Broadway baby

Rocky follows Lakewood native as her acting dreams come true

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Annaleigh Ashford has the dressing room of a Broadway beginner - a tiny two-person space with barely enough room for one.

No matter the size: It's a palace at the Palace Theatre for the 21-year-old who gets to dance nightly in 4-inch heels on the stage where Judy Garland made her comeback and Gwen Verdon stepped high in Sweet Charity.

It's where the Lakewood native puts on makeup for her Broadway debut in the musical Legally Blonde, based on the movie that made Reese Witherspoon an A-list actress. As a secondary principal (she's one of three sorority sisters who make up the show's Greek chorus), Ashford probably won't rocket to stardom from the show. But she is taking a giant step in her theatrical career.

On April 27 the Rocky Mountain News spent the day with her, beginning in the predawn dark and concluding with a performance for theater critics.

4:50 a.m.

The alarm goes off, just five hours after Annaleigh Ashford arrives home from last night's preview performance. The Today show has scheduled several numbers from Legally Blonde on its outdoor stage at Rockefeller Center. Ashford's best friend from college, actor and makeup artist Craig Jessup, slept over to do her makeup.

5:00 a.m.

A car service picks up Ashford and a few other performers for the drive in the pre-dawn quiet to Rockefeller Center.

5:45 a.m.

After arriving at the Today show, 35 cast members, crew, wardrobe people and director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell are crammed into the tiny green room. They look outside to see a deluge; the stage is covered in an inch of water, conjuring visions of sliding dancers and broken ankles. Ashford is putting on her makeup when Mitchell tells her: "Hold on, just wait."

8:14 a.m.

The viewer area outside the Today show, where tourists hold up "Hey, Mom, I'm on TV" signs, is a sea of umbrellas. Actually, it's more like a creek, with only about 100 people staring into televisions on the drowned stage. Free T-shirts keep them hollering. Legally Blonde does not - the performance is canceled, and Meredith Vieira segues into a segment on a violinist without a mention of the exhausted dancers and singers sent home to sleep. "It was an exciting morning for everyone," says Ashford, indomitably upbeat, who adds she'll have to "call everybody you know and be like, 'We'll be on next week.' "

Noon

Ashford wakes up from a 4 1/2-hour nap, eats a Powerbar and heads toward Saks to scan the dresses. She already has one for opening night, but she's unsure. "It's kind of not the time to be looking. I should have done this two weeks ago." Broadway chorus girls, even featured ones, don't get free opening-night dresses. "My manager laughed at me when I asked her."

2 p.m.

Lunch at a diner near her Upper East Side apartment: two eggs over easy, whole wheat toast with butter and jelly, and tea, a constant in a singer's life. A pile of home fries sits untouched. Tiny and strong, she's health-conscious. "You have to be. It's such a part of the business." She frequently checks her cell phone - her mother, Holli Swanson, was supposed to arrive this morning from Denver, but weather has delayed the flight.

3:29 p.m.

At her small, walk-up apartment building, Ashford fumbles for her keys. "I always do this." She shares the ground-floor, nearly railroad-style two-bedroom with Brian Slaman, who she met when they were both touring with Wicked. The door opens onto a narrow kitchen, rubbing shoulders with a narrow hallway/living room, with their bedrooms at either end of the apartment.

On the kitchen counter sits a large bouquet of faded pink roses, a gift from Sharlene Wanger, who worked with Ashford at Town Hall Arts Center and recently came to see the show. In Ashford's bedroom, a painted-over fireplace holds mementos, such as a photo with Denver actor Brian Mallgrave from Paint Your Wagon at Boulder's Dinner Theatre. The bookshelves are stacked with acting treatises and play scripts. Next to the photo with Mallgrave are a pair of framed false eyelashes that Ashford wore when she flew to New York from the Wicked tour for her Legally Blonde audition. She stayed with Jessup and his mother, cabaret singer Ruth Hastings.

"I took my lashes off after the day and I put them down by the TV. His mom framed them and sent them to me."

A hallway is narrowed by a large silver trunk, decorated in silver paint pen. It was given to Ashford to transport her belongings during the 10 months she was on tour. "Your whole life is on the road. Touring is just so different than anything else."

Ashford's headboard is a swooping gold concoction, something Walt Disney might have given Snow White. She found it on eBay. Making it on Broadway doesn't mean a life of wealth. Even while on tour with Wicked, Ashford chose to share hotel rooms to save money. She left the tour in October, and Legally Blonde rehearsals didn't begin until the end of November. "I had two months of living in New York City without a job, so I had to plan for that."

She's a lot better off than most actors, and knows it. "New York is hard. The income that I'm making in New York right now is totally wonderful and livable and manageable. I have a 401(k) at 21, which is amazing. I have a great apartment and I'm able to put away a little bit so someday, I can buy."

But Ashford knows that an actor's life is peripatetic, and those savings may also go to fund a gap between jobs.

3:50 p.m.

Holli Swanson arrives and Ashford runs to the door to throw her arms around her mother. Swanson, who already saw the show during its tryouts in San Francisco, will go to the opening night performance and party with Ashford.

"Tonight, do you want to go to a movie or something?" Ashford asks her mom. "Maybe Craig could meet us?"

"You have a show tonight?" Swanson asks.

Ashford again hugs her mother, long and hard. "I'm so glad you're here," she says.

3:58 p.m.

They move into the parade of dresses that Ashford is considering for opening night: one from Betsey Johnson, and three she picked up that morning at Saks. The theme for the opening night party is pink, but Ashford doesn't want to be too on-the-nose with her dress selection.

The Betsey Johnson is strapless navy, with sweeps of gold and fuschia satin. "This was my original choice, but I'm thinking I may save it for an event down the road."

Next comes a '20s-looking peach dress with intricate gunmetal beadwork.

"Does it go all the way really low in the back?" Swanson says.

"Really low," says Ashford's roommate.

"You don't like that?" Ashford asks.

"I don't care," her mother says breezily.

The next one, a turquoise bubble dress, has great color, but Ashford's 40-year-old mom says: "It's a little too '80s prom for me."

"I have never seen you this tiny before," says the roommate.

"Are you serious?" Ashford exclaims. "It's because I'm so stressed out. It's because I don't have time to eat."

The final choice is a shimmering gold, ruched around the bodice, that everyone loves - with Ashford's creamy skin and blonde hair, it turns her into a life-size trophy - in a good way.

4:18 p.m.

Ashford's grandmother calls to make sure Swanson arrived; Ashford talks to her mother and grandmother every day. Meanwhile, mom reveals Ashford isn't always this chipper. On the day of her Legally Blonde audition, Ashford had some vocal troubles. "She called me and cried, 'I didn't get it, Mama.' "

Later that day, Ashford's father called her mother. "He said, 'I picked up the dry cleaning, I'm going to the grocery, oh, and Annaleigh got the part.' I screamed in Target."

5 p.m.

Meandering toward the theater, Ashford and Swanson also search for the perfect opening night dress. They do a quick survey of Searle, then enter Bloomingdale's.

"This is the Bloomingdale's I worked at," Ashford says. "I was working downstairs at the Kiehl's counter when I found out I booked Wicked."

Swanson, a gym teacher at Green Gables Elementary, bought a black dress for opening night. "I have to get an OK from her and if she doesn't like it, I'll wear something else."

"No, I'm sure I'll love it," reassures her daughter.

5:55 p.m.

Ashford descends the subway steps to catch an R train to Times Square. Most nights, she takes the subway to and from the theater, "which I think is so fabulous. Broadway is the only medium where someone can see you in performance and then directly contact you right after."

6:30 p.m.

Ashford stops in Jamba Juice for a pre-show snack, ordering a Raspberry Rainbow with energy and immunity boosts.

6:37 p.m.

"Hi, Richard!" She greets the stage door guard, then heads down the steep stairs of the Palace, past three washing machines, shelves of laundry baskets and racks of wardrobe, to the dressing room she shares with Dequina Moore. In the size of a walk-in closet (and not a big one) are a dressing table with two lighted mirrors and seats, shoe racks and clothing hangers. There's no window, but there is an orchid, a gift from their dresser.

"I think we're gonna paint it purple," Ashford says of the room, "and then I have an original program of Judy Garland playing the Palace in 1951 to frame."

On Ashford's table are an assembly of painkillers, including Tylenol and Motrin, hundreds of bobby pins to hold her hair down before she puts on a wig that looks much like her real hair, a chart for doing her makeup, accessories for the show, gum and mints. Her costumes are of the spoiled California girl variety: pastel jeans, a white silk coat, huge sunglasses.

"I get to wear the magic Christian Louboutins," she says, holding up the pricey 4-inch heels with the coveted red soles.

Ashford pins up her hair, puts on her makeup and heads down to a dresser, who will give her a wig. Then it's time for warm-up with Chico, the Chihuahua playing Bruiser. Ashford's character, Margot, does most of the onstage interaction with Chico, including a bark-and-talk bit that she says is the toughest dog trick in Broadway history. Before the show, they'll go through the opening trick three times, then head onstage, where Ashford shows the treat Chico is aiming for as he runs to her.

7:50 p.m.

The cast gathers in a circle for pre-show support. Ashford climbs a truss high above the stage.

8 p.m.

Ashford leans out a second-story window of a sorority house and sings the opening lines of Legally Blonde:

Dear Elle: He's a lucky guy -I'm, like, gonna cry -I got tears coming out of my nose!

Mad props! He's the campus catch:

You're a perfect match,

'Cause you've both got such great taste in clothes!

Of course he will propose!EPILOGUE

Legally Blonde opened Sunday, April 29, with Annaleigh Ashford's mother in the audience, along with John Waters, Rosie O'Donnell, Harvey Fierstein and Joan Rivers. From onstage, Ashford saw none of the celebrities - she's most bummed out about missing Waters.

Because it was opening night, there was a 6 p.m. curtain. An hour earlier, Ashford participated in Broadway history, the gypsy robe presentation. Every show adds a patch to the robe, which at each opening is given to the Broadway chorus girl or boy with the most credits, to keep until the next opening.

"She puts it on and we all scream and clap and she runs around in a circle and we all touch the robe. They have one of the robes at the Smithsonian, so it was totally amazing."

"The crowd was just amazing," Ashford says. "They loved the show. It was a great house, it was so exciting. It was just magical, all my dreams came true."

In the end, she wore a dark purple, '60s-style dress she bought that day at Bergdorf Goodman. At 9 p.m., she walked into the party at Cipriani after being photographed and videotaped in the press line.

"I was so happy that my mom was there for all of it. She looked so beautiful, and I think she had a blast."

They stop by an afterparty given by the director and set designer, and at 2:30 a.m. Ashford indulges in two slices of pizza at her favorite neighborhood joint before heading to bed.

In the old days, producers would rush into opening night parties with fresh newspaper reviews - these days, Ashford says, they all use Blackberries to check the headlines. The reviews aren't very good, and the powerful critic Ben Brantley of The New York Times is particularly unkind. Ashford won't read them, though.

"I kind of decided it was better for me as an actor to keep my head out of that. I'm aware that things are pretty positive, but that's all I need to know. The mood was pretty good last night. Our show's our show and nobody's opinion can change it."

Annaleigh Ashford

• Age 9: Began professional career as Annaleigh Swanson in Ruthless at Theatre On Broadway

• 14: Rocky Mountain News names her a teen to watch

• 14 to 17: Works regularly at Country Dinner Playhouse, Arvada Center and Boulder's Dinner Theatre

• 16: Graduates from Wheat Ridge High School

• 19: Graduates from Marymount Manhattan College with degree in theater

• 20: Understudies the role of Glinda in the national tour of Wicked

• 21: Makes her Broadway debut as Margot in the new musical, Legally Blonde