INTERVIEW: From ‘A Chorus Line’ to ‘Grand Horizons’ with Priscilla Lopez
Photo: From left, Priscilla Lopez and Jane Alexander star in Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by Polk and Co. with permission
Priscilla Lopez has a biography that extends back decades. She has been on Broadway in everything from Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights to a revival of Pippin to the landmark musical A Chorus Line. She nabbed her Tony Award for A Day in Hollywood / A Night in Ukraine.
So what her fans might find surprising about the accomplished performer is that for the biography in the Playbill for her latest Broadway show, Grand Horizons, now playing in a co-production between Williamstown Theatre Festival and Second Stage Theater, Lopez has decided to go the modest route. While it’s customary to highlight past successes, especially Tony-winning turns and original roles, the actor’s biography this time around is simple and to the point: “Happy to be in my 15th Broadway show and still kicking!!”
Here’s how that humorous sentence came to be:
“I put so many things in, they kept saying, ‘It’s too long. It’s too long. It’s too long. It’s too long,’” Lopez said in a recent phone interview. “Many times you’re in a show, and they say, ‘You’ve got 70 words.’ So you spend all your time writing 70 words, and then you open the Playbill, and no one has adhered to that 70-word minimum. So I thought, well, this time I’m going to write what I want. I wrote the bio I wanted, and they just kept telling me it was too long. So I finally just said, ‘OK, this is what it is.’ … I thought if anybody really wants to, they can Google me, and all my credits will be wherever they want to see them. But it was kind of saying I don’t want to do this anymore, and I thought maybe people would get a chuckle out of it. And most people have, so it worked out just fine.”
Grand Horizons, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Leigh Silverman, also stars Jane Alexander, James Cromwell, Ben McKenzie, Maulik Pancholy, Ashley Park and Michael Urie. The comedy deals with Nancy (Alexander) and Bill (Cromwell) as they deal with the repercussions of seeking a divorce later in life. Lopez plays Carla, a woman who lives nearby and has been in a secret relationship with Bill.
“For me, I was asked to do it up in Williamstown this past summer, and I had been up in Williamstown two summers ago,” she said. “And my experience there was so lovely and wonderful that when [artistic director] Mandy Greenfield called me and said, ‘Would you like to do this new play,’ I didn’t even know what it was, and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ So I got into it without knowing anything about it and was totally, wonderfully surprised when it did deal with all these issues.”
Those issues are expansive, dealing with everything from aging to love to marriage to children to being free. Each of these topics is brought up in simultaneous poignant and hilarious fashion. This is a comedy, after all.
“It is nice because I am now in that generation as opposed to any other generation, and to see plays about older couples and what they deal with within families, it hits a lot of points,” Lopez said. “And especially matinees are the best because they are the older audiences, and they just love it.”
The role of Carla is an interesting one. Lopez’s character is talked about a lot because it is one of the points of contention between Nancy and Bill, but she only appears for one pivotal scene at the top of Act II. Lopez loves taking the stage and completely dispelling any perceptions the audience might have about her.
“When they do talk about her, it’s, oh, she’s a floozy, she’s this, she’s that, and the fact is that she doesn’t really have an agenda,” Lopez said. “Her agenda is just to live her life and have a good time and do good for people. She’s a very positive character and finds the connection with Nancy, the wife, and even at the end, I say to her, ‘I didn’t expect you to be so nice.’ They really form a bond quickly, which is nice because Carla I don’t think represents the greatest threat. … I think it is good because it tells a good story about women. Women can be very hard on women, but when they form a bond, that can be very strong, too.”
It’s best to keep the secrets of Grand Horizons under lock and key, but what Carla ultimately decides in the play is quite interesting and even unexpected. For Lopez, this ultimate decision is a capstone to how she sees the role.
“She’s always been free and easy,” Lopez said. “And now Nancy’s asking her, ‘Are you getting married? Are you doing this?’ So the picture becomes bigger and wider than she expected it to be. It’s like, oh my gosh, I don’t want to keep making this picture any bigger than it already is.”
Lopez, a veteran of the stage, is enjoying her time at the Helen Hayes Theater working with a fellow veteran of the stage, Alexander, who debuted on Broadway in 1969 in The Great White Hope.
“She knows how to do her stuff,” the actor said. “She’s a veteran of many years. She knows how to work the audience. Watching her, I’m saying, OK, I’ve learned a lot just watching and being with her. My natural energy is very fast and quick and whatever. She definitely takes her time and feels things out.”
When that Act-II curtain rises, and Lopez must face the audience for the first time, one would expect her to be completely at ease. After all, this is someone who originated the role of Diana Morales in A Chorus Line and has appeared in 15 Broadway productions. But Lopez still has a healthy dose of thrill and terror each time she’s asked to perform.
“It becomes a thrill when the terror fades,” she said. “There’s nothing better than originating a role in a play or a musical. There’s just nothing better than that because you get to put your stamp on it, and ever after, other people will come, and they’ll have different interpretations. But you would have always been the original one, so that’s my greatest joy, to be able to originate a role in a piece. … From the second act, I’m standing behind that curtain, and it’s like I want it to go up. And I’m saying, don’t go up yet, so it’s all these different feelings of excitement but a little bit of terror, too. Maybe that’s just the other side of excitement.”
When Lopez is offered a new project, she has some criteria in her mind before signing on the dotted line. That said, she has signed on many dotted lines over the years and almost always has a blast.
“Right now I’m loving the plays,” she said. “I just love the plays. What happened is musicals are so hard to do, but any play is hard to do because the truth is no matter how big the role, how small the role … if you’re doing your job right, you’ll be exhausted for the amount of stuff you’re doing, whether it’s 15 minutes or an hour and a half. That’s been very surprising to me in this because I come home, and I’m exhausted. It’s not this huge role, but it is if you do it right because it takes all that same energy, same concentration and even more so because it’s so concentrated into a small amount of time. That’s been surprising to me, but I love to do plays. I love musicals, too. I’ll do whatever comes. I’m not prejudiced.”
Today, Lopez does seem nostalgic for the past, in that she often thinks back to some of her favorite roles. There may be no show more influential on her résumé than A Chorus Line, a musical about a bunch of performers auditioning for a Broadway production. Put simply, Lopez said that the show is in her heart and never leaving, and the memories of portraying Diana will forever be emblazoned in her consciousness. After all, the Diana character is based off the difficult and sometimes negative experiences Lopez went through as a performer trying to catch a break.
“A Chorus Line was based on true stories, and all those stories in A Chorus Line are true people,” Lopez said. “And I am truly Diana Morales, so when we were putting the piece together, it was almost like a purging of that experience and living it and then getting feedback from other graduates saying, ‘Oh, thank you so much for telling that story.’ Then feedback from other graduates saying, ‘How dare you tell that story.’ So that’s very true and dear to my heart, and I love that an experience that was so negative when it happened to me at the High School of Performing Arts at the age of 14 became the most positive thing to happen to me in my life and gave me a place in theater history. So I think that’s an incredible experience to have had and continue to have, and 43 years later people say, ‘Oh, I saw you in A Chorus Line. Oh, when I saw A Chorus Line, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.’ It’s the gift that keeps giving, so I’m very grateful for that.”
While memories of her past projects circulate, Lopez likes to devote her attention to her current project. She is continuing to find different layers to the character of Carla in Grand Horizons and will probably continue doing so until the limited engagement closes March 1. For her, the show is a wonderful look at marriage and love, and it’s taught her a lot.
“I just completed 48 years of marriage, and I think of my own marriage and the ups and the downs and the ins and the outs,” she said. “And I get really depressed when I see people give up so easily, especially if they thought they were so in love or whatever brought them together in the first place. So I hope the play shows you or tells you or helps you remember why you fell in love and why you should try to keep that communication going. It’s about communication and to not give up. … So I hope that it talks about understanding the idea of longevity in a relationship and then in the end the rewards of it. It’s a person that you’ve gone through your life with, who you’ve shared things with. Even the characters in the play, you see how they suddenly soften, and they start remembering things that they’ve done together. Relationships are the hardest thing in the world, and you’ve got to be a little warrior to get through them.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Grand Horizons, featuring Priscilla Lopez, is currently playing the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. The play, by Bess Wohl and directed by Leigh Silverman, is a co-production of Williamstown Theatre Festival and Second Stage Theater. Click here for more information and tickets.
