To theater fans, The Wiz is a show that won seven Tony awards, ran on Broadway for more than four years and was made into a movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. To Asmeret Ghebremichael, though, it’s the show in which she made both her amateur and professional performing debuts—and that’s her first big project of 2009.
Ghebremichael is in the cast of the Wiz that begins performances June 12 at City Center, this year’s installment of Encores! Summer Stars. When she was in high school, she landed her first professional job in a production of The Wiz at Pittsburgh’s Bynum Theater, directed by Billy Porter (like Ghebremichael, a native of Pittsburgh). She’d had her first-ever role in a musical when she played Dorothy in The Wiz in middle school.
After that sixth-grade Wiz, Ghebremichael announced to her family: “Okay, I want to move to New York, I want to go to NYU, and I want to be on Broadway.” Her mother and father, a nurse and electrical engineer who’d immigrated from the north African nation of Eritrea, were nonplussed: “When I said that I wanted to do this for a living, they had no idea what it entailed.” Yet their daughter managed to achieve all three goals within the decade: She made her Broadway debut in Footloose at age 18, just a few months into her freshman year at NYU.
Now, with another decade under her belt, Ghebremichael can also list these achievements: a featured role on Broadway, a scene in a major motion picture, ensemble parts in a string of hit musicals, and the female lead in an award-winning independent film.
After Footloose closed in mid-2000, Ghebremichael continued her studies at NYU and, following graduation, did a number of out-of-town shows. She returned to Broadway in late 2004 as part of the first replacement cast of Wicked, then after about a year took over an ensemble slot in Spamalot that included understudying the Lady of the Lake. In 2007, she was in the original cast of In the Heights off-Broadway. She departed the Broadway-bound show for a featured role in Legally Blonde: sorority girl Pilar, one of Elle Woods’ besties. “Those three girls,” says Ghebremichael, referring to Elle’s friends Pilar, Serena and Margot, “had the easiest job, and the most fun job. We were sort of the comic relief, and we were featured. We got to sing and we got to dance and we got to act and be funny—it was a little bit of everything.”
Ghebremichael had been runner-up for Pilar at the original cast auditions and ended up taking over for DeQuina Moore, who got the part. But it was only after Ghebremichael succeeded Moore as Pilar that MTV broadcast Legally Blonde—giving her a featured role in a TV special. She later appeared in a couple of episodes of the reality competition Legally Blonde the Musical: The Search for Elle Woods, which also aired on MTV.
The Wiz, which is scheduled to run through July 5, is Ghebremichael’s first major production since Legally Blonde closed in October. She was just one week into rehearsals when I interviewed her last week and had only worked on the tornado and Munchkinland scenes at that point. Among her roles will be the Second Munchkin in “He’s the Wizard,” which five Munchkins sing with good witch Addaperle (Dawnn Lewis). In the original Broadway production, the Second Munchkin was played by Phylicia Rashad (then Phylicia Ayers-Allen)—“not a bad person to follow,” says Ghebremichael.
