Center Stage With Ruthie Ann Miles

After 17 months playing the Beggar Woman in the recent revival of Sweeney Todd, Ruthie Ann Miles moves to yet another Stephen Sondheim show—a concert production of A Little Night Music this June, at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. (The actress also appeared with Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2017 revival of Sunday in the Park With George.) Miles, who won a Tony in 2015 for The King and I at Lincoln Center Theatre, plays Countess Charlotte, the Ice Queen wife of Count Carl-Magnus, who happens to be having an affair behind her back. Miles loves Sondheim, she says, most notably his “wordsmithery,” not to mention how the late writer “thoroughly investigates the complexity and struggle between the human mind and heart.” When asked what Sondheim character she’d most like to play, Miles has an answer: “Is it cheating if I say, ‘All of them?’” As for moving from the gutters of 1840s London in Sweeney Todd to a “weekend in the country” in Sweden circa 1900, Miles is excited “to stand up straight and stand proudly in Charlotte’s power, rather than hunched over” as the Beggar Woman. “My physical therapists and I are very happy,” she says.