GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Dana Marie Ingraham of 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark'

By the time Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark finally opens, it will have had more performances than the entire run of Hot Feet, the last Broadway show that Dana Marie Ingraham was in. Ingraham made her Broadway debut in Hot Feet, the Earth, Wind and Fire jukebox musical that ran for only three months—previews included—in 2006 at the same theater where she’s currently in her third month of previews with Spider-Man.

Since her last Broadway appearance, Ingraham has been alternating between musical theater and concert dance—the field for which she trained and that employed her exclusively in the early years of her career. Just a couple of days after Hot Feet closed, she was offered a role on tour with The Lion King. After nearly two years with Lion King, she spent time as a company member of both Karole Armitage’s and Tania Pérez-Salas’ modern dance troupes. Her last job prior to Spider-Man was the national tour of The Color Purple.

For Ingraham and the rest of the Spider-Man company members, it’s been an eventful few months at the Foxwoods Theatre, as even people who don’t follow theater know by now. The $65 million musical—directed and cowritten by Julie Taymor, with a score by U2’s Bono and The Edge—has postponed its opening three times (it’s now slated for March 15) and recently revised its second act and finale. Technical glitches and performer injuries have garnered Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark nationwide media attention unlike any usually paid to Broadway. “Somebody dubbed us the first celebrity musical,” says Ingraham. “There are no celebrities in our musical, but the musical in and of itself.”

That attention has included mocking by the likes of Saturday Night Live and David Letterman, but Ingraham appreciates that, too. “Good, bad or indifferent in terms of press, I’m just happy that people are looking at art and talking about it, ’cause it gets shoved aside a lot,” she says. “Saturday Night Live is bringing Broadway to the masses!”

Of her own personal experience in the Spidey ensemble, Ingraham says: “It has been surreal to be in a room with so many innovators, to be in a theater and you’re hearing Julie on one end, and you might hear Bono and Edge on the other, and you’ve got these amazing musicians, and you’ve got Patrick Page, Isabel Keating—these wonderful character actors. I think my jaw is constantly dropping, there’s just so much creativity. It’s really kind of a call to make yourself available to the process; you’re just soaking all of it up.”

Though there’s all kinds of aerial effects in Spider-Man, Ingraham has her feet on the ground for most of the show: She’s airborne only in the Act 2 number “Think Again,” when she portrays one of Arachne’s Furies. Her roles in other scenes include a mean classmate of Peter Parker’s, a weeping woman, a soldier and a goth girl. “I’m kind of jealous of the boys ’cause they get to fly more than we do,” Ingraham says, noting that despite a few castmate accidents during rehearsals and previews and her own self-professed “micromanaging” tendencies, she’s not worried about safety while airborne in Spider-Man.

Her track in The Lion King (which was also directed by Taymor) included an aerial sequence, and she did some semi-aerial work when dancing Tania Pérez-Salas’ piece “Las Horas,” which involved climbing a rope and moving around while hanging from it. The first time Ingraham did any onstage flying was at the auditions for Tarzan, where she learned the routine from Angela Phillips, now the production aerial supervisor for Spider-Man.

Tarzan was one of numerous shows for which Ingraham auditioned unsuccessfully when she was trying to break into musical theater about five years ago. Hot Feet was, in fact, the first play she ever did anywhere—other than a Black History Month show in elementary school where she portrayed Marian Anderson. Ingraham began taking dance lessons as a preschooler, and all her training from then on, including at a performing arts high school and theater powerhouse SMU, was strictly in dance, not musical theater. But, the New York City native admits, she always had “a secret desire” to be in plays. Her family couldn’t really afford Broadway when she was growing up, but they watched a lot of musicals and other movies on TV—and those made an impression on her (Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame especially).

She saw her first live dance performance at age 12—an Alvin Ailey program at New York’s City Center that featured “Revelations” and “Cry,” two of the company’s signature pieces. “I remember what they were performing, I remember who was performing, I remember where I was sitting, and I remember the minute that I decided I wanted to be a dancer professionally,” Ingraham says. “Watching the dancers do ‘Revelations,’ I thought they were dancing completely for me. I remember leaving that concert and just saying, ‘I have to do this for the rest of my life.’”

She’d started dancing when she was 4 and her father put her in weekend dance classes because he “wanted to make sure I didn’t get too attached to Saturday-morning cartoons.” He just picked a studio near their home in Queens, unaware that the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Center had turned out such dancers as Ben Vereen, Roger C. Jeffrey, Michael Peters and Lester Wilson (Camille A. Brown would be a classmate there). Ingraham attended that life-changing Ailey concert at the invitation of Bernice Johnson alumna Nasha Thomas-Schmitt, who at the time was teaching at the studio and performing with Ailey.

Ingraham trained at Bernice Johnson while attending elementary school and junior high in Springfield Gardens, the Queens neighborhood where she grew up. Then she got into LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts—the “Fame school”—and began commuting to Manhattan. After her freshman year, she applied for a scholarship to the Alvin Ailey school but didn’t get it. Convinced she belonged there but unable to pay the tuition, she lobbied various staff members until they offered her a special flat fee for three classes a week for the summer. By fall, she was on scholarship and she went on to earn a Van Lier fellowship (awarded to emerging artists of color) that not only covered her Ailey classes but also provided a stipend. So her high school years were spent mostly in the classrooms and studios of LaGuardia and Ailey, and on the subway between Manhattan and Queens.

During her senior year, Ingraham was named a Presidential Scholar, the nation’s highest academic honor for H.S. students. They are recognized in a ceremony at the White House, and Ingraham took her parents and LaGuardia teacher Penny Frank with her to meet President Clinton. She smiles today at the memory: “My parents never had a whole bunch of money and they sacrificed so much for me to dance, and here we are at the White House. I wanted it more for them than me.”

She’d been nominated as a Presidential Scholar by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, which runs another prestigious program (now known as YoungArts) for which Ingraham was selected. Ingraham participated in NFAA’s dance division but remembers being enthralled by the singing and acting talent of the theater students there and thinking, “I don’t know when, but one day I’m gonna do that.”

For college, Ingraham had two main criteria: She wanted to go somewhere outside NYC for a change of scenery, and “I knew I didn’t want to do a conservatory, ’cause I wanted to have that campus experience and that whole other level of academia.” She chose Southern Methodist University in Dallas (the alma mater of her mentor Nasha Thomas-Schmitt) and double majored in dance and sociology. “As much as I love dance, I wanted to explore other things in my life,” says Ingraham, who received both a B.A. and a B.F.A. in 2002.

Following graduation, she danced with Philadelphia-based Philadanco and then Atlanta’s Ballethnic Dance Company, each for about a year. When she returned to New York in mid-2004, she decided to finally pursue her longstanding interest in musical theater. But she needed a day job while auditioning. Instead of waiting tables, she put her sociology degree to use and went to work for an education management consultant. Eventually, the company hired her full time as schools relationship coordinator, serving as liaison with schools that used its programs. The company accommodated her audition schedule, and she was trying out for musicals the entire year and a half she had the office job. She was studying, too—with a vocal coach, yes, but also just the goings-on at auditions. “I had to learn the process,” she says. “In terms of concert dance, I knew how to be seen in a roomful of people. In musical theater, I had to learn how to be seen. It really is show business—you have to know what they mean by typing and how to dress... It’s not about grandstanding or anything like that, but I didn’t understand how to ‘work the room.’

“Usually I’m one of the shortest people,” continues the 5-foot-2 Ingraham. “So how do I connect with the choreographer and the casting people so they notice me in this roomful of women? If it’s concert dance, I know we’re going to get a chance to be seen in small groups, and I know how to move within that realm. In musical theater, I know how to connect with it physically, but there’s a different kind of ‘pop’ that you need; it’s not always about the technique. I had to stop judging it from my concert dance perspective, what I thought was a sloppy way people were dressed, because in concert dance you would come in with a leotard and there’s a certain way you approach the floor—it’s a sacred space. So I went into auditions and took notes...who’s getting booked and why they’re getting booked. It’s like, She’s dressed like that because that’s what the role calls for, and they’re going to look at her because she’s going to embody what they need to see on stage in full form.

“I had to learn how to not take it personally if I didn’t get cast,” she adds. “Sometimes you’re too short—there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t go in for The Producers.”

She also discovered that auditions could be worthwhile even if a job offer was highly unlikely, as at the periodic chorus calls that long-running shows are contractually obligated to hold even if there are no openings in the cast. “I went to as many auditions as I could just so I could be seen, and to build up my confidence,” she says. “You never know who’s looking at you, or what mark you’re leaving on somebody’s mind,” says Ingraham, who found that point driven home when she was called back for Hot Feet after getting cut at her first audition for it.

Hot Feet flopped on Broadway, but it got Ingraham her Equity card, and soon after, she had a part on the Lion King tour. “This industry I had been trying to break into, all of a sudden it was falling into place,” she says. She was in Lion King for over a year and a half but never met Taymor until the Spider-Man auditions. Between Lion King and Color Purple, Ingraham moved to Mexico City to dance for Tania Pérez-Salas and toured Israel with that company. She later performed on an Italy tour with Armitage Gone! Dance. Her other work-related travels include a month in Mexico and three months in Hawaii on the Lion King tour, living in and performing around the southern U.S. with Ballethnic, and a Bermuda engagement with Philadanco.

Now she’ll be staying put for a while, if the sold-out previews are a harbinger of Spider-Man’s post-opening success. It has been nearly a year and a half since Ingraham was cast in the show (producers initially were eyeing an early-2010 Broadway bow), and she understandably is getting a little impatient for opening night. Right before the latest postponement was announced—when she thought opening was just 3½ weeks away—Ingraham bought her dress for opening night. “I think that we’re all anxious,” she clarifies, “but we all want it to be right. In the fullness of time, it will be what everybody wants it to be.”

Her dressing room for Spider-Man is the same one she had for Hot Feet (back then the theater was named the Hilton). And that’s where she was during the December 20 show when ensemble member Christopher Tierney, performing as the stunt double for Spider-Man, plunged more than 30 feet because of an improperly fastened harness, fracturing his skull and shoulder and breaking multiple ribs and vertebrae.

“We banded together and prayed,” she says of the aftermath. It was a tragic yet typical moment for the cast, which Ingraham describes as “one of the strongest ever in terms of bond.” From their pre-curtain circle (“We hold hands and look each other in the eye before every single show”) to their wishes for Tierney (“We lifted him up with our thoughts”), the cast is always “very, very close and supportive of each other,” Ingraham says. “When Chris fell, that’s not my coworker, that’s not my colleague—that’s my brother.”

Tierney’s recovery exemplifies the spirit and commitment of the Spider-Man company, according to Ingraham. “It does not surprise me that he was taking steps a week later,” she says. “His attitude about it doesn’t surprise me at all.” The latter comment refers to Tierney’s TV interviews, where he smiled while describing the incident and his injuries and expressed eagerness to get back in the show. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Of course somebody has to be telling him to say these things,’” Ingraham says. “No, that’s just Christopher. And that’s darn near everybody in our cast.”

Spider-Man also got into the headlines last month when Fox News rabble-rouser Glenn Beck took time out from his Obama bashing to see the show and rave about it (and bash theater critics) on his radio program. Beck usually doesn’t elicit much gratitude from theater folks, but Ingraham says: “Anybody that supports the show, that supports the arts, thank you. We need more support for live theater. Maybe that will inspire somebody to support the arts.”

While Beck was wowed by the show’s superhero razzle-dazzle, Ingraham finds its best quality on a human scale. “The resounding themes of perseverance and redemption are truly what speak to me in Spider-Man,” she says. “The journey to following the path you were meant to be on, complete with all of the doubts, frustrations, temptations to give up and ultimately the victories that ensue, is something that I think many people struggle with. The decision to stay the course in the face of trial and tribulation is, I think, one of the most inspirational factors in this show.”

As for what critics and the general public will say—and have already been saying—about Spider-Man, she states: “Whether people like the show is up to them, but we are part of something that’s never been done before.”

Photos of Dana, from top: outside the Foxwoods Theatre between Spider-Man performances on a recent Saturday; in her headshot; center, partnered with William Isaac in an Armitage Gone! Dance performance at the 2009 Fire Island Dance Festival; with President Clinton at the Presidential Scholars ceremony at the White House in 1998; dancing “Las Horas” for Tania Pérez-Salas; in costume backstage at The Lion King. [Armitage photo by Rosalie O’Connor; Pérez-Salas photo by Pini Snuir]