What Do ‘Hamilton,’ ‘Amélie’ and ‘Great Comet’ Have in Common? Phillipa Soo
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Version 0 of 1. Natasha. Eliza. Amélie. Three Broadway heroines, one drawn from a novel, one from a biography, and one from a film, have very different back stories. But they share a common catalyst: Phillipa Soo. The actress this spring will accomplish an unusual trifecta: Three roles she helped originate will be on Broadway at the same time. Oh, and she is just 26 years old. How did that happen? At 21, just a few weeks after graduating from Juilliard in 2012, she auditioned for an experimental electropop opera, “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” then being developed for an 87-seat theater at Ars Nova, an Off Broadway nonprofit. She got the role. Among the few thousand people who saw the Ars Nova production were two theater directors, Thomas Kail and Pam MacKinnon. Neither knew Ms. Soo, but both were impressed, and the next year, each remembered her when they were putting together readings for shows they were developing. So in late 2013, while performing in another production of “Great Comet” (then in a Midtown tent), Ms. Soo spent a week around a table, working through the second act of the musical Mr. Kail was developing — “Hamilton” — followed by a week in a reading of the musical Ms. MacKinnon was working on — “Amélie.” She got them both. In 2015, Ms. Soo originated the role of Eliza Hamilton, first Off Broadway at the Public Theater, and then on Broadway, where she was nominated for a Tony Award. And now “Amélie,” with Ms. Soo in the title role, starts previews March 9 on Broadway, and is scheduled to open on April 3 at the Walter Kerr Theater. (To make that all work, when “Great Comet” opened on Broadway, Ms. Soo was in the audience, not onstage, her part now played by Denée Benton.) Originating a role is different from performing in a revival. Lines, songs, scenes and characters are added and cut. Actors have an opportunity to shape what their characters say and do, but also must be game to adapt on a daily basis. “I get to be part of the magic,” Ms. Soo said. “I get to see a writer’s process, which is really special, especially having gone to Juilliard where a lot of the things we were doing were by playwrights who were deceased, so to have a live playwright in the room is such a treat. There’s no map for you to follow and take your journey. You are Lewis and Clark. You are the mapmaker.” Ms. Soo, known to friends as Pippa, had been acting since childhood in suburban Chicago. At 11 she had an agent and scored some work in commercials; she studied dance and improv and acted in high school productions, before landing a coveted spot at Juilliard, one of the nation’s leading performing arts schools. The theater industry keeps an eye on Juilliard grads, and Ms. Soo was spotted quickly — she signed with a New York agent through the senior showcase, and in the days after graduating went to audition after audition. “Great Comet,” adapted from a section of “War and Peace,” was about her 10th casting call. “I had no idea what to expect,” she said. “I honestly thought, ‘O.K., this is like, a little bit strange, and I’ve never heard anything like this before.’” Ms. Soo said her only goal was “to make a good impression.” And she did. “She was dressed like Annie Hall, she played the ukulele, and it didn’t hurt that she had a voice like a nuclear weapon,” recalled Rachel Chavkin, the show’s director. Ms. Soo was not the first person to play Natasha — that was Cristin Milioti (a Tony nominee for “Once”) in an early workshop — but she joined at the start of rehearsals for the first production, and played a key role in helping shape Natasha, a Russian countess spending time in Moscow while her fiancé is at war. “Pippa and I worked really hard to make sure Natasha was as interesting as possible — to get out of the box a female ingénue often gets trapped in,” Ms. Chavkin said. “I needed someone who had the grace and the period-ness of the thing, but also had a violence within, and that is something Pippa was able to straddle.” Ms. Soo had a similar goal for the character. “So often I felt like I was giving up a part of myself in order to play this ingénue — either dumbing myself down, or making myself more frightened or scared,” she said. “I finally saw an ingénue that I connected with, and I didn’t feel like I was giving up a part of myself, because the material asked for so much more.” As the composer, Dave Malloy, revised the show in between productions, Ms. Soo influenced him to make Natasha’s big song, “No One Else,” meatier. “The biggest service an actor can be is as an advocate for their character,” Ms. Chavkin said. “The song at Ars Nova was sweet, but it got a shot in the arm from Pippa, who said, ‘Look at the language in the book — Natasha is a philosopher.’ Dave ended up mining that for the show.” Ms. Chavkin said she was particularly struck by Ms. Soo’s handling of a scene in which Natasha erupts at family members who have foiled her plans to elope. “The riff that Natasha has to sing is just ridiculously high, and she has to belt it, and that alone knocks out 80 to 90 percent of the actresses we’ve seen for the role,” Ms. Chavkin said. And, as Ms. Soo sang her anger, and then prepared to try to kill herself out of spite, “she was cold, in such a beautiful way.” Ms. Soo won plaudits for her performance — the New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called her “luminous,” and she stayed with the show through several pre-Broadway incarnations, playing the part more than 300 times. She said the experience taught her about the challenges of sustaining emotional and physical intensity over a long period of time. “As a young person, I was eager to put myself out into the world and claim this moment and just go really hard, but by the end of it I was exhausted,’’ she explained. “Now, when building a show, I ask myself the question — like, jumping off this table will be really cool, but can I do that eight times a week?” Mr. Kail still remembers the cold winter night when he first saw Ms. Soo in “Great Comet.” He was seated with theater industry professionals at the makeshift supper club that was the show’s set at Ars Nova. “I remember sitting there and saying ‘Who’s going to do it? Which of you is going to take this incandescent talent and share her in the world?’ ” he said. “She is lit from within.” As it turned out, it was Mr. Kail who helped give Ms. Soo her big break. He was putting together a diverse cast for a reading of the second act of “Hamilton,” and invited Ms. Soo, whose paternal grandparents were immigrants from China, to join, convinced that she would make a good scene partner with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s writer and star. Mr. Miranda read as Alexander Hamilton; Ms. Soo as his wife, Eliza. She knew nothing about the Hamiltons. “I Wikipedia-ed Eliza, and didn’t really find a whole lot — just that she had a lot of children,” Ms. Soo said. But she knew a bit more about Mr. Miranda, having seen video of his performance of a song from “Hamilton” at the White House a few years earlier. By 2014, Ms. Soo had committed to “Hamilton,” meaning that she would be unable to continue with “Great Comet,” which was being refigured for Broadway, ultimately with the pop singer Josh Groban as its star. “Of course I felt sad not to have the full experience,” she said. “But all three of these opportunities came when I was ready to be in the creative process again.” The character of Eliza is challenging — every night, the actress playing the part must grieve her husband’s infidelity, mourn their lost child, and, finally, close the show envisioning her own death. “Sometimes I would look out and see the audience, sometimes I would look out and see my grandmother, and sometimes I would look out and see Alexander,” she said. The smash musical made Ms. Soo much better known — her anguished solo, “Burn,” is a highlight of the cast recording — and Mr. Kail said he always knew she would move on. “‘Hamilton’ is how a few people in the world got to know her,” he said. “But she’s just getting started.” Ms. Soo didn’t know Natasha before “Great Comet,” or Eliza before “Hamilton.” But she knew “Amélie.” “That movie was like my religion, as a young woman who was not necessarily introverted, but certainly a very quirky person,” she said. “I loved the colors. I loved her anonymous do-good agenda. It made living in a suburb much more exciting, because my friends and I would try and do Amélie-type things — we would dress up and leave little gifts for people.” Ms. Soo joined the project as it was getting serious, after years in which Daniel Messé, a Brooklyn musician, had been trying to figure out how to adapt the indie French hit film, which starred Audrey Tautou, into a musical. The big challenge, of course, was figuring out how to bring to life onstage a character who speaks only minimally in the film. “I was always curious — how do you make the young woman who doesn’t say much be the main character of a musical,” Ms. Soo said. “Now we have a song that can inform people what’s going on inside of her — her inner thoughts, communicated through music.” When Team “Amélie” was ready for an initial production at Berkeley Repertory Theater, in 2015, Ms. Soo was on Broadway in “Hamilton.” Samantha Barks played Amélie in the Bay Area. Ms. Soo stayed with “Hamilton” for a year (and along the way got engaged to the actor Steven Pasquale, with whom she had been set up by Jonathan Groff before he, too, joined the “Hamilton” cast). She then returned to “Amélie” for a production at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles last December, in anticipation of the transfer to Broadway. She is now the visual brand of the show: her face and impish smile adorn the marquee. “She has big charisma—and big vulnerability,” Ms. MacKinnon said. For Ms. Soo, a third opportunity to develop a new character has her feeling “less angst ridden” than before. “I think I’ve learned, really, just how to let go — if an idea doesn’t work, or it’s not perfect, that’s O.K.,” she said. “I’m happy that I learned something, and will apply it in the next version.” |