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[title]Not everyone admired Arthur Laurents's new revival of West Side Story quite as much as we did, but about one thing, at least, everyone agreed: As Anita, the girlfriend of a Puerto Rican gang leader, Karen Olivo is giving a breakthrough performance. It has earned her, among other plaudits, a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, a category in which she must be considered the front-runner. We caught up with her at the Tony nominees junket.
Time Out New York: So are you, you know, happy to be nominated?
Karen Olivo: C'mon! What do you guys think? Yeah, I'm ecstatic.
Is West Side Story a show that you have known and loved for years?
I saw the movie musical when I was five or six years old. And then I had the opportunity to do the production when I was 15 years old at a community theater. I had no business doing the role of Anita, but I always knew that it was something I wanted to do, when I was at the right age. Yeah, it's the best musical ever!
There was a magazine article recently about Arthur Laurents, and about what a mean, mean man he is. Did he abuse you actors?
That cracks me up! I'll be honest with you. I was warned about Arthur before I got into the production, and so I sort of had my walls up. And then I met him and worked with him—and he is one of the most generous men I've met. I guess people could say that he's abrasive, but I think he's just very honest. A lot of people have a problem with honesty, but from an actor's standpoint, I need you to be brutally honest with me, because I need to fix anything that needs to be fixed—and if we play games, then my work suffers and your work suffers. So I was always very happy when he was like, "That's not real. Make it real." I guess people can find problems with that, but I just found him a real joy to work with.
So no chair throwing in rehearsals?
Gosh, no! He's really funny too. I don't know why people don't spend more time talking about how funny he is.
One thing that he writes about a little bit in his new book is the work that you had to do on your dancing for this role. Do you have any background as a dancer?
Well, I was a mover. I could do some basic sort of things. Even in In The Heights, Andy Blankenbuehler and Luis Salgado had to work extensively with me for all the partnering in the salsa. But Jerome Robbins and Peter Gennaro's choreography is a whole other beast, and it's for real dancers—people who have been in dance class since they were four or five years old. So they put me through boot camp basically. I would work for two hours before anyone else came to rehearsal, and I took private lessons in Pilates and ballet just so I could look like a dancer. There are a lot of things about line and form; if you haven't done it since you were a child, your body just doesn't make those lines and you cannot find the right center and you can't achieve these really hard moves. They just—you know, they beat me. They whipped me into submission, and here I am.
One of the things that I love about your work here and also in In The Heights is that in both cases I feel like there is a sadness in the character that isn't necessarily in the writing. I feel like you bring a lot of that out. Is that intentional?
As actors you try to bring as much of yourself to roles as possible. And, you know...I have a vast amount of sorrow, I would say. I understand it, I get it, I understand how people get there. And I think that's something that people lack a lot of times in musical theater—depth and being really grounded in something. So I just try to be as honest as I can, and usually when I'm honest as a character it comes off as, well, a little sad! But I think for musicals, that's a good balance. You have so many people shaking their hands, and big smiles, and tap numbers. Sometimes you need a little bit of reality to counterbalance all of the glitz. That's just what I do, I guess.