Since Wicked opened on Broadway five years ago this month, the show has repeatedly broken the record for weekly box office gross; has had three different neighbors—with varying degrees of success—in the adjacent Circle in the Square Theatre; has been produced as far away as Japan and Australia; and has seen its original principals go on to screen roles and Tony recognition. And during those five years Rhea Patterson, who’s currently a member of Wicked’s Broadway cast, danced her first steps—and sang her first notes—in a musical.
Patterson’s career was in modern dance until her former high school classmate Dell Howlett (an alum of Bombay Dreams and Aida on Broadway) persuaded her to audition for a theatrical talent agency a few years ago. Even as a child and teen, Patterson’s performing was devoted almost entirely to dancing. She didn’t take acting classes or do school plays; the closest she ever came to musical theater was show choir—“close,” she says, only because it involved singing and dancing at the same time.
Now she finds herself in the biggest musical of the decade, which celebrates its fifth anniversary on Broadway on October 30 (among the commemorations: a cast album re-release, with bonus CD, and a benefit concert of cut songs). Patterson plays, among other roles, a citizen of Oz, a Shiz University student, an oversize puppet and a flying monkey. Prior to joining Wicked on Broadway in June, she’d been in its Chicago company, and earlier she performed in the 2006-07 national tour of Sweet Charity. In September, she was joined in the Broadway Wicked cast by Patrick McCollum, a swing who’d also been in the Chicago company but before that had performed only in concert dance.
For the first five years following her 2001 graduation from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Patterson belonged to the concert dance world. She’s been a member of Urban Bush Women, INSPIRIT, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and the Bermuda Dance Company. Her first theater audition arose from a concert dance connection. After participating in the choreographer workshops for The Color Purple—the ones that won modern dance maestro Donald Byrd the job of choreographing the show (his first for Broadway)—Patterson auditioned over and over for the Broadway cast. She estimates she was seen close to 10 times, but never got a part. “That’s when I learned how the business works, ’cause I remember the choreographer really liking me and he was like, ‘I’ve done everything I can.’ I just didn’t understand that: ‘Well, if you want me in the show, then what...?’”
Coming from concert dance, where the creative team for any given production tends to be small, Patterson had to sort out the complexities of theatrical production. “Learning that casting agents are different from talent agents—that was a big one for me,” she says. “That there’s all these parties involved in casting: the producers and the directors, and everybody has a say. You don’t realize how big the picture is until you’re actually in a production.”
As soon as Patterson had an agent (the one Howlett had directed her to), she was “sent out to all these auditions I would never had imagined going on.” After eight months of trying to break into musicals, she was cast in Sweet Charity as one of the dance hall hostesses and understudy for lead dancer of “Rich Man’s Frug.” About halfway through the 11-month tour, she began understudying Charity’s pal Helene. “It was perfect timing,” she says, “’cause [by] then I’d really started to understand the curve of the show, how it worked. If I had just walked into it, this being my first show, that would have been way, way over my head.”
In Sweet Charity, Patterson performed beside an actress she’d been watching on screen for years: Molly Ringwald, who played the title role (eventually succeeded by Paige Davis). “Sixteen Candles was one of those movies that whenever it came on, I watched it, no matter how many times I saw it,” says Patterson. “I had expected her [Ringwald] to be this huge personality, but she’s quiet.” She also describes the former teen queen as “a workhorse.”
