Manoel Felciano, Tony Award-nominated actor and musician, is having the time of his life in the City by the Bay. But then making his Bay Area and Tom Stoppard debut at A.C.T. has been a dream come true. "To be able to make my Bay Area professional debut at A.C.T. with a Stoppard play is like hitting the jackpot on all three levels: professional, artistic, and personal," says Felciano, who stars in the West Coast premiere of Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll at A.C.T. Born and raised in San Francisco before moving to New York City to pursue a career in music, Felciano plays the lead role of Jan, a rock music-obsessed graduate student fighting for freedom of expression in Soviet-dominated Prague. Performances start September 11.
"The character of Jan fits him like a glove," says Artistic Director
Carey Perloff of Felciano, who received a Tony nomination for playing Tobias Ragg in Sweeney Todd on Broadway. "He is a Yale-educated intellectual who is also a rock-and-roll musician and an actor of great wit, intuition, and sensuality-so all the seemingly contradictory sides of Jan's personality can come into play. Besides, he's a San Franciscan, so he's an anarchist and utopian at heart."
Love of music is one of the strongest connections between the role and the actor. In Stoppard's decades-spanning play, Jan is an avid vinyl collector, whose collection of rare records fills a section of the set. Felciano spent his youth listening to the records featured in the show while working at Haight's legendary vinyl store, Recycled Records. "I couldn't ask for a better opportunity to be able to play this role in Rock 'n' Roll, a guy very much like myself, whose love of vinyl leads him, belatedly, to political activism."
The power of music to shape a person and even a whole country is at the heart of Stoppard's vision for Rock 'n' Roll. He builds the play around an emblematic '60s rock-and-roll soundtrack featuring songs from such greats as the Grateful Dead to
Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd to the Rolling Stones. And this volatile intersection of art and social change speaks to Felciano personally: "Even when it's not overtly political, rock music is by its nature primal, visceral, irrational, and rebellious. A mere act of playing a record can be a way of speaking truth to power that even to this day remains inherently dangerous to authoritarian regimes," he says. "Keep cranking up the volume and eventually the people in charge will hear you."
TICKETS
Tickets for Rock 'n' Roll can be purchased by visiting A.C.T. Ticket Services, located at 405 Geary Street, by calling 415.749.2228; or via the A.C.T. website at
www.act-sf.org. Groups of 15 or more people are eligible for discounts; please call 415.439.2473.
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