating from NYU and at loose ends in the big city, she decided to try her hand at songwriting.
"I was feeling crappy,” Jones told me in 2010, when she'd come back to Wilmington to play a show with a folk duo called Bone Sweet Bone. ”Like, I wasn't reaching my potential. I had reached a boiling point with my creative self and had to start writing.”
She's been writing songs ever since. In 2014 she moved to Portland with her then-boyfriend, and notes the irony of discovering most of the Southern music she's into after moving to the West Coast. The first thing she did in Portland was join a bluegrass band, and the combo Crow and the Canyon would go on to carve out a niche in the Rose City scene. They even went on a 2018 tour of East African countries Eritrea, Uganda, Zambia and Ethiopia as part of American Music Abroad, a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
When the most recent group she was part of, the all-woman ensemble Five Letter Word, broke up last year, Jones created Eugenia Riot, the name coming from a 13th-century English relative whose existence was discovered by one of Jones' family members. Her first album as Eugenia Riot, "Can't Wait to Miss You," comes in May, and she expects to start releasing singles in March.
These days, she writes when "something challenging is going on in my life, whether it's heartbreak, or just (messed) up things in the world," Jones said. "I can't imagine going through a breakup and then trying to get over it without writing."
One of her best songs is "170 Delancey," a bouncing lilter with a pop-Americana vibe whose sweet sound masks lyrics about a love affair that didn't work out.
"Probably the overarching theme (of her songs) is longing," Jones said. "I write a lot of songs addressed to people. Whether or not I ever send them to those particular people."
"I definitely have songs that are, like, about someone," she added, "but someone else thinks it's about them."
Does she tell them the truth about the song when they ask?
"No," she said, and then, a glittering laugh. "I just let them believe."
Want to go?
When: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 23-25 and March 1-4, 2 p.m. Feb. 25-26 and March 4-5
Where: Thalian Hall, 310 Chestnut St., Wilmington
Details: 910-632-2285 or ThalianHall.org
Who: Eugenia Riot
When: 8 p.m. March 10
Where: Bourgie Nights, 310 Princess St.
Info: Tickets are $12, $15 day of show
Details: EugeniaRiot.com
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Leigh Jones of Eugenia Riot in Wilmington for Ring of Fire musical
