Hey guys, it’s time for yet another Musical Spotlight! This time, we’re going to feature a musical that not a lot of you might have heard of, or have just been constantly setting aside: Brooklyn the Musical
Show Background:
Music, Lyrics, and Book by Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson.
Directed by Jeff CalhounSchoenfeld and McPherson had collaborated on a record more than two decades earlier but lost touch until the latter encountered her former partner singing on a Brooklyn street corner as a means of support. She invited him home to live with her and her family, and the two began to write songs based on Schoenfeld’s experiences they eventually worked into a plot.
After twenty-seven previews, the Broadway production, directed by Jeff Calhoun, opened on October 21, 2004 at the Plymouth Theatre (renamed the Gerald Schoenfeld in May 2005), where it ran for 284 performances. x
The small cast of 5, the City Weeds, included Eden Espinosa as Brooklyn, Karen Olivo as Faith, Kevin Anderson as Taylor, Ramona Keller as Paradice, and Cleavant Derricks as a street singer who acts as the narrator.
Plot:
Using the play within a play structure, Brooklyn focuses on a group of five ragtag homeless musicians known as the City Weeds. The group periodically transforms a street corner under the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge into a stage where they present their play about a Parisian singer Brooklyn, named after the New York City borough from which her wayward father Taylor hailed. Orphaned when her depressed mother Faith hangs herself, the girl in quick succession is sent to live in a convent where she discovers her vocal talents, becomes a star, performs at Carnegie Hall, sets out in search of her father (who she discovers is a drug-addicted Vietnam War vet), and engages in a competition with local diva Paradice at Madison Square Garden. x
Why we love it:
The show is very different from a usual Broadway musical. A lot of people said that the concept of the show is weird, but we think it actually delivered. The songs are catchy, beautiful, and some even inspiring. Brooklyn’s Once upon a time is an absolute favorite of our’s. The main set being a messy street corner and how they manage to transform these piles of ‘garbage’ into effective scenery is pretty cool. Same way as how the show’s really small, talented cast of five transforms from one character to another. One moment she’s a street singer, the next minute she’s Paris’ world renowned dancer. What a way to optimize the use of these peoples’ talents! Also, it’s pretty nice to see (or hear) Eden Espinosa in a show before all her Rent and Wicked fame, and Karen Olivo before she became ‘the’ Tony winner Karen Olivo!
We suggest you listen to this show’s Original Broadway Cast recording. With the show’s play within a play concept and having the soundtrack recorded live during a performance before an invited audience, listening to it feels like actually seeing the show, only your eyes were closed the whole time. It’s quite an experience! ;)
Originally from: karenolivo.com
Posted: May 07, 20120
I saw a great movie tonight with two great people. I was inspired to be courageous in this very uncertain time. We talked about my journey with WSS for a moment and how strange it was that as a “mover”, I learned to dance. I forgot that.
I remember the failures far too often and forget the feats of sheer will. I remember being so scared, like now. I remember being in over my head and the only way out , was to go through it.
I needed to be reminded that I am made of some pretty strong stuff. And if I made it before when so much was against me, I can beat this.
So, next week in NYC, I plan on remembering that I am alive and love many people who return the sentiment.
Normally, I am not a hugger (much like Harry Korn), but on this trip don’t be surprised if I tackle you in the street ;)
Originally from: karenolivo.com
Posted: May 06, 2012
I haven’t said much on this blog for one reason.
I know that in our advanced technological age this blog can be duplicated everywhere. And I wasn’t ready to be truthful about some stuff.
What I can say now is this…the above picture was taken 10 months ago before I left for my LA adventure. I was packing for an unknown amount of time. The room, the luggage, most of those things in that picture are all gone now. In 10 months a lot of what I knew to be has changed. I am so unsure of most things these days and this picture, filled with things that are gone sums up my current state.
I think this up-heavel is needed for growth. I think that although I am uncertain and scared about me, my feelings, my future, and my over-all purpose, I am growing.
I will not allow my uncertainty to be my downfall. Anything is possible in an uncertain state…right?
By Gary White, THE LEDGER
April 26, 2012
When Karen Olivo was an aspiring actress at Lakeland’s Harrison School for the Arts, the drama program received a visit from Kelli Rabke, an established presence on Broadway.
“I remember her talking about the business, saying how difficult it was,” Olivo recalled. “I remember going up and shaking her hand and asking if she had any critiques. She said, ‘No, you’re on the right path,’ and that meant so much to me that someone who was a working professional believed in my talent.”
Olivo is now the accomplished actress sharing her wisdom with nascent thespians. In recent years, she has conducted master classes at Harrison School for the Arts and at Theatre Winter Haven, where she performed as a youth.
It’s even more personal this time around. Olivo, a Tony Award winner and a current cast member of the TV show “Harry’s Law,” will conduct two master classes Saturday in Lakeland at Rick Olivo Studio, a venue opened last fall by her father. The classes are titled “Auditioning for the Camera.”
Karen Olivo recently completed shooting her first full season on “Harry’s Law,” an NBC drama created by David E. Kelley (“The Practice”) and starring Kathy Bates. Olivo, 35, said she relishes any chance to return to Polk County and encourage young actors.
“I think that I’ll never really get rid of that wide-eyed sort of amazement that I’m doing what I love,” she said by phone from California. “Every single time I will be driving onto the Warner Bros. lot to go to work I have that feeling in my stomach like I’m a kid in a candy store. … That is reminiscent of that 12-year-old that was doing a show in Florida and hoping and dreaming and wishing and being like, ‘One day I’m going to be able to do it.’
“So from the moment I started this process I knew I had to go back at some point and, I don’t know, bolster egos and be like, ‘You guys can do it.’”
Olivo will work directly with just five students in each class, and those spaces have been reserved. Rick Olivo said openings still exist for the audience of each class. Admission is $50.
Each session is scheduled to last 2½ hours, including a 30-minute question-and-answer session.
BROADWAY SUCCESS
Olivo, a 1994 Harrison graduate, made her Broadway debut in 1996 as an understudy in the original production of “Rent.” She later played Mimi in the musical’s first national tour.
Olivo achieved Broadway stardom as Vanessa, a role she originated for “In the Heights.” The musical won a Tony Award in 2008, and Olivo captured an Astaire Award, denoting her best female dancer on Broadway.
She followed that success by playing Anita in a revival of “West Side Story” directed by Broadway luminary Arthur Laurents. For that role, Olivo captured her own Tony as best featured actress in a musical.
A foot injury abruptly ended Olivo’s role, and she began seeking opportunities away from Broadway. She had gotten attention for a recurring role on the TV show “The Good Wife,” and last fall she joined the cast of “Harry’s Law” for its second season. Olivo portrays Cassie Reynolds, a lawyer who provides a voice of reason among eccentric colleagues.
April 8, 2012 4:00 PM ET
Actors pick up accents, gain weight or walk differently for roles, whatever they need to do to make the characters believable. Karen Olivo learned to drive for her role as Cassie on NBC’s “Harry’s Law.”
A Bronx native who spent much of her childhood in Florida, Olivo picked an apartment near the show’s Burbank, Calif., studio so she could bike to work.
She laughs recalling how surprised some studio bosses were that she couldn’t drive. ”I am a New Yorker,” she tells Zap2it, referring to the city where mass transportation is the preferred mode of getting around. “So I had to just rush and get it. A couple of long days at work, and getting in the car and driving is really therapeutic.”
Though this is her first regular series role, Olivo likens the experience to being an understudy on Broadway, where she had to learn multiple roles and be ready at a moment’s notice.
“I relate it to my life as a swing,” she says. “You prepare, you prepare and you never know what you are preparing for. Being a swing, that is where I started my career.
“That free-falling of, ‘How are we going to do this?’ “
In Rent, she learned all of the roles save one. Olivo was terrific in the Tony Award-winning musical “In the Heights” and again the next year when she picked up the featured acting award for the revival of “West Side Story.”
“I feel like I don’t understand this medium well enough,” she says of TV. “So I would like to do more. … I like the feeling of meeting the challenge every week. Of course I miss the theater, but that is home. It’s hard on hiatus to find something that will fit — to find something in the time frame and that you fit into.”
Credits: “The Orphan Killer,” “Chase,” “Shanghai Hotel,” “The Good Wife”
Always in your refrigerator: Kale
Other Jobs: “I have done the New York waiter thing,” she says. “I was living in Harlem and working in a place on Central Park South. It was a pretty fancy place, and I remember being really bad at it. It takes a very specific person to be a good waiter. My nickname was ‘On the Fly’ and ‘86.’ ‘86’ is when you don’t have any more. I was notorious for ordering multiple orders of things that were already 86’ed.”
Question: What would you say has been your biggest challenge for working on Harry’s Law?
Nate Corddry:
We don’t have a catered lunch so… That question is really hard to answer. In my experience in television, which has been brief, there’s always at least one issue that you have to negotiate with a personality that’s difficult to work with, that holds the camera, that just makes for a difficult situation like any other job, it doesn’t matter what job you have. There’s always one person that you’re like, oh god, if I get stuck with Frank today I’m going to loose my mind.
This crew and cast you don’t have anyone. Everyone there is happy to be there, is professional, works exceptionally hard and I’ve never once been frustrated going to work or leaving work. I look forward to going there. It’s like a great big family and that’s so many people say that but I feel like on our show it really is and I’ll hand it off to Karen.
Karen Olivo:
I feel exactly the same way. I’m from the theater so this is my first real TV things where I’m on every week and I was told by so many people in New York that the egos in LA would be soul crushing and I’ve yet to encounter any of them. So I would probably say if there was anything difficult for me it would be purely on a technical note which trying to not play to 1700 people and trying to play to the camera which is very different for me.
But, yes, I really do echo everything that Nate’s saying. These people are really great and it feels kind of like, to me, it feels like a troop of actors that we could be doing a play like in the East Village right now and this does not feel LA or ego-driven at all which is really awesome.
Question: Do any of you have like a favorite or most memorable moment from the episodes that you’ve shot so far for this season that you want to talk about?
Karen Olivo:
I think it was Episode 3 with Alfred Molina. We had like one scene where no one could keep it together because we were having so much fun and there was some sort of video that we were supposed to be watching on TV and for some reason somebody in the scene thought something was funny and it caught on like wildfire. I mean, no one kept it together.
Every single laugh one of us broke at some point ending with Kathy Bates who is the most professional women I’ve ever met but it took every single last one of us down but it was just because we were having so much fun but, yes, that one sticks out in my memory as being like, yes, this is like the greatest job ever. Alfred Molina is cracking up on screen. I just thought that was so cool.
Nate Corddry:
I would say a similar thing like it’s not the moments so much that end up on America’s television, it’s the things that don’t make it on to TV that we share as a group of 75 people in a really big cold room everyday. Those things that don’t make it on to TV that you only share with your family. And there’s been tons of moments like that, they just keep on happening because everyone’s really happy to be there.
Question: Karen, after getting to know the character of Cassie, how has she pushed you in news ways after coming from the theater?
Karen Olivo:
She’s extremely reserved and theater people are nothing like that. We’re kind of big and boisterous at all turns. And there’s something very poised about Cassie which, I mean, it really is work for me as Nate will tell you. I’m a big clown and a kid so every episode where they put me in another tight fitting suite or tight fitting dress looking extremely studious is a bit of a challenge for me. But, it’s really great because it really has bled into my everyday life. I think that I can conduct myself in a more adult manner now that I’ve played Cassie Reynolds.
Nate Corddry:
You’re wearing sexy dresses more often too.
Karen Olivo:
That is true, yes, yes. I am.
- I am petrified of raccoons.
- I occasionally fry chicken wings for my friends but ONLY while wearing a red ski hat.
- I snore like a lawn-mower.
- I have 2 cats. One named Korbin and the other named Leeloo.
- My nick-name as a baby was Weeble.
- I paint in my free-time.
- I hate beets.
- I love single-malt Scotches. (Oban, Glenmorangie, etc.)
- I am an extremely loyal friend.
- I have a poor concept of time. (1 minute can feel like an hour.)
- I should wear glasses at all times but choose to see life through a fuzzy haze.
- I was a vegan for 2 years.
- My husband’s pet name for me is “monkey.”
- I don’t drink coffee and only drink tea, preferably black tea.
- I am obsessed with Revolution in Motion.
Source: Cincinatti.com
Former University of Cincinnati student Karen Olivo has found a touch of home on the West Coast.
The Tony-winning actress added to NBC’s “Harry’s Law” this fall loves sitting at the show’s replica Arnold’s Bar and Grill, which viewers will see for the first time on Wednesday’s episode.
“It’s so comforting to sit down there between takes. You see the pictures and memorabilia on the walls, the old Cincinnati Reds stuff. It’s a very homey place,” said Olivo, who plays attorney Cassie Reynolds.
“I’m the only one on the set who would recognize everything. It makes me giggle to know they got it right. It’s really cool,” said Olivo, who studied at UC’s College-Conservatory of Music (1994-97) before joining the “Rent” cast in New York City.
Producers of Kathy Bates’ legal series built the fake Arnold’s on a Warner Bros. sound stage to give a Cincinnati flavor lacking in the first shows last winter.
Attorney Harriett “Harry” Korn (Bates) and her co-workers hang out after hours in the bar, based on the 150-year-old tavern on Eighth Street Downtown. Viewers this fall also see dozens of Cincinnati street scenes pulled from 22 hours of video shot by a “Harry’s Law” crew this summer.
“Every single show, you get a lot of great snapshots of Cincinnati,” Olivo said.
Born in New York, and raised in Central Florida, the daughter of a children’s theater director doesn’t find it ironic that she landed her first TV series regular role in a show set in the Queen City.
Olivo had been flying from New York to LA to get into TV for five years, even before winning the 2009 best actress Tony for Anita in “West Side Story.”
“It just makes perfect sense,” she said.
Just like coming to CCM from Harrison School for the Arts in Lakeland, Fla., in 1994.
“The first day I walked on the campus, I felt: This is where I should be,” she said.
At CCM, she appeared in “Big River,” “Cabaret,” “Oklahoma!” and not many other shows because she was working her way through school at Bagel Bros.
Despite Broadway success in “Rent” and “In the Heights,” she never forgot the words of Aubrey Berg, CCM musical theater chair. “He was the first teacher I had who said I ought to be on TV,” she said.
Berg said Olivo was overflowing with potential when she came to Clifton.
“She was a strong singer, dancer and actress. She certainly had the looks and acting chops for a career in television, even then.” Berg said.
“I love watching her on the small screen, but I am so glad she first made her mark on stage,” Berg said.
The admiration is mutual.
“So much of my success has been based in my Cincinnati years,” she said.
Her UC years help Olivo play by-the-book Cassie, the lone sane character in an Over-the-Rhine loft office filled with eccentrics.
“When they say, ‘You’re standing outside the courthouse,’ I know exactly where I am because I’ve been to the courthouse before. When they talk about Cincinnati, I feel I don’t have to act as much,” she said.
Producers haven’t told her much about Cassie, so she’s invented her own back story.
“She definitely lives in a swanky little place in Mount Adams. She goes to the Aronoff Center and Playhouse in the Park,” she said.
Cassie also loves Skyline Chili. Three way, no onions, same with Olivo. Except that Cassie hasn’t tasted any on the show. Yet.
“I keep asking them: ‘When do we have chili?’ They have no idea what I’m talking about!
“I keep asking all the time, ‘When do we have Skyline?’ “
This is from Karen herself: I have had to put the album on hold due to Harry’s Law. I have some songs written and will probably record and release them as singles. But that won’t happen for a while. Very sorry to those who have been waiting. There are not enough hours in the day.
“But at the same time, they always gave me good advice and told me how I was doing. The best thing they ever did for me was not lie to me. If I needed improvement in an area, they told me. That was so helpful to me.”
“…told me that I must work harder. She said that natural talent wasn’t enough and that I needed to do more. I think that stuck with me, because I’m always trying to work harder and do more.”
“Oh my God, I just want to dedicate this to everyone who has a dream. A lot of people said I couldn’t do this, but I think if you stick with it and you surround yourself with people who love you, you can do anything.”
“There are so many times you think, ‘This isn’t worth it,’ ” she said. “People think being in acting is a glamorous thing, but it’s really not all people think it is. All the interviews, the applause, people taking pictures of you isn’t all everyone thinks it is. We don’t pursue acting for those reasons. For us, artists love what we do. It’s like an addiction.”
“As an actress, I’m judged constantly,” she said. “Every time I do an audition or a performance, I’m putting myself on the chopping block. You get rejection after rejection and have doors shut in your face. It’s almost like I’m a masochist.”
“It isn’t easy,” she said. “But the truth is, that this is the only thing I know how to do. I wouldn’t want to have to learn how to type so I could get an office job. I’ve spent my entire life learning to be an actress, and this is all I can do.”
“You have to be really hungry for it - not to prove to someone else you can do it - but to prove to yourself, because it’s what you want,” she said. “Because it’s something you want more than anything else in the world.”
“Study, study, study! That means regular subjects too. I’ve never known of an ignorant actor that I thought was talented.”
“Dreams come true, bitches!”
Great article about Karen (it’s the one Lin linked in that tweet I posted). It provides a very nice rounding out of the basic concept “Karen Olivo is badass and adorable and you should watch her on TV.”
I don’t know why they are making this sound all sketchy and schemey with the “as part of second season strategy” headline, especially as the article doesn’t outline any particular strategy beyond having hired someone awesome. But set your DVRs for Wednesday, September 21 at 9/8 central on NBC! Karen Olivo will be being badass on a TV near you!
Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen’s Fugitive Songs, which was originally produced Off-Broadway by Dreamlight Theatre Company in 2008, will live on in a studio cast recording.
Miller and Tysen have partnered with Yellow Sound Label, who will release the cast album of their The Burnt Part Boysthis fall, to produce and distribute Fugitive Songs.
The studio cast will include Karen Olivo (Tony Award winner for West Side Story), Joshua Henry (Tony Award nominee for The Scottsboro Boys), Will Chase (Billy Elliot, High Fidelity), Matt Caplan (Spider-Man, Rent) and Alysha Umpress (American Idiot). The cast will head into the recording studio in September with a December release likely.
