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DIVA TALK: Chatting with Next to Normal's Alice Ripley, Plus Betty Buckley at Feinstein's
By Andrew Gans
22 Feb 2008
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Alice Ripley
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News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert/cabaret stage.
ALICE RIPLEY
As one of the many who have enjoyed watching Alice Ripley become a leading player in the New York musical theatre scene, it's especially gratifying to report that the gifted singing actress — whose Broadway resume includes Side Show, Sunset Boulevard, Les Miserables, The Who's Tommy and James Joyce's The Dead — is currently offering her most powerful performance yet in the thoroughly moving Off-Broadway musical Next to Normal at Second Stage.
Ripley has been involved with workshops of the Tom Kitt (music)-Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) musical for the past few years; she even debuted the beautiful "I Miss the Mountains" at her Town Hall concert with Emily Skinner in 2006. Ripley, in fact, has had such confidence in Next to Normal that she and husband Shannon Ford have relocated to New York (they recently purchased a house in Long Island) after spending a few years in Los Angeles. "I wanted to show my faith in the show, and I really wanted to be here for the show," Ripley says. "I really wanted it to go through my whole [being], and it's working. It definitely is having an effect on me. It's been a very intense experience, and I'm glad to say that the show feels manageable now. It feels like I can deliver it, get out of the way, and remain intact at the end and feel energized by it as opposed to being devastated by it. That's how it was for a few weeks there."
Ripley plays the mammoth role of Diana, the manic-depressive wife of Dan (Brian d'Arcy James) and mother to Natalie (Jennifer Damiano) and Gabe (Aaron Tveit). After years of a drug-induced existence, where she experiences neither life's highs nor lows, Diana tries to find happiness, at first without the aid of medication and later through more drastic methods. While researching the role, Ripley says, "I did everything that I could. I definitely did a lot of homework, reading up on the subject matter of the show — books and online research. Also, I'm drawing from my mother's side of the family. Diana's story is in me personally. Even though I don't have the same story. . . the bloodline of what she goes through is definitely in my family."
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Alice Ripley in Next to Normal.
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
Ripley describes Diana as "the most vulnerable person in any room. In that way she is very much like my mother. [That's] a nice way of putting it," she says with a laugh. "[Diana] is the life of the party, a graceful life of the party, completely lovable . . . and the person that will get under the table and smash the china piece by piece, which is something I witnessed in my childhood. Diana throws the cutlery across the room and instantly regrets it, but the moment of thinking, 'Maybe I shouldn't do this,' doesn't occur to her. She is very impulsive, but at the same time, completely lovable."
When asked her own views on medication versus more traditional psychotherapy, Ripley pauses and says, "[Next to Normal] has strong statements that it makes about certain subjects, and I am aligned with them. I'm very much kind of a hard-nosed self-healer. That doesn't mean that I won't take an antibiotic if I really need it, but I try to be careful about the choices that I make. I put my faith in myself first when it comes to my health. That doesn't mean that I don't need help, but it just means that there are certain things that I can do on a daily basis to prevent illness. If I can do that, then sometimes I can avoid it. But then, if you're really sick and you need somebody to help you, then you need somebody to help you. But in general I think that I am kind of a hard-lined conservative about my health in that I believe that I trust myself first."
Ripley, whose powerful and rangy belt is used to dramatic effect throughout Next to Normal's pop-rock score, says the role has "not been without its challenges. I've definitely climbed a couple of mountains along the way, and happily I'm on the other side of all of those things. It was a real trick to figure out how to do what you're always asked to do in a musical, which is to balance the dramatic action with the technique [of singing]. In a show like Side Show, that was definitely a challenge. This makes everything else I've done seem easy, in that sense at least, in that the dramatic intensity of the show never lets up. If I have a fight with my husband and I throw the silverware across the stage, I have to remember that I can't really yell at him. I have to keep a gate on the follow-through of the action in order to then be able to keep my [vocal] technique together for later on in the show and the next day and the next day and the next day. That's been a real challenge to figure that out, and I think that we have figured it out. I probably speak for the whole cast in that because I'm not the only one who goes through that kind of an experience onstage in the show."
Ripley says working with Michael Greif, best known for his Tony-nominated direction of Rent and, more recently, Grey Gardens, has been "a dream. He's so loving and kind — generous, considerate and maybe even too careful of everybody's feelings in the room. Just like any director that you work with, there's a filtering thing you go through as an actor, where you figure out a language and you figure out the dance and how to relate to each other. That happened very quickly with Michael. I instantly adored him."
Greif, Ripley says, attends every performance and waits at the top of the stairs post-curtain. "We all run up at the end of the show, and he's waiting up there, and his face is like a light bulb all-aglow with happiness," says Ripley. "He's proud of us. He still gives us notes, and I love that. I love getting notes — that's a nice compliment."
Ripley also has nothing but praise for her co-stars and the entire design team, which boasts Spring Awakening's Tony-winning lighting designer Kevin Adams. "He's done a great job," Ripley says. "The lights in a show are often taken for granted, like a band at a wedding. If a band at a wedding is bad, everybody complains about it, but if they're good, nobody says anything. To me, the lights of any show I do [are] always kind of the secret ingredient to my performance. It informs the emotion, especially in this piece."
About working on the spectacular three-tiered set designed by Mark Wendland, Ripley says with a laugh, "I did have a collision with the set at one point that was an accident. Luckily, I have a really hard head and I wasn't injured! I have worked on some scary sets, so I'm used to … trusting [the scenic designer] that he knows what he's doing and that everything is where it's supposed to be and is going to be where it needs to be at the time it needs to be there. You just kind of trust. And, it is a wonderful set. It's like a big jungle gym, like a playground for the imagination.
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Ripley with Brian d'Arcy James
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
Continued...
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