Lindsayann Collazo didn’t have a clue as to why Assistant Principal Frank Costello was pulling her out of Spanish class during the last week in April.
“He said he came to congratulate me,” Collazo said. “I asked him for what? And when he told me I kissed and hugged him. I was that excited. My heart nearly pounded out of my chest. I couldn’t believe it.”
Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., had nominated Collazo for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for the part she played earlier this year as “Maria” in West Side Story. The Paper Mill Rising Star Awards celebrates achievement in musical theatre productions by New Jersey high schools.
Recognition of outstanding accomplishments is made in the areas of: performance, direction, choreography, costume & lighting design and overall production excellence.
The awards will be announced in a ceremony on stage at Paper Mill on June 5, during which excerpts from the nominated productions are performed. Scholarships to Paper Mill’s Summer Musical Conservatory are also awarded to outstanding students, nominated by their teachers, who will be continuing their theatre studies. “She will spend six weeks studying at Paper Mill’s summer program,” said Costello. “She and the other nominees will put on a production there.”
First time
Although Lyle Leeson, choral director for the Secaucus High School music program, said this was the first time Secaucus High School had applied for the competition, the relatively small school had to compete against schools with much larger programs.
“This isn’t like sports where you play against teams from schools about the same size,” Leeson said. “We competed against schools much larger than we are.”
Judges, Leeson said, came to see all three performances put on at Secaucus High School last April, a different set of judges each night.
Collazo said she didn’t know the judges came more than once, but knew they came during the Saturday production. Yet instead of scaring her, their presence inspired her as well as the rest of the cast.
“The whole cast performed better that night,” she said. “It was the best performance of all three nights.”
Leeson believes others in the cast should have received additional recognition for their performances as well, but the school’s lack of auditorium hampered the production efforts. Instead of the orchestra performing in a pit in front of the stage, it was hidden behind the stage.
“If we had a real auditorium, I think more of our cast might have been nominated,” he said.
Collazo agreed the lack of dedicated space posed challenges other schools did not likely encounter, since the cast and grew had to shape a space normally used as a cafeteria into something an audience would think of as the streets of a city.
“But everybody did a great job,” she said.
A role she always wanted to play
Collazo, now 16, said she has wanted to play the role of Maria since she was five or six years old – the first time her mother, Melissa Dulzaides, introduced her to the 1961 film staring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer. “I wanted to expose her to those things that showed challenges Latinos face in America,” Dulzaides said. “This was one of the films that showed this perfectly.”
West Side Story is an energetic, widely-acclaimed, melodramatic musical – a modern-day, loose re-telling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet tragedy, set in the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1950s. The play portrayed racial strife between rival New York street gangs (newly arrived Puerto Ricans and second-generation Americans from white European immigrant families), juvenile delinquency and inner-city problems of the mid-twentieth century – in musical and dance form.
Collazo’s family moved to Secaucus about five years ago. She was 11 and attended Clarendon School. The family had lived in Westchester, New York, and moved to Secaucus partly because they heard the school system was so good. The theater program was a pleasant surprise. Her school district in Westchester didn’t have such a program.
Since then, Collazo has appeared in the school productions of Oliver, Mame, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, and Carnival. Last year, she played the supporting role of Tuptim in The King and I.
But once she heard about West Side Story being scheduled for this year, she was stunned.
“I was beside myself,” she said. “I knew the part I wanted to play. But I would have settled for any part.”
She auditioned for the part of Maria, then when finished; she was prepared to audition for the supporting role of Anita. Jody Jaret – who conducted the audition – told Collazo to leave.
“I went home, within an hour Jody called to say I got the part,” Collazo said. “I started to cry.”
When she got onto stage and started to perform, Collazo developed a distinct Latino accent, something that startled her schoolmates, but not her mother.
“She could change her voice from the time she was three years old,” Dulzaides said. “She sang Little Mermaid for us when she was three and we couldn’t believe it.”
She is working to make a career on the stage
Collazo said she wants to make a career on the stage, singing on Broadway if she can get there. Although she is still only a sophomore in high school, she has aspirations of attending Julliard, and is gearing up to meet the stiff entrance requirements.
“I’m going to have to know how to sight-read music,” she said. “And I will also need to know five languages.”
These are French, Italian, German, English Opera and Spanish. Julliard officials, however, said she doesn’t need to know them fluently, but enough for her to understand what is going on in various operatic scenes – whether the mood is happy or sad and what each character is supposed to be doing. Sight-reading is also necessary in order for students to read and practice music on their own. Ability to play piano is also helpful.
Leeson has been acting as Collazo’s operatic coach, and he said Collazo has an amazing voice.
“She is always on pitch,” he said, “and she brings to her singing an experience beyond her age. She is 16, but she sings as if she was 30.”
A play with a point
It was no accident that Secaucus High School put on West Side Story this year, said Assistant Principal Frank Costello.
“We wanted to show the whole school the social issues involved and how issues like gang violence and lack of respect for authority are as relevant today as they were in the 1950s.”
The play’s theme, he said, centers around the idea that violence is not the answer, but often it is what happens when people lose the ability to deal with each other at a rational level. Costello said schools across the county have been hit with shock waves as a result violent attacks in schools.
“We’re trying to face the issue head on, trying to get our kids to think,” he said. “This play shows them out it is a losing battle.”
To help coordinate some of the more violent scenes in the play, the school reached out to a former Secaucus resident, Rick Sordelet, a member of the Society of American Fight Directors, who has directed the Superbowl XXIX halftime show and served fight director for the films Breaking the Silence and Slings and Arrows, Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast , The Lion King, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Titanic, Epic Proportions, Wait Until Dark, Once Upon a Mattress, and Martin Guerre, Titanic, Ben Hur and Sunset Boulevard. Sordelet currently teaches at Yale School of Drama and is fight director for the television show All my Children.
In a demonstration done in the Secaucus High School gym in April, Sordelet astonished students with tricks of the trade. But he also said it was important not to allow imaginary acts to become real.