Building Character
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He’s Not a Total Villain. Honest.
Tom Hewitt plays a bad guy with a soft side in Doctor Zhivago — Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles When Tom Hewitt admonishes the adolescent daughter of his paramour to “Pull your stockings up, Lara; it’s distracting,” you learn everything you need to know about […]
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Meet the Symbolically Powerful Eunuchs
Behind the most unusual characters in Broadway’s The Visit
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When Your Lines Are Like Lyrics, How Do You Speak?
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Four Broadway Roles at the Same Time
By MARK BLANKENSHIP Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles No wonder it took Tracee Chimo a few performances to discover how Molly speaks. She already had her hands full with April, Betsy, and Fran. Chimo portrays all four women in the Broadway revival of The Heidi […]
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When She Lectures, You Laugh
Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles When Mary Louise Wilson urges the audience to “Repent, repent, repent!” in Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of the screwball musical comedy On the Twentieth Century, everyone bursts out laughing. That’s because her character, a seemingly sweet little old heiress, Letitia […]
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Would You Have an Affair for the Sake of Your Memoir?
Anna Camp plays an artist in crisis in Verité — “This play is definitely keeping me up at night,” says Anna Camp, the star of Verité, Nick Jones’s unsettling new comedy at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. Specifically, she’s unsettled by the decisions her character makes about balancing her family life with her career as […]
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How Is She Playing 40 People At Once?
By KENNETH JONES Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles It’s a wonder that actress Christina Bianco doesn’t struggle with nightmares about the dozens of characters she plays in Off-Broadway’s one-woman comedy Application Pending. You imagine that keeping all of them straight haunts her fevered mind. “This […]
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Do You Care More About the Captor or the Captive?
Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles Nick Bright, the American investment banker who’s kidnapped and held for ransom in Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, certainly evokes some sympathy. In the play, which is now at New York Theatre Workshop, he has to raise his own ransom […]
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How to Put Soul in a “Honeymoon”
Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles Make no mistake: the new Broadway musical Honeymoon in Vegas is supposed to be a lark. Based on the 1992 film, it’s a fizzy romance about Jack Singer, a guy who won’t propose to his girlfriend Betsy because his mother […]