From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Tue Jun 02 2009 - 09:25:07 EDT
For pictures click on
http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/GYPSY_OF_THE_MONTH_Asmeret_Ghebremichael_of_The_Wiz_20090601
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GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Asmeret Ghebremichael of 'The Wiz'
Monday, June 1, 2009; Posted: 09:06 PM - by Adrienne Onofri
To theater fans, The Wiz is a show that won seven Tony awards, ran on
Broadway for more than four years and was made into a movie starring Diana
Ross and Michael Jackson. To Asmeret Ghebremichael, though, it’s the show in
which she made both her amateur and professional performing debuts—and
that’s her first big project of 2009.
Ghebremichael is in the cast of the Wiz that begins performances June 12 at
City Center, this year’s installment of Encores! Summer Stars. When she was
in high school, she landed her first professional job in a production of The
Wiz at Pittsburgh’s Bynum Theater, directed by Billy Porter (like
Ghebremichael, a native of Pittsburgh). She’d had her first-ever role in a
musical when she played Dorothy in The Wiz in middle school.
After that sixth-grade Wiz, Ghebremichael announced to her family: “Okay, I
want to move to New York, I want to go to NYU, and I want to be on
Broadway.” Her mother and father, a nurse and electrical engineer who’d
immigrated from the north African nation of Eritrea, were nonplussed: “When
I said that I wanted to do this for a living, they had no idea what it
entailed.” Yet their daughter managed to achieve all three goals within the
decade: She made her Broadway debut in Footloose at age 18, just a few
months into her freshman year at NYU.
Now, with another decade under her belt, Ghebremichael can also list these
achievements: a featured role on Broadway, a scene in a major motion
picture, ensemble parts in a string of hit musicals, and the female lead in
an award-winning independent film.
After Footloose closed in mid-2000, Ghebremichael continued her studies at
NYU and, following graduation, did a number of out-of-town shows. She
returned to Broadway in late 2004 as part of the first replacement cast of
Wicked, then after about a year took over an ensemble slot in Spamalot that
included understudying the Lady of the Lake. In 2007, she was in the
original cast of In the Heights off-Broadway. She departed the
Broadway-bound show for a featured role in Legally Blonde: sorority girl
Pilar, one of Elle Woods’ besties. “Those three girls,” says Ghebremichael,
referring to Elle’s friends Pilar, Serena and Margot, “had the easiest job,
and the most fun job. We were sort of the comic relief, and we were
featured. We got to sing and we got to dance and we got to act and be
funny—it was a little bit of everything.”
Ghebremichael had been runner-up for Pilar at the original cast auditions
and ended up taking over for DeQuina Moore, who got the part. But it was
only after Ghebremichael succeeded Moore as Pilar that MTV broadcast Legally
Blonde—giving her a featured role in a TV special. She later appeared in a
couple of episodes of the reality competition Legally Blonde the Musical:
The Search for Elle Woods, which also aired on MTV.
The Wiz, which is scheduled to run through July 5, is Ghebremichael’s first
major production since Legally Blonde closed in October. She was just one
week into rehearsals when I interviewed her last week and had only worked on
the tornado and Munchkinland scenes at that point. Among her roles will be
the Second Munchkin in “He’s the Wizard,” which five Munchkins sing with
good witch Addaperle (Dawnn Lewis). In the original Broadway production, the
Second Munchkin was played by Phylicia Rashad (then Phylicia
Ayers-Allen)—“not a bad person to follow,” says Ghebremichael.
Another thing she has in common with Rashad is a sister who’s also a
performer. Asmeret’s younger sib Semhar Ghebremichael has been in the Lion
King tour and the Las Vegas Spamalot and recently had a brief dancing scene
on 30 Rock. Though they both auditioned for City Center’s The Wiz as well as
a regional Little Princess (which Asmeret got) and Shrek (which she didn’t),
Asmeret downplays the competition. Even as children, there wasn’t too much
rivalry, the big sis says: “She was much more into gymnastics and tumbling;
I was more interested in the singing and the theatrical aspect.”
Asmeret and her sister grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Churchill, in a
home where their parents spoke the Eritrean language Tigrinya, which Asmeret
says she can understand but not speak proficiently today. She’s always known
other Eritreans, both in the Pittsburgh area and here in New York: “We have
family and friends who live all over the place.” And while she admits to not
doing much cooking of either Eritrean or American food, she’s still a fan of
the popular Eritrean/Ethiopian dish injera—a flat, soury bread topped with
spicy meats and vegetables. “There are plenty of restaurants in the city
that serve it,” Ghebremichael says. “I also make my mother cook it and bring
it with her when she visits.”
She visited her parents’ homeland as an adolescent, not long after Eritrea
had prevailed in its three-decades-long war for independence from Ethiopia.
A former Italian and British colony, Eritrea lies on the western shore of
the Red Sea, across from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and borders Ethiopia and
Sudan. Her parents came to the U.S. for college and stayed because of the
war. They named their elder daughter after Eritrea’s capital city, Asmara.
The true pronunciation is As-merit, but she goes by the Americanized
Az-ma-rhett (her last name is pronounced Ghebra-mikell).
Asmeret began taking dance classes when she was 3—“because I had way too
much energy, like a lot of people who start dancing.” A few years later, she
switched to another studio and expanded from just ballet to jazz and tap.
Voice lessons commenced when she was in middle school. During middle and
high school, Ghebremichael came to New York a couple of times a year with
her dance teacher and other students. On their first trip, they saw Tommy,
Guys and Dolls and Annie Warbucks, but it was a show on a subsequent trip
that stuck with her the most. “I remember seeing Vanessa Williams do Kiss of
the Spider Woman,” Ghebremichael says. “For me, what was so inspiring was
that, first of all, there was someone who looked like me in the lead role,
and she was also doing everything—singing, dancing, acting. I thought:
That’s kind of a dream part.” She waited at the stage door after the show to
meet Williams. “She took a picture with me,” Ghebremichael recalls, still
elated. “I was totally starstruck!”
To ensure she’d get to NYC, Ghebremichael applied only to New York
colleges—Fordham, Columbia and NYU—but she was not so single-minded as far
as her coursework. “I decided that I wanted to study something other than
dance or drama,” she says, adding that it was “sort of at my parents’
urging, too.” She majored in communications at NYU and while she took voice
classes at school, she headed off-campus (to Broadway Dance and Steps) for
her dance training.
Though Ghebremichael worked professionally for over a year during
college—some of it out of town—she graduated on time, and even gave the
valedictory address at her 2002 commencement. At NYU, she was in the Martin
Luther King Jr. Scholars, an honors program for students of color in all
different majors. Requirements included maintaining a 3.5 GPA, doing
community service and meeting regularly with the group to discuss topics in
various disciplines. “I knew I wanted to perform, so it was nice to have,
sort of, both worlds,” Ghebremichael says of balancing performance classes
and the honors program. For a Scholars trip to Brazil during her junior
year, students selected specific aspects of Brazilian history, life or
culture to study on-site. She chose capoeira, the acrobatic
martial-arts-infused dance. “It’s such a part of their culture, they do it
on the street,” she says. “One afternoon I ended up battling with some of
the people on the street, throwing in my gymnastics.” She also bonded with
some street children who’d been put in dance and other arts classes, staying
in touch with them after she came home.
Ghebremichael had auditioned for Footloose before she began college. The
show opened on Broadway as her freshman year was getting under way, but she
hadn’t gotten into the original cast. A few months later, they needed an
immediate replacement for Lori Holmes (who went on medical leave) and called
her. She left Footloose for what was supposed to be a pre-Broadway tryout of
Finian’s Rainbow. That production—directed by Lonny Price and starring
Austin Pendleton, Brian Murray and then unknowns Denis O’Hare, Kate Jennings
Grant and J. Robert Spencer—played the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami and
the Cleveland Playhouse, but its Broadway plans fell apart before the next
intended stop, the Ahmanson in L.A.
Back in New York in 2000, Ghebremichael returned to Footloose for the
remainder of its run. Then she turned her attention back to college
full-time. After graduation, she went out on tour with Aida for a year, as a
swing and understudy for Nehebka. Later, she performed in the
Orfeh-headlined revue Nights on Broadway at Caesars Palace in Atlantic City.
That show was choreographed by A.C. Ciulla, who’d worked on the Wiz she did
in Pittsburgh and choreographed Footloose.
For City Center’s The Wiz, she’s reunited with other former colleagues. The
Encores! production has the same creative team as In the Heights: director
Thomas Kail, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and music director Alex
Lacamoire. They, obviously, harbor no hard feelings over her decision not to
join In the Heights before it hit Broadway. “When I left In the Heights for
Legally Blonde, there was talk of me coming back to do my track when it
moved to Broadway,” she says. “It was really hard to make a decision because
I’d created something and it was so personal. To everybody—we were all so
involved emotionally with the show. But ultimately, I decided that for my
career I needed to stay in Legally Blonde and focus on more featured,
principal roles.”
“They’re still my family,” Ghebremichael says of the Heights folks, “and now
I get to work with them again.” She’s especially excited to be dancing once
more for Blankenbuehler, who choreographed the A Little Princess musical
that Ghebremichael was in in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2004. “Andy has been so
wonderful in letting his dancers just take the steps or whatever staging
that he gives them and develop it. I always feel like an actor and a dancer
doing his stuff,” she says. “The older I get, the more interested I am in
not only a genre [of dance] but communicating the story—especially in a
musical. Just walking across the stage and conveying some sort of message
through your expression and your physicality.”
She also knew Lacamoire before In the Heights, having met him when she
joined Wicked’s Broadway cast. From Wicked, she moved on to another
juggernaut, Spamalot, where she occasionally got to cover the Lady of the
Lake (then played by Lauren Kennedy), a role she’d desired since she first
saw the show the previous year. While she was in Spamalot, castmate Steve
Rosen asked her to be in an improv/sketch comedy show he’d co-created. It
was Don’t Quit Your Night Job, which turned out to be something of
juggernaut itself—albeit after-hours. After a monthly gig at Joe’s Pub
downtown from mid-2006 to spring of ’07, the show moved to the HA! Comedy
Club in the theater district for nightly performances; in late 2007, it took
up residency at midtown’s Zipper Theater, and was performed there monthly
until the Zipper shut down in January. Ghebremichael was in the show
throughout its Joe’s Pub and Zipper runs, as her real “night job” changed
from Spamalot to In the Heights to Legally Blonde. Among her Don’t Quit
duties were singing the opening number and performing in the “NY2” skit—a
spoof of NY1’s “On Stage,” with two actors playing critics reviewing shows
improvised by other actors from audience suggestions for characters, titles
and stars. “I think my favorite moment from that game was when I played Mrs.
Butterworth,” says Ghebremichael. “I also got to play a Hebrew school
dropout.”
In addition to those comedy shows, her work outside of musical theater
includes a few movies. She appears in a scene with star Isla Fisher in
Confessions of a Shopaholic (due out on DVD later this month), portraying
the receptionist at Alette magazine. And she has a principal role, as
wedding singer Ivy, in The Drummer, an independent film about two people
rediscovering their passion for music. It has screened at several film
festivals nationwide and even won Best Short at some of them. On The
Drummer’s website, the movie’s writer-director, Bill Block, mentions that
Ghebremichael was virtually the only woman who auditioned for Ivy who didn’t
sing “Defying Gravity.”
“When I got there,” she relates about the audition, “I realized that they
were seeing a lot of Broadway girls, because they wanted whoever was playing
Ivy to really be a singer. I had no idea what they were looking for, because
they saw all different types of women. I sang ‘I Got It Bad’ by Duke
Ellington, which is one of my favorite songs to sing.”
She also appears in another independent film seeking distribution: the
thriller Red Hook, which stars Terrence Mann. She plays a cashier at an
Internet café named Asmeret. Without knowing her, the screenwriter—who’d
seen her in shows—named the character after her because he liked the name.
When the director came to see In the Heights, she recalls, “he told me this
story and asked me if I’d like to play myself.”
Back on stage, Ghebremichael appeared at Joe’s Pub in April—alongside Don’t
Quit Your Night Job creators Rosen and Sarah Saltzberg, among others—in a
one-night-only concert staging of The Czar of Rock and Roll, a 1989 musical
by Lewis Black and the late Rusty Magee. She also recently participated in a
reading of the American Idol-inspired “interactive” musical Superstar, which
is hoping for a Broadway bow as early as next year.
Perhaps with Superstar, Ghebremichael will accomplish an as-yet unfulfilled
goal: originating a role on Broadway. “I feel like my career has been full
of me replacing people,” she says. Her tone is anything but complaining, but
she does recall a number of times she went down to the wire for an original
cast before the last cuts were made—Footloose and Aida, to name a couple.
“In the beginning there was a lot of making it [through auditions] all day
and then not getting it,” she says.
Of course, she still made it to Broadway a matter of months after arriving
in New York. While she admits to being “a little spoiled” by her early
success, she’s now experienced enough to have tasted disappointment as well
as victory—and learned from both. “I think one of the most important things
to remember is, you’re not going to get everything that you audition for,”
she states. “You definitely want to go in there and have a great audition
and give everything you have, but there are so many other reasons why you’re
not getting this job—or you are getting the job—that if you try to dissect
it, it’ll drive you nuts. I realized that if I didn’t get something that I
really wanted, it’s only because down the road I got something that maybe I
was meant to do.”
Photos of Asmeret, from top: during a rehearsal break for The Wiz; with her
Legally Blonde sorority sisters Tracy Jai Edwards (left) and Annaleigh
Ashford, on the “pink carpet” for the telecast’s premiere; with her real
sister, Semhar, who’s also in showbiz; as the Lady of the Lake in Spamalot,
2006; center, between Lin-Manuel Miranda and Robin de Jesus, in the
off-Broadway production of In the Heights; opening Don’t Quit Your Night
Job, with Maurice Murphy (left) and Derrick Baskin, last October. [Heights
photo by Joan Marcus; Don’t Quit photo by Peter James Zielinski]
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