[Laughs] I should say, "I did theater because I'm not a very good waiter." I actually I got a business degree from USC so I dabbled a bit in the corporate world during college. I was working for a real estate company that was dealing specifically with new development. I was a research analyst. But I wasn't alive when I was in the corporate world...[laughs] so I choose not to go back to that dark place.
Wow. So how and when did you make the transition into being a performer?
Well in college I was in an a capella group called the USC SoCal VoCals and almost immediately after I got out of college I got a job as a professional singer with a professional a capella group called Groove 66 that performed at Disney's California Adventure. I did that for two and a half years, intermixed with singing gigs for Disney on Ice, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. So I was making my living just singing. That was all I did. I did some television but that was my bread and butter. Groove 66 ended in '04 and thereafter I started getting involved with Los Angeles theater. I got married in 2005 and very soon thereafter I booked the Rent tour. I did Roger on the Rent tour in 2006. And then right after I got off the tour, I came back to Los Angeles, only to quickly decide that to do theater we needed to be in New York. So we packed up the the U-Haul- no, I guess it was a Penske truck - and came out here. So it was a bit of a dream!
I know that, in the free time you don't have much of anymore, you also dabble in songwriting. Can you talk a little about this side of your life? Are there things coming up on that horizon that you are excited for?
Realistically, it's more of a hobby. Something that I do to stay creative and productive. The music industry is in such a strange place right now, and my business background tells me that now is not the best time to get involved in it. I love writing songs. Well, more specifically, I love being creative and I love music, and those two passions put together basically turned me into the songwriter. My band has two albums out: we have a live album and a studio album called 'A Fire in the Night,' which is available on iTunes. There's a lot of very talented people who, when they're in shows, are doing the exact same thing eight days a week. And at a certain point, you've kind of discovered all there is to discover about that particular character, and so then it becomes about maintenance. You maintain the character, maintain the show, and maintain your creative and artistic integrity for that role. But there is a limit to how much you can explore in an eight show week format, especially with commercial theater. So what does the creative side do with all this unrealized potential? A lot of us out there have other outlets. Mine is songwriting.
So after See Rock City is up you then go directly into Leap of Faith. Is there anything else that's planned for you that we should know about?
It's all focused on Leap of Faith after this. My family is out in the LA area, so we're going to go out, have a great time doing Leap of Faith, reconnect with all of the relatives out there and kind of see what happens. In the same way that we loaded up a Penske truck and came to New York in 2006, we're kind of like, "all right God, what do you got for us?" The future is wide open and we don't have any sort of "oh, well once that's finished, we're going to go here and then we're going to go here and then we're going to go to the left." There's no master plan and that's something that is both really scary but really exciting.
----
Ryness is joined in See Rock City by Stanley Bahorek (Broadway's Big River, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee); Donna Lynne Champlin (Broadway's Billy Elliot, Sweeney Todd, OBIE Award winner for TG's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs); Jonathan Hammond (Broadway's Ragtime, OBIE Award winner and Drama League Award nominee for TG's The Boys in the Band); Ryan Hilliard (Off-Broadway's Grey Gardens, Godspell); Bryce Ryness (Drama Desk Award nominee for Broadway's HAIR, TG's Crossing Brooklyn); and Sally Wilfert (Make Me a Song, Broadway's Assassins).
For tickets and more information, visit http://www.transportgroup.org.
Click here for a video preview of See Rock City in presentation on BroadwayWorld!
