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Interviews
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Priscilla Lopez - Everybody's Mom Philip Fisher meets Obie and Tony Award winner Priscilla Lopez. Priscilla Lopez is clearly one of those people who loves what she is doing. As soon as she starts talking about her part in Anna in the Tropics, a smile comes to her face and her enjoyment spills out. The fact that she is now playing mothers seems a source of joy rather than disappointment and her sunny nature is apparent as she rejoices in the fact that at least it is not grandmothers. This enjoyment is partly due to a realisation that she really is cut out to be a comic character actress like her childhood heroine, Lucille Ball. It took time but "I eventually found out that I was comedic and not a dramatic actress". She first came to public attention when she was in the original cast of A Chorus Line at the Public Theater in New York and then on tour in Los Angeles. For a year-and-a-half, she played the part of Diana Morales and introduced the song "What I Did For Love". She was rewarded with an Obie and a Tony nomination and is unequivocal about that time. "It was the best experience in the world, I wouldn't trade it for anything and I wish I could do it again". She went one better with her performance as Harpo Marx in the musical comedy A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. Unlike the original, she did not play a harp but a musical bicycle, at increasingly frenetic pace. For this performance, a Tony nomination became an award for Best Featured Actress. Miss Lopez' career has featured numerous Broadway productions such as Nine The Musical and Breakfast at Tiffany's, many off-Broadway shows and TV and film appearances. However, it is only in the last 12 months that she has shed unbearable pre-performance nerves. As she says, "Every night, I felt like I was going to throw up until I went out on stage". Mysteriously, when she was performing in what she regards as "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life", she suddenly noticed that the stage fear had disappeared, seemingly forever. That was in Eric Weinberger's one-woman show Class Mothers '68, which earned her a nomination for a Drama Desk Award, no mean feat for a low-budget show in an off-Broadway theatre. Her energetic tour-de-force as six different characters fully deserved the acclaim that she received. In addition to the theatrical work, Miss Lopez has also enjoyed her recent work on film. A year ago, she had the good fortune to appear with her namesake, Jennifer Lopez (JLo and PLo as she puts it) and Ralph Fiennes in Maid in Manhattan. Surprisingly, although she attended an initial read-through with the English heart-throb actor, that was the last that she saw of him as they shared no scenes together. Most of her work was with the lovely JLo. Now, she has just finished making a film version of the off-Broadway staple, Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding. This is a kind of the reality theatre show where the audience become guests at the celebrations and has achieved a kind of cult status in New York over the last fifteen years. Miss Lopez has been cast as the mother of the bride and, judging by the hilarious rendition of short extracts that she provides in her Broadway dressing room between performances of Anna in the Tropics, it will be unmissable. She regards Anna in the Tropics as one of the highlights of a relatively long career - "such a joy". The cast is the happiest that she can ever remember and she loves working with a team of exclusively Latino (or Hispanic) actors. That community has recently rewarded her with a Rita Moreno Hola Award for her career achievements. The chance for the Puerto Rican Miss Lopez to banter in her mother tongue with a group of actors with whom she feels completely comfortable is a source of great pleasure. As she emphasises, "I've never been in a company that gets along as well as this one. They're like a family". This allows her to speak and eat her language for the first time in years. She is also proud to be working in a play that has won its writer, Nilo Cruz, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the first time in its history that it has been won by a Latino playwright. This play is also almost unique in that new writing does not make it to a Broadway stage without playing elsewhere in New York first. It appears that neither Mr Cruz nor the McCarter Theatre Center at Princeton under its artistic director and director of the play, Emily Mann, realised that they are attempting the impossible. It is a credit to all concerned that not only has the play made it to Broadway but it is doing well there. In her dreams, Miss Lopez would like to continue playing Ofelia forever and maybe even satisfy a fantasy by taking the show to London. If nothing else, that would allow her to continue acting with a great company including film actor Jimmy Smits, somebody for whom she has nothing but respect. It would be nice to feel that, not only for the delightful Miss Lopez and the rest of the production team but also for all those Latinos who are finally seeing their peers portrayed on a Broadway stage, her dream will come true.
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