‘Charity’ smiles on teen actor
Just ask 18-year-old Allegra Leland of Northvale, who won the Helen Hayes High School Theater Award this summer for her lead performance in the musical “Sweet Charity.”
She couldn’t have won the Helen — the secondary-school equivalent of the Tony — if her family hadn’t been preparing her for the role of the showgirl Charity all her life.
“I was a Broadway baby,” says Leland. “I’ve basically been surrounded by the arts and everything involved in the theater since I was so little, and my parents and friends are all very talented people. I had no chance of not having a deep love and respect for the arts.”
It should be explained that the Lelands are not your typical family when it comes to show business.
Their dining room, for instance, has wall-to-floor mirrors — so that Mom, Dad and daughter Allegra can practice their bucking and winging when they’re not serving the casserole.
Both parents are show people. Marc Leland is a dance teacher, performer, director, choreographer and filmmaker; Carmel Kirtland Leland is a former Radio City Music Hall dancer who teaches jazz dance at the CGI Holistic Fitness Center in Closter.
And Allegra, who is off to New York’s American Musical and Dramatic Academy in the fall — complete with scholarship — is determined to follow in their footsteps.
“I feel I’ve been very well trained to succeed in a life of performing,” she says. “I want to be on Broadway.”
She got a chance to practice the sweetest part of her profession in June, when she beat out six other deserving actresses for the Helen Hayes award, bestowed in front of an audience of more than a thousand at the Paramount Theater in Peekskill, N.Y.
When her name was announced, she says, she just froze.
“I had a moment of: What? Really?” she recalls. “I was sitting next to my mom, and we both kind of stared at each other. And then I skipped up, actually skipped, onto the stage, because I was so excited.”
Helping her hone her award-winning performance as Charity at Academy of the Holy Angels in Demarest (it ran in late March) was a pro even more seasoned than Mom and Dad.
Jack Lee, one of Leland’s vocal coaches, was one of the conductors and musical directors for the original Broadway production of “Sweet Charity” — the 1966 hit that director Bob Fosse tailored for his wife, actress Gwen Verdon, out of the somewhat coarser material of Federico Fellini’s classic 1957 film “The Nights of Cabiria.”
It was nice, Leland says, to learn that the original artists who concocted a tuneful hit (”Hey Big Spender,” “If My Friends Could See Me Now”) out of the story of an innocent dance-hall girl in a not-so-innocent world had some of the same problems she had.
For instance, the song “You Should See Yourself,” with the high notes at the end: Verdon had problems with that one, too, Leland learned.
“[Lee] told me Gwen Verdon didn’t like to do the song, so every night he would change the orchestration, bring in a Spanish guitar, make it fun for Gwen, so that she would be anxious to see what he had done to it,” Leland says.
“It was nice, when I was a little worried about something, to hear that Gwen had also worried.”