West End Girl

Alexandra Silber gets ready before the show. Photo: Ivan and Michelle Hoo/ Chellevan Art Studio.

Alexandra Silber is currently starring in Carousel, which opened in London in December. Before the show, Ryan Roark met up with her to talk about musical theatre, drama school and auditioning for Andrew Lloyd Webber.

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I first saw Alexandra Silber almost three years ago on the closing night of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical The Woman in White, in which she took over the supporting role of Laura Fairlie. At the risk of sounding like some sort of crazy person, I was bowled over by her performance, to the point that I found myself thinking with dread, What if I hadn't gone to the theatre booth today and gotten the last ticket? Tragedy averted! Then when I checked the programme, I found that she had the shortest bio of anyone in the cast, as The Woman in White was her first performance out of drama school, and she's American?that piqued my interest. So now that she's starring as Julie Jordan in the revival of Carousel, I jumped at the chance to interview her and talk to her about theatre. It turns out she is also quite an enthusiast and therefore can relate at once to my story about why I was so excited to interview her.

Alexandra presents her own story as a series of almost accidents that brought her to where she is today. She tells me, "I can't even believe I'm sitting here. Carousel was the first show I ever did, when I was little, aside from school plays. It was an am-dram production in Birmingham, Michigan. It was such an eye-opener for me. I actually played the character who is the daughter of my current character. I was a little ballerina, and I knew that ballet ballet wasn't what I wanted to do, and this play had a twenty minute ballet, so I auditioned for it and it literally ripped my eyes open. I was like, oh my God, the theatre! I was twelve at the time, and I was obsessed with Carousel, because it became this symbol of what I wanted to do when I grew up. So in that sense, the fact that I get to do this is even more amazing."

Since that amateur performance of Carousel, Alexandra has been devoted to the theatre?not just acting, as she is keen to point out: "If I had absolutely no ability to act or sing or dance, I would be a designer or I would work in stage management, because the theatre is the thing I have a tremendous, overwhelming passion and love for."

Alexandra has lived in the UK since she started at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) when she was nineteen. When I ask what brought her to the UK, she tells me: "In America, if you don't go to college right after high school, you're considered a 'loser'. But I just could not find the program that I wanted; nothing seemed to fit right, there was always something just not quite happening, and I'm not the sort of person who can just settle. I knew exactly what I wanted, and I couldn't find it, so I went to the wrong school because I didn't know what else to do. To make a long story short, after a couple of months my father passed away, so I took the opportunity of grief to stay at home with my mom, and to review my life and what it meant. It was a really sharp reminder that there's no time to waste and that my dad would have wanted me to do what was right.

"I decided to make a big list of everything I wanted and said I don't care where the school is that matches the most things on this list, I'm going there. I did my research for three or four months, phone calls, hassling people in Australia and Europe, just going crazy. The RSAMD was the school that matched the most things on my list. Since I was so ignorant, and probably a little bit crazy, I was like, 'Okay, well I'm going there.' Not like, 'I might not get in', but just, 'I'm going. It matches the most on my list, that's the plan!' Ignorance worked for me because when I auditioned I was just like, 'Hello! When do I start?' I was totally confident, so it probably worked to my advantage. A lot of ignorance has helped in my lifetime, I must say. After all, I did get in and I loved it."

Like the decision to come to the UK, the choice of musical theatre was not the result of a conscious plan, but just the way things happened to turn out. Though Alexandra's major West End credits to date are all musicals, The Woman in White, Fiddler on the Roof and Carousel, "I'm quite surprised that my career has taken me in the direction of musical theatre, because my training has been predominantly classical?in terms of acting, not singing, I should say!

"At RSAMD we didn't audition for shows, we were just assigned shows, so [in the third year] they had to teach us to audition, since it's the most important talent you have as an actor. They brought in some professionals to teach us, and one of them was this guy who taught the straight actors to do musical theatre auditions?it was that day. I don't know what it was, but I had this sort of voice in my head, a feeling, saying if you nail this, your life will change. So I dressed up smart, got my big folder of music?and I knew this genre, I knew I could do this.

"I went in with this guy for about twenty minutes, singing three or four songs for him, and the next day, this guy who I'd never heard of, David Grindrod, who turned out to be the biggest casting director in London, phoned me and said, 'Hi, we'd like you to come audition for The Woman in White.' I didn't even know who he was, I just said 'Okay!' I didn't know what The Woman in White was; I didn't even really quite understand what the West End was. I just thought, that sounds like an interesting show. Like I said, ignorance has gotten me through a lot. I went down to London and thought, there's no reason why I couldn't do this, and somebody had to get it. When they called me back, they called me back for the role?I didn't realise there was a difference?and they gave me all these things to read. Only when they told me 'We're going to need you to do two speeches for Trevor [Nunn], and Andrew [Lloyd Webber] will be listening to you sing,' and I thought 'Trevor and Andrew, fine!', only then did it kind of click that this is sort of a big deal. I got the part, and I had to move down from Glasgow within four days. I came down with two suitcases on the train, and that was that."

While she obviously loves what she's doing?and can't rave enough about how much she loves Carousel?Alexandra says she doesn't think of herself specifically as a musical theatre actress, but rather sees musicals as "another genre in which to tell stories, just like farce or commedia." That having been said, she admits that musical theatre has a particular power: "The combination of spoken poetry with music to carry the emotion on is unparalleled."

One of the things that makes Alexandra a great actress is her interest in learning about everything, which comes across when she talks about preparing for the role of Julie Jordan. Because of her history with the play, she already knew it well, and being American, she also had a sense of the historical background of the characters, which she explained to the rest of the company during rehearsals: "The people who originally founded New England left England because they thought it was too liberal, so that's the kind of puritanical thinking we're talking about here. Their inability to articulate emotions?an unwillingness as well as inability?that facade holds in an ocean of emotion because it has no outlet. In some ways these characters probably feel more profoundly than people who are more willing to express themselves, because it has no place to go.

"As far as Julie is concerned, I wrote down her biography, her history, and I wrote down what happens between the scenes, that the audience doesn't see. To be perfectly honest, I'm a closet academic. I want there to be a real cerebral process of what happens between the scenes, that then can translate itself emotionally, so that when you see Julie after two months have gone by, you can actually see that two months have gone by. I know exactly what has happened to her and what she's done. The lines and the words are rooted and loaded with real events and real things I've created in my mind. We all did a lot of that together, as the process. One of the great things about Lindsay [Posner, the director] is that we sit around a table for two weeks and we comb through the script, asking 'Why that word, and not another word?' and 'What do you think happened?', and we're all on the same page about exactly why we're saying what we're saying. What's great about that is that even nine months down the line when you're tired and you're maybe a little bored, that sort of detail can see you through. There's no way of losing yourself, because it's so specific and so rooted....

"The man who plays opposite me [as Billy Bigelow], Jeremiah James, we have this amazing chemistry and this amazing working relationship. The best way to describe the way we work, at the risk of sounding completely prosaic, is that it's sort of like jazz. It's the same song, the variations on the theme stay within this same structure, but the way we get there alternates every day depending on how we personally feel, based on our level of emotional strength."

Given Alexandra's enthusiasm for all aspects of theatre, I am curious what her future projects will be. In particular, I ask if she would like to direct one day. She responds without hesitating, "Oh yeah?absolutely! There's not a lot of the theatre that I wouldn't want to participate in. I sometimes have dreams about the way I'd like to light something. I'd love to direct some day, and I will absolutely teach. Teaching is a very important goal to me, because I know what it did for me and how it changed my life. I think that opening young people's eyes to the potentials in the creative world is amazing. When you have a piece of information, and you tell thirty people who don't have it, and then those thirty people have it, it's the most intoxicating thing you've ever seen."

As for her short-term goals, she says, "My goal this year is to start to spread my creative outlets. I've always been interested in visual art, so I'm trying to explore that and not judge what comes out, just do it for the sake of expressing myself. And I blog, because I love writing. And this year I'm going to start a podcast. That's going to be really exciting, because, in my humble opinion, I have a great idea for a podcast. It's going to be encompassing and touching and funny; it will be based around the theme of working and living in the theatre. That will be a real treat to work on, and I hope people will enjoy it." In the mean time, Alexandra is more than happy to be where she is right now: "Carousel is the caviar of musical theatre, and I'm loving it!"

Carousel is booking through 25 July at the Savoy Theatre. You can read Alexandra's blog about life in the theatre and other funny stories at alexandrasilber.blogspot.com.