Conrad Ricamora On The Bumpy Road To The ‘Little Shop Of Horrors’


Since opening in October 2019, Michael Mayer’s well received “Little Horror Shop” the resurrection attracted a number of handsome protagonists: Jonathan Groff was the first to step into Seymour Krelborn’s Converse sneakers, followed by Gideon Glick and Jeremy Jordan. This reflects the cast evolution of the character, who is a painfully shy plant geek. Both Rick Moranis (in the 1986 film adaptation of the show) and Jake Gyllenhaal (in the 2015 concert production) didn’t get many roles.

When asked about participating in this, ahem, hot streak, Conrad Ricamora burst out laughing. “I played a nerdy IT guy for six years on ‘How to Get Away With Murder’, so I don’t know if there’s a complete consensus that I was inducted into the Jake Gyllenhaal Hall of Fame,” he said.

Ricamora, 42, has been performing at the Westside Theatre’s headquarters since January 11, showing some serious comic power while also tapping into the character’s agonizing loneliness. Pain is felt when the opening number says, “Someone show me a way out of here / Because I’m always praying to get out of here”.

This versatility won’t be new news for those who’ve seen him on stage before – yes, Oliver stans, he can sing! Ricamora had a way of invoking a shamanic intensity as magnetic political leader Ninoy Aquino in David Byrne and the Fatboy Slim hit show “Here Lies Love,” which opened at the Public Theater in 2013. And then there was her fiery romance. Condemned to the Burmese scholar and beloved Lun Tha in the 2015 Lincoln Center production “The King and I” – ah, those duets with Ashley Park’s Tuptim!

Chatting after a recent rehearsal, the actress was candid about the obstacles she had to overcome on her way to Skid Row, the derelict neighborhood where “Little Shop of Horrors” takes place.

For example, when the director of his first professional show, “Everything Goes” production in North Carolina, asked if more Chinese could sound. “In the Asian acting community, we call it ‘ching chong’ – ‘they want you to be ching-chong-y’,” said Ricamora, who is half Filipino. “It didn’t feel great.”

He talked about his disappointment as he felt that there was a lack of attention to dialects, even in the production of “The King and Me”, which had huge resources. “I didn’t want to make any waves because I wanted this job – I still had debt, I had a lot of debt,” he said. “And number 2, I thought the best way to work was to say yes to everything because then they would tell other people it was easy to work with.” (Financial pressure only subsided after he began making what he called “TV money” on “How to Avoid Murder” for six years, where he played computer genius Oliver Hampton.)

Being in the casting was a relief for Ricamora. “Soft Power” by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori A delicious acid meta-musical from 2019 that looks at myth-making and how American culture deals with ethnic stereotypes – including a whole Rodgers and Hammerstein pastiche trick about correct Chinese pronunciation.

One day, Tesori asked the largely Asian-American cast what it took them to tell such a personal, emotional story on the show. Reliving that moment, Ricamora turned her question on its head and once again overcame it with the pain and anger that unlocked the problem when she thought that the cast still had a rare opportunity to play fully human characters after all these years of stereotypical roles. .

“What does [expletive] Did it cost me all of my Asian American brothers and sisters?” she said, her voice trembling. “Here’s what it costs us: Women are constantly played as prostitutes and purely sexual beings. As Asian American men, we’re constantly being asked to completely abstain from our sexuality and be the butt of the joke and be treated like third-class citizens.

“When you see Asian Americans standing on stage in the theater, they’ve been getting over people who have been telling them for years to put it aside and be a cliché,” she burst into tears. “We all wonder, ‘When will we have a chance to fully exist?’ And that’s how ‘Soft Power’ felt for all of us.”

It had been a long journey up until that point – however, for a long time Ricamora’s life had been focused on tennis, not theatre.

“You wouldn’t know that I wrote ‘I’m going to win the US Open’ in my diary over and over in college,” he said with a laugh. “It was never my goal to want to go to Broadway because I didn’t know it existed. I grew up in a very toxic masculine culture on Air Force bases, so there was no theater. There was no such thing as art.”

His military father, who immigrated from the Philippines, wandered the family until he settled on a longer spell in Florida, where young Conrad attended middle and high school. His white mother had separated when he was a baby, and his father remarried when Conrad was 8 years old.

He studied psychology at Queens University of Charlotte, NC, which he attended on a tennis scholarship. And then she had a revelation: She took a theater class at an early age and was given a monologue from Lanford Wilson’s “Sky with Lemon” and was given a monologue about a young boy trying to connect with his estranged father. “I remember thinking, ‘This is my experience – I have to stand here and say these words because I know what this person is talking about,'” she said. “The electricity I felt in that moment, that connection between actor, playwright and audience, is something I’ve been after ever since.”

After completing his education, he started playing in the local community theater and moved on to professional productions. Low point: “Everything Goes”.

Highlight: “Shakespeare’s R&J” in 2008, starring Juliet opposite Evan Jonigkeit’s Romeo. “It blew my mind for a queer one,” Ricamora said of the Philadelphia production. “I felt like he blew up the world for me. There was so much more I could reach in my job.”

She was nearly finishing her MA in acting at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and saw the call for “Here Lies Love” when she went to New York to audition.

“You can immediately say you’re in the presence of a really special and—I hate to use that word—starred person,” director Alex Timbers said on the phone. “There was a real connection to the role, but there was also something that you wanted to be a part of early in that actor’s career because they’re going to extraordinary places.”

Hwang was similarly impressed: “He is some kind of charisma machine.”

And yet, the frenzy unleashed by Tesori’s question is haunting. Yes, Ricamora replaces three Tony-nominated actors in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but it’s hard not to be a little disappointed for her: Why did it take so long to get the lead? Why aren’t actors like Ricamora, Jason Tam (“Be More Chill”) or Telly Leung (“Allegiance”) better known?

“There have been more or less non-existent roles for Asian romantic leads,” Hwang said. “Even if you take on a role like Lun Tha, which is kind of in that direction, it’s still not the center.”

“For Asian women, it’s hard in a different way: They tend to be overly sexualized, portrayed as lotus flowers or dragon ladies as we call them. So they’re in a limited but different set of clichés.”

Never mind the quality: even the quantity is missing. According to a report by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, only 6.3 percent of all available roles in New York City during the 2018-19 season went to Asian American actors.

A partial solution is what Ricamora is doing now: to put her stamp on an iconic role like Seymour. After just two weeks of rehearsal, she allowed herself to “chatter a little” after she hit the stage, so for now she’s focusing on making the part her own – “I’ll fill it in more as the competition progresses,” she said.

For Tammy Blanchard, who played Seymour’s sweetheart Audrey from the very beginning: “Conrad is very deep, very centered. Jeremy was hilarious, but you also had feelings for him. I think Conrad will be more than what Michael Mayer originally intended with Jonathan Groff – a dark, kind of emotional journey.”

And when that experience is over, Ricamora is ready to tell more stories.

“I would love to play ‘Tom’ in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ or Hal in ‘Henry IV, Part One – my father’s problems run deep,” Ricamora said, laughing from the episodes of her dream. “But especially after doing ‘Soft Power’, I think the roles were written by playwrights I still haven’t met, Asian American playwrights I haven’t met yet.”

The challenge for this latest demographic is clear: The Coalition’s report points out that Asian American playwrights, composers, librettists and songwriters made up just 4.4 percent of all writers produced on New York stages in 2018-19. Time Promising list of Asian-American productions Finally lined up in 2020, Covid-19 hit.

While it’s on television for now, Ricamora is willing to play its part there too: He and his friends Kelvin Moon Loh and Jeigh Madjus have sold “No Rice,” a half-hour comedy series they wrote, executive produced, and starred in. “The name comes from what people would put in Grindr, Tinder or Match or whatever,” he explained, referring to the racist shorthand descriptions. “In 2015-2016 and before, it was all over dating apps – people would freely write ‘no rice’, ‘no spice’, ‘no oil’, ‘no female teeth’.” (He has yet to reveal where he will be on the air.)

Meanwhile, he is back on stage, happy to fight a bloodthirsty plant and sing songs of loneliness and pain. “I love going back to the theater because you show up every day,” Ricamora said. “Theatre grounds you – eight shows a week is no joke.”



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