Interview: 'I Feel Most Myself When I Am Acting': A Conversation with GREASE's Chelsea Williams

"I think other people first recognized that I was geared to being a performer. I didn't necessarily recognize that myself, but when I performed in my first musical in high school, I suddenly said to myself 'Nothing else makes me feel like this. I felt these amazing vibrations between me and the audience and me and the rest of the people on stage; I felt connected to the world - more like my true self myself that I had ever felt before, and that's how I knew."

Chelsea Williams is talking about discovering her vocation as an actress and the creative journey which has taken her to the nation's leading theatres. This July and August the Windham, Maine, native returns to her home state to play Sandy in Maine State Music Theatre's production of Grease, which begins its run at the Pickard Theater on July 19. Williams made her MSMT debut last summer as Sophie in MSMT's blockbuster hit, Mamma Mia!, reprising the role that constituted her big career breakthrough. Like Mamma Mia!, Grease is blessed with an unforgettable score and a story that is both endearing and totally joyous, and the new MSMT production in which Williams stars promises to be the mega hit of the company's summer season.

Williams is keenly cognizant of the challenge this presents to her as an actress. "As Sophie [in Mamma Mia!] I was pretty much on stage all the time, but because Sandy is such a beloved character and so many generations are familiar with her, she seems all the more iconic." Williams acknowledges that predecessors in the role, especially Olivia Newton-John, have created performances that are seared into memory. For her as a young actress making her debut in the part, she has tried to both honor her own history with the piece and find an original perspective.

"I think I first encountered Grease as a kid by watching the movie, and then I did see a touring production that came through Portland. I was always a fan of Olivia Newton-John, and now that I am walking in her shoes, I have even more respect for her performance. She really nailed it." Williams says that vocally, Newton-John's choices were "so smart that I may have taken a few pages out of her book. " And she admires the way the screen actress was able to maintain the character's "sunny disposition without making it look artificial. That is harder than it looks!"

While the character of Sandy may, at first glance, appear dated in its message for a contemporary audience, Williams say director/choreographer Mark Martino has helped her understand Sandy's transformation in a light that she, as a feminist, can comprehend. "The story has some interesting nuances for 2017. Sandy is a girl whose moral compass is challenged by the new kids at her new school, and she learns a great deal from them. Ultimately she decides to change her lifestyle and become one of them. At first I found that a bit problematic - perhaps not the best message to be sending today. But Mark [Martino] is handling this very delicately in his staging so that it seems not so much about Sandy's sacrificing the standard she's held for herself all along, but rather more about the fact that she has perhaps not opened herself to the possibility of living fully, of taking risks, and trying things that may make her feel uncomfortable. I see her as realizing that you never know until you try something. She doesn't want to look back on her life and wonder what things could have been like. So for me, her transformation feels as if she is going outside her comfort zone and making the decision to live more colorfully."

Williams describes Sandy's relationship with Danny Zuko, who is played by her friend and former Mamma Mia! colleague, Neil Starkenberg. "Both Sandy and Danny are greatly influenced by their environment and upbringing - Sandy from her [conservative] dad and Danny from his ragtag group of friends who are not always the best of influences. She demands respect from him and wants him to grow up a little, and he challenges her to take more risks, to be a little brave, and to let her hair down a bit. Over the course of the play, each learns from the other."

Williams says that the MSMT production is "so well balanced; it is not like reading a cartoon strip; the characters have real substance, at the same time that it is a production that is insanely electric and joyous." Williams describes what she believes to be some of the ingredients of Martino's staging that are sure to ignite the audience. "The original Grease on Broadway had sixteen cast members, and this production uses thirty-four! It is massive, but Mark is so good at working with large numbers of people at the same time that he is meticulous with the small scene work. The audience is going to lose its mind in the hand jive scene, and the finale is amazing! There is all this bright, fluffy, incredible dancing and singing and then you have the deeper, quieter moments."

Williams notes that the MSMT version will include some of the best loved songs from the movie which had not been in the original Broadway production - "people would be disappointed not to hear them" - as well as a real rock and roll band with drums, guitar and all the sounds that capture the time." She adds that the choreography, too, evokes the era perfectly, as do all the visual elements of the production. "Mark [Martino] has such a feel for this show," she says by way of enthusiastic summary. "He has played Danny at least three times, and he has directed it many times. He understands the history of the piece, and he conveys the period brilliantly."

"Mark likes to describe Grease as a show that captures an era that never happened," Williams continues. "It did happen, of course, but Grease looks at the 50s nostalgically. It shows the audience the best parts of being alive at that time. And it is not difficult for the audience to remember what that felt like and to embrace the music of the period." Williams, of course, like virtually the entire MSMT Grease cast, was born long after that era of muscle cars, rock and roll, and greasers and pink ladies, but in remembering the music of her own youth, she says she is able to easily identify with the emotions and situations of the show.

Chelsea Williams was, in fact raised in Windham in western Maine, and while she sang in choirs from an early age, initially, it was soccer and softball that engaged her rather than theatre until high school when she experienced her epiphany about her theatre vocation. Looking back, she sees how sports prepared her for her eventual musical theatre career. " I was always interested in the team aspect of sports, and that exists in theatre as well, where it is not about a singular performance but about relying on your colleagues. Then there is the actual physical discipline of musical theatre. You really do have to be an athlete to do eight or nine shows a week; it takes physical and vocal stamina and is not for the weak. So when I began to concentrate on the stage, I was grateful that I already knew what it was like to put in that time and effort."

Williams went on to study musical theatre at Boston's Emerson College and remained in that city for a year after graduation working in a variety of theatre projects there before she was cast as Sophie on the national tour of Mamma Mia! "I was a relative novice when I joined the tour," she recalls, and more than five hundred performances later, "not only did I learn so much about vocal stamina, but I also learned so much about the business and about adapting to different situations and co-workers. It was like working ten regional contracts because every city and theatre I went to was a little different."

Following the tour, Williams settled in New York City and has been pursuing the usual round of auditions and projects that constitute a working actor's life. This fall for the second year, she will go out on tour for several months in White Christmas, performing in the ensemble and understudying Betty Haynes, and she has lined up a series of other gigs which will occupy her until January. She confesses that ity has taken her a while to get used to the intermittent rhythms of work and pause in an actor's life. "At first I wasn't prepared for the down time, and it is hard to plan anything too far in advance because you don't know what you'll be doing. But each year I feel I become more comfortable with the time between gigs. Every job I get helps to boost my confidence that there will be a next time. I may not know when, but it will happen."

Meanwhile Williams tries to stay focused on the moment and immerse herself in the show she is currently performing. The upcoming production of Grease has been challenging and absorbing for her. She says she feels that her personal big take-home lesson from playing Sandy will be "to walk away a better actor. Playing Sandy is harder than one might think. Sophie was a natural fit for me, but Sandy is not who I am, so it is a massive acting exercise."

And just as playing Sandy appears deceptively simple, but is far more complex, so, too, Chelsea Williams believes is Grease a work that "has far more depth than people may remember. Yes, of course, at the end the audience will be in such a good mood, but I think they will not only feel the joyousness, but also they also will be reminded that these characters and ths story are more layered, more varied than they may have imagined."

Photos courtesy MSMT

Grease runs from July 19- August 5 at MSMT's Pickard Theater, 1 Bath Rd., Brunswick, ME 207-725-8769 www.msmt.org

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