GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Rashidra Scott of 'Sister Act'

This Thursday, Broadway in Bryant Park kicks off its season with a performance by Rashidra Scott. Actually, the lunchtime concert series is featuring numbers from Sister Act, but Scott will be singing two of Deloris' songs. Scott understudies the lead role of Deloris Van Cartier, a lounge singer who hides out as a nun in a convent after witnessing her gangster boyfriend kill someone. She has yet to go at a performance of Sister Act for Patina Miller—who was nominated for a Tony for her portrayal of Deloris—but the Bryant Park concert will not be her first time singing one of Deloris' songs for an audience. In early April, while Sister Act was still in previews, Scott performed "Fabulous, Baby!" in At This Performance, the concert series showcasing Broadway understudies. At the time, Scott had not yet had a rehearsal for Deloris' role.

But even just playing one of the nuns whose choir is transformed by Deloris—Scott's regular ensemble role in Sister Act—she is having the time of her life. "Omigod, this show is such a gift," says Scott, who also plays Michelle, one of Deloris' backup singers in her lounge act. "We are all so happy, so happy. The show after the Tonys, I got to about 50th and Broadway and I could see the marquee and I, honestly, almost started running—I couldn't get to the theater fast enough to be back with everybody."

As a bonus, Scott and the Sister Act company got to meet President Obama on June 23, when their show was a benefit for his reelection campaign. Obama posed for photos with the cast after the performance and made sure to shake everyone's hand. He also chatted them up a bit—commenting, Scott reports, that they "must be hot in those costumes." With the president came the Secret Service, who were at the theater for about a week beforehand and in "every nook and cranny" during the performance Obama attended, according to Scott. Due to security, cast members were not allowed to go to their dressing rooms or the bathroom throughout the second act, and they had to change in the lobby restrooms after the show.

The Sister Act fund-raiser was hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, who played Deloris in the 1992 Sister Act movie and is a producer of the Broadway version. Even when she's not bringing the leader of the free world to the theater, Goldberg has helped keep spirits up at the Broadway Theatre. "She loves to send us junk-food treats backstage," says Scott, adding she's particularly appreciative as "a junk-food junkie." Mostly, though, Scott credits director Jerry Zaks for making her job a pleasure. "He's very protective of us and of the show, and that has made for such a great experience," she says. "The first day—before we started learning any music, before anyone else said anything—the first thing that Jerry did was to sit us all down and say 'This is a positive environment. We are here for each other, this is where we feel free and comfortable to make mistakes. Don't feel that anyone's going to laugh at you or judge you. This is where we get to experiment and play around and see what works—if it doesn't work, I'll tell you. But don't give each other notes, don't let anyone else give you notes.' If anybody tries to give us a note, whether we're around the theater or we go out, he has directed us to say 'Thank you very much, now my director told me to tell you to go eff yourself.'"

Just three and a half years ago, Scott was having a harder time in her Broadway debut. After only a few months in New York, she got a featured role (Gary Coleman) in a Tony-winning hit show, Avenue Q, but to this day describes it as "not a good fit." Though she acknowledges, "I made Q not a good fit for myself. I was so in my head about being new and green and put pressure on myself to show people why I deserved to be there." In a more positive summation, she adds: "It was a great learning experience...a good lesson on how to just be in the moment—don't concern yourself with notes and corrections or suggestions, be honest and speak from the heart."

Scott was in Avenue Q for six months starting in December 2007, then filled in as Gary Coleman for a week shortly before the show closed in late summer 2009. By then, she'd done another Broadway show and several featured roles regionally. "I didn't put any pressure on myself," she says of the second go-round on Avenue Q. "I just went in and had fun with it, and it felt immensely better. I was able to breathe and it felt so good!"

In 2010 Scott was a member of the replacement cast of Hair on Broadway (the entire cast was replaced so the original company of the revival could do the show in London), and the year before she was in the short-lived Broadway revival of Finian's Rainbow. Last fall she appeared in Hairspray at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse, and she's also been seen regionally in Godspell at St. Louis Muny, And the World Goes 'Round at Philadelphia's Prince Music Theater, Kirsten Childs' Funked Up Fairy Tales at Barrington Stage in the Berkshires and Little Shop of Horrors at Stages St. Louis. For her performance as Crystal in Little Shop, she and the other two "Urchins" were nominated as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Musical for a Kevin Kline Award, St. Louis' version of the Tonys.

Scott was in the pre-Broadway staging of Finian's at City Center Encores! in early 2009. When she scheduled her audition for Encores!, she knew nothing about the Yip Harburg-Burton Lane musical, an anti-racism allegory whose original 1947 production was the first Broadway musical with a racially integrated ensemble. "I had no clue what that show was about," she says. "I didn't even know there were black people in it!"

Finian's Rainbow's standards-laden score is quite a contrast from the rockin' Hair, but the older show did prepare her for the hippie musical in one respect. "Because there was such a specific singer chorus as opposed to the dance chorus in Finian's—the dancers were on the flat stage, and the singers [including Scott] were on the ramp and the rakes up on 'the hill'—my body was already conditioned to the Hair rake," she says. But, she notes, it was a vocal challenge going from Finian's to Hair. "I had to recondition my voice," says Scott. "To go from being able to show up to work and not really warm up to having to warm up where you can't get through the first number was a bit different. I like to jokingly say I folded a blanket behind a glittery, sparkly tree on yon hill—that's basically what I did in Finian's. It was a gorgeous but vocally simple, old-time musical." Her experience on the two shows had one other important similarity, though. "Both of them, I got to start from everyone being there at the beginning," she says. "Obviously with Hair, we weren't the beginning, but we were all there for our own beginning as a tribe." And she still fondly remembers the cast camaraderie at Finian's: The women's ensemble would show up early on Sunday for a pre-matinee potluck "ladies' brunch" in the dressing room.

Scott had auditioned for the original revival cast of Hair back in 2008. At the time, coincidentally, she was playing Dionne in Hair with the Arizona Theatre Company, and several castmates from that show took the same redeye flight to New York to audition for the Broadway Hair. She'd already done her first show in NYC—The Rockae, a rock adaptation of Euripides' The Bacchae that was presented by the Prospect Theater Company at the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). Rockae was Scott's first show in the city but not in the New York area: That was a reading for New York Stage and Film at their summer home in upstate Poughkeepsie that future Sister Act star Patina Miller was also in. Meanwhile, Scott has performed alongside Sister Act castmate Demond Green twice previously, in Funked Up Fairy Tales and Godspell.

On one of Scott's first professional gigs ever, she worked with a now-famous performer—Esperanza Spalding, who earlier this year upset Justin Bieber to win the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. Scott and Spalding were classmates at Boston's Berklee College of Music when they were invited to tour with renowned jazz singer Patti Austin in conjunction with the release of Austin's Ella Fitzgerald tribute album. Austin had selected Scott (and Spalding) for the tour after teaching them in a clinic at Berklee.

Scott majored not in performance but in music business management in college. "For a while growing up," she relates, "I thought that I was going to be a major recording artist. And my argument when I told my mom I wanted to go to school for music and not to be a doctor was that doctors don't go into the operating room their first day at school—I want to get some background, I want to be able to have control over my career. So the agreement was that I could go to school for music as long as it was a music business program, so that I could learn as much about the music industry as possible." Scott herself wasn't opposed to studying something other than performing: "I figured, I've been performing all my life, I didn't need a degree to learn how to perform. Nobody's going to not come see me because I don't have a degree in vocal performance." She feels her college training has benefited her as a performer. "I learned so much in that program," she says. "It has helped me look at rejection from a business standpoint, as opposed to personal."

Born in Norfolk, Va., Scott grew up in Virginia Beach. She was already soloing in the church choir at age 5, which was around the time she started taking dance classes. "My mother raised me for a while as a single parent, and I had a lot of energy, and after she got home from work she was tired, so she really got me into dance to try and burn me out. It worked, but it also fueled a passion that she wasn't expecting." Her mother may have had some hint of that passion, though: Once, when Scott was about 3, her mother had company over and Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" came on the radio. Scott sang along for the guests in true diva style. "I ran up to the fireplace and moved the fireplace set out of the way, I used the fireplace as my stage, and the poker was my microphone," she recalls. Asked which singers inspired her recording dreams, Scott says, "Definitely Whitney," as well as gospel artist Yolanda Adams.

Scott continued training at a dance studio right into high school, participating in dance competitions for many of those years. She also took singing and piano lessons beginning in elementary school and performed with the Hurrah Players community theater. A costar at Hurrah and classmate at the Virginia Governor's School for the Arts was Anthony Wayne, last month's Gypsy of the Month from Anything Goes. Like Wayne, Scott attended the Governor's School in Norfolk in the afternoon, following a half-day of academic classes at her local high school. For four years in high school and college, Scott competed in the Miss America Organization; she placed in the top 10 in the state pageant each year, with her best finish as third runner-up for Miss Virginia in 2003.

During her freshman year at Berklee, Scott auditioned for Disney and was offered a job, but her parents insisted she stay in school. So she graduated in three years and went to work for Disney then. She spent much of 2004 aboard the Disney Wonder cruise ship on Florida-Bahamas sailings, singing solos on The Lion King's "Circle of Life and Tarzan's "Song of Man" among other duties in the various revues. She left the cruise line to perform in "Tarzan Rocks" at Disney World's Animal Kingdom park; after about nine months in Orlando, she went to Hong Kong to be in the opening-day cast at Hong Kong Disneyland, where she played Nala in the Lion King show from mid-2005 to early '06. Both Americans and Chinese people were employed at Hong Kong Disney. "It was just amazing to have an experience breaking down barriers," Scott says. "I could be sitting in the dressing room and quite often the girl next to me didn't speak English, but we really liked each other and really wanted to have a conversation, so we're using a girl two seats down to be our translator." She also got to sightsee in Asia, visiting Beijing and Bangkok when her mom visited, and traveling regularly to Shenzen, the city on mainland China near Hong Kong. (Scott had gone to Japan in high school as a student cultural ambassador.)

After Hong Kong, Scott returned to the Disney Wonder for another nine months or so, working to earn enough money to settle in NYC. Her cruise ship tenure turned out to be good training for New York. "It was an extremely good stamina-builder," she explains. "We were doing 50-minute shows twice a night every day. It was just like Broadway...14 to 16 performances a week that are each about an hour long."

Scott was 24 years old when she moved to New York. On her 24th birthday, a friend asked what her goal was for the year and she responded, "I want to be in a Broadway show—maybe not by my [next] birthday, but at least by the end of the calendar year." Her friend, who had already performed on Broadway, replied: "That's really ambitious, but you know it doesn't happen like that." It did, however: Scott was offered the role in Avenue Q the day after her 25th birthday.

Now, she's even made her prime-time TV debut, appearing as a nurse in a 2009 episode of Rescue Me and performing "Raise Your Voice" with Sister Act on the Tony Awards telecast last month. "It didn't hit me until we were on stage performing...and I almost started crying," Scott says of the Tonys. "I just wanted to sit there and soak up every feeling, thought and emotion of the moment. To be there representing my family, agents, people from home—community theater, my performing arts high school, my dance company, piano and voice teachers, everyone who's touched any ounce of my soul and development—even if I was fourth nun on the left, it was as much their moment as mine, and that was unbelievable!"

To see Rashidra perform live as Deloris, head over to 6th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets for the Broadway in Bryant Park concert on Thursday, July 7 at 12:30 p.m. And check out her non-Sister Act song in April's At This Performance concert here.

Photos of Rashidra, from top: center, in Sister Act with Aléna Watters (left) and Patina Miller as Deloris and her backup singers; in her headshot; left, with Seymour (Ben Nordstrom) and the other Urchins (Valisia LeKae, center, and Lisa M. Ramey) in Little Shop of Horrors; left, in Finian's Rainbow at City Center, with (from left) Lisa Gajda, Terri White, Mary Iles, Meggie Cansler (rear) and Monica L. Patton; on right, in the Arizona Theatre Company's 2008-09 production of Hair; left, in Paper Mill's Hairspray with Iris Burruss (center) and Nicole Powell; bottom right, singing "Take Me to Heaven" in Sister Act.

UPDATE. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has finally opened! We featured a Gypsy of the Month from the show in February (when it was slated for a mid-March opening), and I checked back in with Dana Marie Ingraham after the show opened in mid-June, following more than 180 previews and a performance hiatus while it got revamped. "During the hiatus," says Dana (right), "we were pushing to get through the last leg of our race, a race that really tested the limits of our endurance in so many ways—mentally, physically, emotionally. But we could see that finish line on the horizon. I'm so very proud of our cast because we really pulled together and ran our race." Dana adds, "The audience is responding really well to the new version. I think for any artist to feel that there is a genuine love and appreciation for this shared journey that we have invited the audience to embark on with us is icing on the cake. If I might even be so bold to add: I've spoken with audience members after the show, and I feel like many are not only fans of the show, many are also supporters of our journey. It is nice to feel the love!" Read more about and from Dana in our original profile here.

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