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Broadway
Actress & Singer Sarah Rice |
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“He
was a dashing pig,” says New York City actress and singer Sarah Rice, recalling
her first role as a child when she played the girlfriend of the brick house
builder in a stage production of The
Three Little Pigs. Sarah Rice would later take a more substantial step to
stardom when she left the Phoenix – Tempe, Arizona area as a young woman,
straight out of college, in the mid-1970s. “I was going to school at Arizona State when I won a
singing contest. The Phoenix Musical Theater had run a contest and I won first
prize, which was $400. They would not give me the money until I left town,
because they wanted me to use it for a career. They paid for my ticket one way
and I came to New York City with $200 and two cats,” she recalls. That
bold step launched a career in which she has demonstrated excellence at her
craft, as well as versatility. Ms. Rice was cast as The Girl in the Broadway
production of the Fantasticks and she
was the original Johanna when Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened on Broadway in 1979, which
also starred Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury. The musical would go on to claim
eight Tony Awards and nine Drama Desk Awards. Sarah Rice has performed as an
Opera soloist on some of the most prestigious stages worldwide and in 2011 she
took her music in a decidedly different direction with her Screen Gems Songs of
Old Hollywood, winning both a Bistro Award and MAC Award for her cabaret show.
Ms. Rice’s accomplishments are too numerous to note in this space, but to give
the reader a small sampling of her career, consider this; she won a Theatre
World Award for her role in Sweeney Todd
and a Grammy Award for the Original Cast Recording of Sweeney Todd. Among the
many leading soprano roles Ms. Rice has been; Marie in Daughter of the Regiment,
Cunegonde in Candide, Mabel in
Pirates of Penzance, Maria in
West Side Story, Magnolia in
Showboat and Christine Daae in
Phantom of the Opera. Her dramatic
roles include numerous Shakespearean productions. She portrayed Jenny Lind in
both an acting and singing role for HBO’s
P.T. Barnum and His Human Oddities docu-drama and was cast as Maude Arthur
in the PBS series The Best of Families.
She has recorded five albums, including
Jerome Kern Revisited. “When you don’t know what
you can’t do, you trust that everything is going to be okay,” she says, “I moved
(to New York) with my friend JoAnn Yeo (now Yeoman). She is a choreographer (and
director / producer) and we became roommates.
It wasn’t like I was here by myself and she had been to New York before.
She knew how to live here safely. In Arizona you have eye contact with
people on the street and she taught me that in New York you have to walk like
you are going somewhere. You just walk like you know where you are going. It’s
not so bad anymore, but this was a long time ago,” she says.
Sarah Rice’s first role after arriving in New York City was with a smaller
theater company in Hang On To Your
Ribbons. “It
was a musical version of The Misers and I walked in and I sang a Mozart aria.
The director thought that was hysterically adorable and I got cast as Marianne,
the fiancé of the young man in the show. It is based on Moliere’s
The Miser. It is about a miser who
hates everybody and his son and daughter are trying to trick him out of his
money. The miser wants to keep everything, so it is a farce.” The role in Hang
On To Your Ribbons opened the door for Sarah Rice to take on even a bigger
role. “The role in The Fantasticks
came directly from The Miser (Hang
On To Your Ribbons), because the girl that was playing the daughter of the
miser was taking a hiatus from doing The
Fantasticks. She was doing The
Fantasticks and she said oh you should go and audition for it, because I am
going to be leaving soon. I did and when she left, I got the job. I was in it
for two years to start and then I was in it off and on for another four,” says
Ms. Rice. She considers The
Fantasticks to be her first big break, “because it was like a dream come
true to me to get into the original company of
The Fantasticks and to work with Tom
Jones (lyrics) and Harvey Schmidt (music). That was major and of course
Sweeney was major too, working with
Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince and all of those people. That also was a dream
that came true. The agent that my
manager introduced me to was the one who set me up for Sweeney. I had five
callbacks and I sang every aria that I could think of and it was down to me and
Betsy Joslyn. I found out that half were divided between me and half with her.
Years later I was told that when I had sung the song “Steal Me Sweet Thief,”
which is a Menotti aria about a woman begging this thief to steal her, before
time steals her youth or death comes, that it made the producer cry, so she said
they had to hire me. For the final
callback they had these 17 year old models and we had to go out and stand with
them. While Betsy and I were waiting to hear, they came up to her and they told
her they were offering her the understudy, so I thought that was it for me and
that I was out. I thought they wanted these beautiful seventeen year olds. I was
nineteen, but at that point seventeen seemed so young. I thought that I was gone
and then the casting director came up and said, ‘You got it,’ and I almost fell
down.” Sarah Rice’s memories of opening night for
Sweeney Todd, “I was just thinking to
get through it. It was so overwhelming, exciting and it felt like a dream.” While comparing her roles in
The Fantasticks and
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet
Street, Sarah Rice says The
Fantasticks holds a special place for her, “because of the emotional journey
that the part goes through. It is
one of the best written roles that exist for a young girl.
Johanna (in Sweeney Todd) was
a little frustrating, because you had to make up your own thing as to how you
got from A to B. It was pared down so much that you had to make it up to get to
the next place, whereas with The
Fantasticks it is kind of all out there for you.”
As for the roles that she is attracted to Ms. Rice says,
(The role) has to speak to me through my own prism. In other words I have to
understand what the character is about.
I don’t have to live a parallel life to it, but I have to understand it.
I have auditioned for things where I can’t get a handle on something and I can’t
make it work, but if the character has a point of view or something that I
understand and I feel that I can express my own prism, that is what draws me to
certain roles. If I can get it and I can express what that character is going
through. If I don’t love a role, I
can’t do it. If it doesn’t speak to me and it isn’t something that I absolutely
love I won’t do it.” As
for what lies ahead for Sarah Rice, she is trying to put the financial pieces of
the puzzle in place, so she can record her
Screen Gems Songs of Old Hollywood.
She says she would likely not have been happy with the results of a live
recording, because there are too many variables in terms of ambient noise and
production quality. In April and in May she is also appearing in the New Jersey
stage production History / Herstory
which you can learn more
about here
.
The musical is being directed by her lifelong friend JoAnn Yeoman. “It is about how people can look at the same thing and
see something completely different. It is interesting how men and women see
things differently. It comes from
fairytales and fables and all of that stuff. It is how we see ourselves in the
world, because of these stories and how we act accordingly. It really messes us
up. It has been interesting
exploring this musically. We do the two fairytales from
A Little Night Music. She sees it as
a story of a princess who gets to marry all three suitors and the young man sees
it as a knight who has to go and slay a dragon. We are using the International
and the American Songbook and we also have some music by Nancy White, who is
from Toronto.
You can learn more about Sarah Rice by
visiting
her website.
Photos of Sarah Rice are the property of Sarah Rice and they
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