GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Tracee Beazer of 'Memphis'

If the new Broadway musical Memphis turns out to be Tracee Beazer’s swan song in the chorus, she sure picked a good ensemble to be her last. The ensemble of Memphis, under the direction of choreographer Sergio Trujillo, has been lauded in most reviews. They’re in a majority of the show’s musical numbers, doing everything from singing gospel to jumping rope, and, with “Underground,” they have one of the most exciting opening numbers in recent memory.

“I live for ‘Underground,’” says Beazer. “It comes off with a bang and says ‘this is where we are’—and it has the most dancing, I think, in the show.”

In addition to a nightclub patron (in “Underground” and other numbers), Beazer’s roles in Memphis include a backup singer for aspiring pop star Felicia in “Someday,” the self-described “nerdy girl” on Huey’s Cavalcade TV show and the lady with the cigarette during “Ain‘t Nothin' But a Kiss.” Her ensemble track also entails understudying Montego Glover in the lead role of Felicia—and that, says Beazer, was the real draw for her. She’s trying to transition out of the chorus and into speaking parts, and had opted for unemployment over ensemble work prior to joining Memphis for its summer 2008 run at southern California’s La Jolla Playhouse.

“You have to grin and bear it sometimes,” she says about committing to a career redirection. “The four months that I wasn’t working was a lot of turning down auditions and trying to change the minds of casting directors about how they view me. Sometimes you just have to say: ‘No, she’s really trying to get more principal roles, so she’s not going to be able to come in for this [ensemble] audition.’ They know that’s what you have to do sometimes when you want to make that transition.”

Beazer hasn’t gone on yet as Felicia, not on Broadway nor at La Jolla or Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre, where Memphis had another out-of-town tryout last winter. She has been seen on the 5th Avenue stage in a principal role, though. After Memphis’ run at the theater, artistic director David Armstrong invited her to stay for their next show, Hello, Dolly! Beazer played Minnie Fay in the March ’09 production headlined by Jenifer Lewis as Dolly. “I love that he did that,” Beazer says of Armstrong’s interracial casting for Dolly! Her performance earned raves like “spirited,” “especially appealing” and “a constant delight” from critics.

Beazer’s last show before the La Jolla Memphis was also done in a nontraditional manner. For Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies at the ALLIANCE THEATRE in Atlanta in early 2008, director Kent Gash employed just nine performers in a show that usually has twice as many in the cast. “We were the singers, dancers and actors,” Beazer says. “That was definitely a workout.” Even more of a workout, she says, than the energetic numbers that the Memphis ensemble does.

Memphis is Beazer’s fourth Broadway show, and her first since 2006’s The Wedding Singer (which she was also in during its pre-Broadway run at 5th Avenue). She made her Broadway debut in 2003 as a replacement ensemble member in Hairspray, understudying the role of Motormouth Maybelle—mother of the teenage Seaweed—when she was 22. “I was the youngest person in the scene except [the girl playing] Little Inez,” Beazer says of going on as Maybelle. “Chester Gregory, my Seaweed, is older than me. But if you believe what you’re doing, the audience will go with you.” All it took, she notes, was “a fat suit and a big wig and some makeup!”

Her second Broadway show was the infamous Beach Boys jukebox flop Good Vibrations. When the topic of that universally panned musical—which eked out a 2½-month run in early 2005—comes up, Beazer lets out a semi-embarrassed laugh and attempts to sum up the experience: “It is, you know… It was a lot of things… It is what it is.” Her tone suggests she and her castmates weren’t exactly fans of the show themselves. Asked if performers realize when a project in which they’re involved is misbegotten, she admits: “We do. We kind of knew from the start.” Pressed for details, she recalls “one instance in rehearsal where [director] John Carrafa brings out a giant Hula Hoop and he was like, ‘Everybody, get in!’ He wanted everybody to try and Hula Hoop together. At that point we were like, We don’t know how this is going to work out…” Yet she does find something positive to say about Good Vibrations: “There were talented folks on that,” including current Memphis star Chad Kimball. “I made a lot of great friends in it.”

She bounced back from the Vibrations disaster with a hit that summer: the revival of the Two Gentlemen of Verona musical at Shakespeare in the Park, which was popular enough to spark Internet buzz about a Broadway transfer. For Beazer, the daughter of West Indian immigrants, the show’s part-calypso score was a chance to celebrate her heritage on stage. Her only other professional experience with a calypso-inflected score has been participating in a couple of readings of the 1970s hit revue Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, directed by Kenny Leon. Of her Caribbean background, Beazer says: “I think it has given me an ingrown rhythm. Everything is all about music with them—and hips. It’s definitely given me an internal drum in a way, an internal funk.”

The youngest of three siblings, Beazer grew up in Waterbury, Conn., and was taking dance classes before she ever went to school. “When I was 3, I was dancing in front of the television—I don’t even know what movie it was—and my godmother told my mother to put me into dance class ASAP,” she says, adding that she still feels indebted to her godmother June for the suggestion. It was also at that preschool age that Beazer first homed in on her career goal. “I wanted to go to Broadway when I was 3,” she says. “I didn’t even know what Broadway was. I just knew that’s where all the good dancers go.”

Her parents were supportive, even though they weren’t very familiar with the different kinds of training for wannabe performers. “My parents are from the islands, Antigua and Barbuda, so they didn’t have any of that. My mother always says she wishes that she did—it just wasn’t available,” explains Beazer. “They were not really exposed to the Broadway community, so I don’t think they realized: Oh, we could just take her to New York and see a show. They knew immediately that this is what I wanted to do, so they used whatever they knew—the dance schools, community theater. My mother was always driving me back and forth to auditions.”

Though her hometown is just a couple of hours from New York City, Beazer saw only one play on Broadway growing up: Show Boat, on a seventh-grade field trip. “Seeing a show like Show Boat, it was like, Yes! My people are up there, and I can be up there too...I can be that little girl right there!” Beazer says. “It wasn’t like a crazy dancey show, but the fact that I saw somebody who looked like me and somebody who was young, because I really did pay attention to the little kids in the show…yes, it’s possible.”

Around the same age, Beazer began performing in local theater. Her first role was in Bye Bye Birdie at Seven Angels Theatre, an Equity house in Waterbury, when she was 12. She went on to perform at other Connecticut theaters, including Danbury’s outdoor Richter Park (where she played Dorothy in The Wiz at 16), the Warner in Torrington (Anytime Annie in 42nd Street) and Curtain Players of Waterbury (Barnum). She trained at the Connecticut Academy of the Performing Arts, Children's Dance Theater and Nutmeg Ballet.

After high school, Beazer planned to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) in Manhattan, but shortly before she was to matriculate, she was offered her first stage role in New York: Portia Pig in a Theatreworks USA production of The Three Little Pigs. “So I did that instead,” says Beazer, whose parents were going through a divorce at the time. “It made sense ’cause I was just going to go to a performing arts school anyway. I could get my Equity card, and my mother didn’t have to struggle to pay for tuition that she didn’t have.”

She doesn’t feel she missed out on much not going to college, except maybe “more exposure to information about theater and shows, and digging into the backstories of authors and playwrights and composers—getting a good hands-on study of them.”

A couple of years passed before Beazer came back to NYC to work. Then, in 2001, she was in a summer production of The Pirates of Penzance performed aboard the tall ship Peking that’s docked at South Street Seaport. During its run, she sublet an apartment with another young woman in the cast, Montego Glover; Kevin Covert, who’s also now in Memphis with Beazer and Glover, was in Penzance too.

Beazer first worked with Memphis director Christopher Ashley in 2007 when she played Lorraine in All Shook Up for the final four months of its national tour. Around the country, she’s also appeared in Lone Star Love at Cleveland’s Great Lakes Theater Festival; Anything Goes at the Ordway in St. Paul, directed by David Armstrong and starring Sandy Duncan; and Dreamgirls, with Jennifer Holliday, at Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Off-Broadway, she was in 2003’s Keith Haring biographical musical, Radiant Baby, at the Public.

Beazer’s also got herself some screen credits, including one of the girls performing Promises, Promises’ “Turkey Lurkey Time” in the cult film Camp and a student of Sarah Jessica Parker’s in the indie Spinning Into Butter. She had a small part in a 2001 episode of Law & Order: SVU as prey of an HIV-positive ex-con who goes after underage girls.

Looking ahead, Beazer has goals besides moving into principal roles. One is to “introduce arts to people on the islands” that her family’s from. She’s already performed in Antigua and Barbuda for their Independence Day and at the annual cultural festival Caribana. “The past five years I’ve been going back every year,” she says, “so they’re getting exposed to the fact that ‘Yeah, we can do this’ and it’s out there and available.”

She also would like to take a professional stab at something she’s been doing as a hobby for years. “Along with dancing, writing songs is probably the thing I’ve done the longest,” Beazer says. “My dream is to write my own music. I’m trying to get that off the ground—it’s in the very beginning stages, and I’m learning to play the guitar. I really want to have a concert or some kind of showcase.” She has performed at open-mike nights in clubs around the city and classifies her music as neo-soul, along the lines of India.Arie and Jill Scott, two artists she admires.

Her favorite music maker is another soul goddess. “I have an obsession with Tina Turner,” Beazer states. “I think she’s amazing. She did it her way, and she’s still kicking up her heels. She’s a badass!” Beazer got to portray her idol in The Wedding Singer, when she was “Tina Turner” in the scene full of celebrity impersonators.

As for a role model within the theater community, Beazer names erstwhile gypsy Deidre Goodwin, who’s starred on Broadway as Velma in Chicago and Sheila in A Chorus Line and had movie and TV roles. “She has a great career: singer, dancer, actress,” says Beazer. “She gets to do all of that in every show.”

Whatever she does in the future, Beazer will rely on the same source of strength and inspiration that has carried her this far: her faith. “I believe that God is for me in everything I do, and He is fiercely committed to seeing me do well,” she says. “I felt at a very early age that He promised me I was going to be on Broadway. I believed it, and it happened. And I believe that for a lot of other things in life, like marriage and kids and I’m going to be successful in everything I do if I trust.”

Without her devotion to God, says Beazer, “I wouldn’t be able to understand that what’s mine is mine and what’s not isn’t. So I’d probably be struggling with ‘Why didn’t I get this?’ [instead of] knowing and trusting that it’s so much bigger than me and so much bigger than what I did in that audition room. If it’s mine, then nothing I do could take it away.”

Beazer recalls how her spirituality aided her when she was under consideration for Hairspray, which would become her Broadway debut. “I’d gone in for the tour a few weeks before, and I didn’t get it,” she says. “Then I was offered the understudy for the Urchins in a production of Little Shop of Horrors they were doing in Atlanta and [planning] to bring to Broadway. So I was praying about it and God was like, Just go the way of faith. I believe that I’m meant to be on stage and actually perform every night, so I’m going to turn it down, and I know that You have something great. And like the next day, Hairspray called: We have a spot open for you in the Broadway company. God was smiling down on me, and that was the best year of my life!”

Her Playbill Who’s Who refers to a Bible verse, Hebrews 10:35-36. “Every time I used to come back and forth to New York, I had that in my songbook: ‘Cast not away your confidence, because it has great recompense of reward. That after you’ve done the will of God, you receive your promise,’” quotes Beazer, who was raised Episcopalian but now attends Christian City Church, which holds services in the Times Center in midtown. “Artists go there, people on Wall Street—a lot of different people. The average age may be like 26, 27. We’re not just going and having church and then going home; we do life together too,” she says. “When I found the church, I was finally able to call New York City home. I tried Times Square Church, but it was just so big it was difficult to have a relationship with people. That’s what you need, because that’s sometimes the thing that’s lacking the most in the city.”

Photos of Tracee, from top: left, with Sydney Morton on Memphis’ show-within-a-show; as Minnie Fay in Hello, Dolly!, with Mo Brady as Barnaby; right, in Memphis, dancing to Felicia’s (Montego Glover) singing, with Dionne Figgins at left; in the female ensemble’s dressing room at the Shubert Theatre; left, in Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies, with Bryan Terrell Clark and Terry Burrell; performing her original music at a benefit in Seattle last year; in Antigua and Barbuda, her parents’ homeland; as a faux Tina Turner in The Wedding Singer, with “Secret Serviceman” Nick Kenkel; second from right, worship leading at Christian City Church. [Memphis photos by Joan Marcus]