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Written by Andrea Braun Monday, 11 April 2011 11:08

She compared acting to a “magic trick,” and how she sought solitude in the arboretum at her childhood home to sing and think. But people who have faith in you and “taking care of your gift are key to long term success.

Alice Ripley is prodigiously talented, articulate and devoted to her art and her fans. She’s also given a lot of interviews in the time she has been playing the lead role of Diana Goodman, the mother at the center of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning musical, Next to Normal, coming April 12 to the Fox. She won the 2009 Tony for the demanding role (her second lead actress nomination), and has been with the show since 2006, in its early days off Broadway.

When it was suggested she take a break from the New York company, then return when the tour went out, she agreed. She also maintains a successful recording career, fronting her band, Ripley, with whom she has recorded several albums. When I had a chance to speak with her by phone, I hoped to find something to talk about that she hadn’t already been asked to discuss numerous times. So, what topic did she suggest? Facebook.

Ripley maintains three Facebook pages. She noted that the social network is a kind of “obsession,” and she is at the site often, which gives her the opportunity to keep in touch with her fans. It allows her to update everyone on her activities and read their posts about her work. She even uses a photo of herself with some audience members who came to the show’s opening at the Arena stage last fall toward the end of Next to Normal. So, in that way, Alice Ripley is just like you and me, only with a lot more friends, an amazing voice, a thriving career and a monster hit show.

In February, 2010, she released an album of rock song covers under the title “Daily Practice” (co-produced with Sh-K-Boom Records). She began writing songs in 1991 at the encouragement of a friend, and has written more than 100 to date. When I asked her the style of her compositions, she compared her work to Sarah McLaughlin’s, but Next to Normal has warmed up her rock chops, and she’s exploring that aspect of her musicality with her latest recordings. “The audience demanded the record,” she added. “I did this record for [them] and I want to make [another] live album soon.” She said she had visions of going out on a tour bus with her guitar and playing the venues she has visited with Next to Normal, as well. She also is an artist working in mixed media, a real renaissance woman.

We started talking about the current show, Ripley told me she “hopes it is a cathartic experience for this audience.” She calls it a “rock opera,” (her first Broadway touring experience was with Tommy) “with that classic, wide-scale impact of something like Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. . . Albee takes no prisoners.” Neither does Next to Normal. She’s like to do a straight play—one of the classics herself someday, but so far her career is in musicals.

Ripley sang Fantine in the national Les Miserables tour prior to Sideshow, and that led us to the subject of strong women, and how much she’d like for there to be more parts for strong women. Of her character, Diana, she said: “There is no more powerful force than a real, strong woman, and Diana is caged, her paws are cut off. She evokes a tremendous response, and I think this is why [the show] won the Pulitzer. . . . That was the moment where I thought, ‘Okay, I can relax a little bit.’”

The composers who created this remarkable woman are, of course, men, Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics). “They came up with this impossible thing that nobody would want to produce,” Ripley said. But of course, someone did: The executive producer is David Stone (Wicked). “It turned out that it was the perfect time, and when I meet the three generations of women at the stage door, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, they experience the show as a group. And it’s a strong message for young women to take in.” I asked what kind of mother Diana is to her daughter Natalie, and she analyzed her as a “supermom.” “She keeps house perfectly, everything is in order. She has a degree in architecture like her husband, but she doesn’t practice. She doesn’t have to because he makes enough money.. . . She’s trotting along but [she’s] bored. Still, she has a survivor mentality.” This last is an excellent quality, considering Diana has suffered from bi-polar disorder for the past 16 years, and traditional drug therapies aren’t helping.

The daughter, Natalie (Emma Hunton), adds extra pressure to her mother’s already not-so-normal life: “[In some ways, Diana] completely denies she’s a mother at all, except to her son (Curt Hansen). But their relationship isn’t the usual one, and he’s not always an angel—sometimes he’s the devil, and he won’t go away.”

Of Diana’s husband, Dan (Asa Somers), she says: “He has a lot of false bravado. He lives in denial. He doesn’t think in the long term, but when Diana makes her difficult decision in the end, she is thinking that way. She isn’t selfish [in what she’s doing], she’s human, but it’s selfish to be human and human to be selfish. We are all spirits in the material world. That’s why sometimes we just screw it up.”

Asked the most rewarding part of playing Diana, Ripley responded: “Digging into myself. Finding that human side of myself.” The hardest part? “Well, right now, it’s being on the road. It’s tough to change mattresses every day” (laughs). She does have company: Her husband is the drummer in the show.

I wanted to know if her large, blended family provided encouragement for her as a child, and she said they had. “They were my backyard audience. There was support, but no domineering [behavior] going on. When you’re an artist, you just want the attention.” She said that she had seen few professional shows growing up, but when she saw Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris at 14, there was a moment “when I definitely thought, yeah, I can pull that off.” And, as so many performers, she confesses to being painfully shy, and that parties are hard (“You have to be rested up for that kind of thing”) but she finds joy onstage, even in a part as demanding as this one.

She compared acting to a “magic trick,” and how she sought solitude in the arboretum at her childhood home to sing and think. But people who have faith in you and “taking care of your gift are key to long term success. Next to Normal puts the audience face to face with you and each other, and there are lots of ways to get into the story—a whole palette of emotions, many unresolved, unexpressed.”

Inevitably, I asked her about drug therapy and any message the show might be making about that or electro-convulsive therapy. She doesn’t see that these are condemned in any way, but that Diana “doesn’t have a room of her own, and that’s what she goes off to find at the end.”

Alice Ripley is a charming woman and a huge talent. You won’t want to miss Next to Normal. Tickets are available through Metrotix or at the Fox box office (in person only). I’m confident this will be a special theatre experience for all of us. | Andrea Braun

Alice Ripley on Wikipedia