Download Tag: les miserables

Laura Heywood Interviews Ben Crawford (Phantom of the Opera)

Ben Crawford is currently and creepily embodying Broadway’s favorite malformed and maladjusted romantic hero: The Phantom of the Opera.

Is hero the right word? He’s certainly the leading man. But that Phantom, he’s a dark dude. And I can’t wait to dig into his complexities with the actor who brings him to life on Broadway eight shows a week.

Ben Crawford has been playing The Phantom for nearly two years, and he brings the same freshness every performance that he did when he first took on this “monster” of a role.

Believe it or not, The Phantom of the Opera just celebrated its 32nd anniversary on Broadway. Only 16 actors have been cast as the Phantom in that time, so this is an elite club. 

It is an “unparalleled delight” to welcome Ben Crawford to Laura Heywood Interviews!

Laura Heywood Interviews Alice Ripley (The Pink Unicorn, Next to Normal, Side Show)

Alice Ripley is one of the heavyweights of American Musical Theatre. A Tony winner for her star-turn as Diana in the Pulitzer Prize winning musical “Next to Normal,” Alice Ripley is known world-wide for showstopping roles, including those in Side Show (for which she was also Tony nominated, alongside Emily Skinner), The Rocky Horror Show, The Who’s Tommy, Les Miserables, James Joyce’s The Dead, Sunset Boulevard, and American Psycho. She is here today promoting a one-woman monologue show, “The Pink Unicorn,” at The Cell, a 60-seat venue in Chelsea. 

In “The Pink Unicorn,” from Out of the Box Theatrics, Alice plays Trisha Lee, a Christian widow in Texas whose world is shaken when her 14-year-old child, Jolene, announces that they are not in fact female but instead genderqueer, changing their name to Jo, launching a Gay/Straight alliance, and introducing their mom to the concept of gender-neutral pronouns. Trisha is totally thrown for a loop, hurled out of her comfort zone — and the show takes all of us though the complex journey of navigating the conservative community as well as her own biases, and the challenges of loving and accepting a child who defies expectations in service of being themselves.

To quote Hunter Bell & Jeff Bowen’s quirky, brilliant musical [title of show]: 

ALICE RIPLEY, SHE’S FIERCE!