Broadway bound

Arvada Center actress wins a key role in 'Chorus Line'

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 17, 2006 at midnight

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On Thursday, Jessica Lee Goldyn opens in the chorus line of Pippin. Days after the show closes, she joins A Chorus Line - the hotly awaited Broadway revival.

It's a big move for a 20-year-old, cast in the ensemble of the Arvada Center's production of the Stephen Schwartz musical. She'll be one of the many in Arvada, the company backing up a fanciful tale of the son of Charlemagne.

And until this winter, Arvada would have been a major move forward in her career. The New Jersey native just got her Actor's Equity union card last fall. Then came A Chorus Line, in which Goldyn won the role of Val at an open- call audition in February.

It's the same role that last fall won her that Equity card in Akron, Ohio. She was playing Val at a dinner theater, singing Dance Ten, Looks Three, about a flat-chested dancer who never gets hired until plastic surgery boosts her "talent." She was understudying the role of Cassie, an older dancer back to audition for her ex-lover.

Cassie, though, was a struggle for such a young performer. "I didn't have the chops to back it up. There's an emotional side of Cassie that only someone who's older can understand."

In Akron, Goldyn was directed by Donna Drake, who played Tricia in the original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line. "She worked with me a lot, because Val came a lot easier for me than Cassie. She tried to teach me the vulnerability of Cassie," Goldyn says."

At her audition for the Broadway production, Goldyn went back to the role of Val, performing her monologue.

"Everyone in the show is such a typecast," she says. "You can look at the stage and go, she's a Sheila, she's a Val, she's a Connie. I think that my personality fits Val."

Goldyn knew she was doing well in the audition, even with Bob Avian, the revival's director and the original production's co-choreographer with Michael Bennett.

"They started to laugh, and it's so hard to make them laugh because they're picking apart everything, and they've seen how many Vals do Val," Goldyn says. "It's hard to make Val likable. She's doing her monologue and it's full of 'F' words and cursing, and you have to like her."

A Chorus Line, of course, is about an audition where the director makes his dancers get personal. But the Broadway auditions were strictly performing affairs. "There wasn't a callback that I didn't think they were going to do it to me, and I didn't want to think what they were going to say," Goldyn says.

Growing up in Parsippany, N.J., Goldyn spent her childhood dancing, first at a local dance studio and then at the High School of Performing Arts in New York. Before her senior year, she auditioned for a non-Equity tour of Fosse and was hired. Goldyn took her GED and hit the road. "I didn't like school, so it was never in the cards. Plus, a dancer's life is so short. There's only so long you can dance."

Between Bennett of A Chorus Line and Bob Fosse of Pippin, Goldyn will be dancing the steps of the two great choreographers of the 1970s. A jazz dancer, she says her skills are rooted in years of ballet.

"If you look at any of the original-cast Fosse dancers, they're all ballet-trained, because it's such a controlled movement in the Fosse style, and it's all about the strength that ballet gives you," Goldyn says. "But I believe that Fosse dancers are born Fosse dancers. And I feel that way with Michael Bennett's dance as well. There are a lot of people who can't dance the way Michael Bennett did in 1975."

The men have signature styles that often faced off against one another for awards and audiences.

"Fosse is just a smaller, more intricate movement," Goldyn says, "and I'd say Michael Bennett is more of a workhorse dancing, where one minute you're down to the floor and the next minute you're popping up.

For the original cast, A Chorus Line was a mixed blessing. It brought them out of the background and made them the toast of Broadway. But most had trouble reaching that prominence again.

"You know what? It's what I love to do, and it doesn't matter if you're a tree onstage, really," Goldyn says.

"I could do Chorus Line and then be back in the ensemble, doing a show in, you know, Kentucky. I don't think it's really hit me yet that I'm going to be a principal in a Broadway show."

Jessica Lee Goldyn

• Age: 20

• Hometown: Parsippany, N.J.

• Current job: Ensemble of Pippin at the Arvada Center

• Next job: Val in the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5101

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