Bornstein: 'Wicked' role good news for rising Denver actress

Saturday, April 15, 2006

At age 9, Annaleigh Swanson was acting professionally as the lead in Ruthless at Theatre On Broadway.

At 14, the Rocky Mountain News profiled her as a teen to watch.

Now, just weeks short of her 21st birthday, she is touring the country as the understudy for Glinda in the hit musical, Wicked, taking the stage in the lead role last weekend in Philadelphia.

She's doing it under a new name that isn't that new at all. Annaleigh Swanson became Annaleigh Ashford on the advice of composer and playwright Rupert Holmes. Ashford is her mother's maiden name; Swanson is the name she took out of respect for her stepfather, who has raised her since childhood.

After graduating a year early from Wheat Ridge High School, Ashford enrolled in college at Marymount Manhattan, where she also graduated a year early last spring. Throughout college, she refined her audition skills in New York; at her senior showcase, she caught the eye of Evita choreographer Larry Fuller, who was working on a new tour. Fuller didn't give Ashford a job, but he led her to Dave Clemmons, one of New York's biggest casting agents.

"That casting director kept bringing me in all summer long," Ashford says.

She was cast in a small show that brought her big attention. Feeling Electric opened at the New York Music Theatre Festival, a sort of musical fringe festival, with Ashford in the role of an angry teen ("Night and day compared to Glinda," she says) opposite Broadway stars Amy Spanger and Anthony Rapp.

That show brought her a manager and the same agents who represent Spanger. Does a 20- year-old really need a manager?

"The manager is more personal," Ashford says. "She kind of takes care of all my business stuff, because I'm really bad at that, I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't know as much about TV and film, so she's been guiding me through that."

Ashford spent the fall at auditions for some major shows, including Mamma Mia!, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The Light in the Piazza and The Wedding Singer.

"Everything was like a whirlwind," she says. "I kept getting so close. It almost became like auditioning was my job, and I got used to it, and almost used it as an artistic outlet, and used it to work on new pieces. I think once my mind-set about auditioning changed, that's when I got Wicked."

She learned not to hang her hopes on every audition, "knowing that there are so many other factors that go into how you're hired and why you're hired," she says.

"In a show like Wicked, it could be that maybe they don't have a costume for your size. Because you don't wear a four, you wear a two, they end up hiring somebody else.

"So much of it is out of your hands. I think once you think of it like that and you don't take it personally, you walk in with a different energy. People know when you walk in the room that you're desperate for the money and you're desperate for the job."

While auditioning, Ashford worked three jobs: restaurant hostess, at a birthday-party venue, and at the Kiehl's counter at Bloomingdale's.

"When a dry spell comes along, I'll go back to my juggling, because that's what you do, especially at this point in my life, where I'm just starting out," she says.

A week before Thanksgiving, Ashford was cast in the ensemble of Wicked, and as one of two Glinda understudies. With her blond hair, pale skin and rock-candy voice, she's a natural piece of casting.

"I remember when I did Cinderella in Denver, I never thought, 'I'm the pretty girl so I'm gonna get the pretty girl part,' " she says.

"If anything, I feel like my Cinderella was quirkier than it should have been. In terms of typing, I think I'm more of a quirky ingénue, and that's why I think Glinda fits me more than other roles have."

She went on in the lead role for the first time in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; last week her family caught the show in Philadelphia, but missed her as Glinda by a few days.

"The first time is very surreal, and you can't believe it's happening," she says of playing the role. "When something goes wrong onstage and you have to cover, you go into a mode and you're peaked on adrenaline, and you can't think about it, you just have to do it. That was the day when I realized that all your work comes into place. That's what it was like, for three hours.

"It was really exciting, and also helped me kind of believe in myself and believe in my work. But it was very scary and crazy. At the end of it, I was really wired, and that night I was really exhausted."

When she's Glinda, Ashford descends to the stage on a massive metal "bubble" a few minutes into the first scene. But she has to sit on that bubble, high in the stage loft, through the entire overture and first scene before she comes down to the ground.

"That scares the (expletive) out of me," she says. "I got a lot better at it this weekend. What a way to make an entrance. You have to wait, and you're way high up there. You're on like a one-and-a-half by one-and-a- half-foot little square, that's all you stand on."

Ashford is the youngest member on her tour, but she's used to that after years of working in Denver's professional theaters.

"I'm so grateful for my opportunities that I had in Denver because they taught me how to be in a dressing room eight times a week with people that are older than you and have different jobs, have families," she says.

In a few weeks, she'll be able to legally join them in the bar after work.

"For some reason, 21 is not a big deal to me. I don't really drink. I'm really more excited for 25 when I can rent a car."

Early stages

She's using Annaleigh Ashford as her stage name now, but Annaleigh Swanson was a familiar and favorite presence on Colorado stages before she graduated high school:

• Ruthless: Theatre On Broadway, 1995

• Little Women: Town Hall Arts Center, 1998

• The Sound of Music: Country Dinner Playhouse, 2000

• Cinderella: Town Hall Arts Center, 2000

• Grease: Country Dinner Playhouse, 2002

• Paint Your Wagon: Boulder's Dinner Theatre, 2002

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5101