Since opening in October 2019, Michael Mayer’s well-received “Little Shop of Horrors” revival has attracted quite a few leading men: Jonathan Groff was the first to step into Seymour Krelborn’s Converse sneakers, and he was followed by Gideon Glick and Jeremy Jordan . This reflects the casting evolution of the character, a painfully shy plant geek. Not many roles have been played by either Rick Moranis (in the 1986 film adaptation of the show) or Jake Gyllenhaal (in a 2015 concert production).
When asked if he wanted to join the, ahem, hot streak, Conrad Ricamora burst out laughing. “I played a nerdy IT guy on ‘How to Get Away With Murder’ for six years, so I don’t know if there’s a full consensus that I’m in the Hot Actors’ Jake Gyllenhaal Hall of Fame,” he said.
Since January 11, Ricamora, 42, has taken center stage at the Westside Theater, and while he shows some serious comedic muscle, he also takes advantage of the character’s painful loneliness. When he sings ‘Someone show me a way to get outta here /’Cause I constant pray I’ll get outta here’ in the opening song, the pain is palpable.
This versatility won’t be news to those who have seen him on stage before – yes, Oliver Stans, he can sing! There was the way Ricamora would evoke a shamanic intensity as the magnetic political leader Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne and Fatboy Slim hit show that opened at the Public Theater in 2013. And then there was his fiery romance as the doomed Burmese scholar and lover Lun Tha in the 2015 Lincoln Center production of “The King and I” — oh, those duets with Ashley Park’s Tuptim!
After a recent rehearsal, the actor spoke candidly about the obstacles he had to overcome on his way to Skid Row, the run-down neighborhood where “Little Shop of Horrors” is set.
For example, there was one time when the director of his first professional show, a production of “Anything Goes” in North Carolina, asked if he could sound more Chinese. “We call it ‘ching chong’ in the Asian acting community — ‘they want you to be ching-chong-y,'” said Ricamora, who is half-Filipino. “It didn’t feel great.”
Even with the production of “The King and I,” which was heavily resourced, he said he was frustrated with what he believed to be a lack of attention to dialects. “I didn’t want to make waves because I wanted this job — I was still in debt, so much debt,” he said. “And #2, I thought the best way to work was to say yes to everything because then they’d tell other people you’re easy to work with.” (The financial pressures were only eased after he started making “TV money,” as he put it, on the show “How to Get Away with Murder,” in which he played computer prodigy Oliver Hampton for six years.)
It was a breath of fresh air for Ricamora to be cast in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s “Soft Power,” a wonderfully sour 2019 meta-musical that looked at the making of myths and the way American culture handles ethnic clichés – including a whole Rodgers and Hammerstein pastiche song about correct Chinese pronunciation.
One day, Tesori asked the largely Asian-American cast what it had cost them to tell such a personal, emotional story on the show. Reliving that moment, Ricamora turned her question on its head, and was once again overcome with the pain and anger the question had unleashed as he remembered that the cast would get the still-rare opportunity to play fully human characters after so much. years of stereotypical roles.
“What does it do [expletive] cost me all my Asian-American brothers and sisters?” he said in a trembling voice. “This is what it costs us: women are constantly being made to play prostitutes and just sexual beings. As Asian-American men, we are constantly asked to completely get rid of our sexuality and be the butt of the joke and treated like third-class citizens.
“When you see Asian Americans on stage in the theater, they overcome so many years of people telling them to put that aside and be a stereotype,” he continued tearfully. “We all ask ourselves, ‘When will we get the chance to fully exist?’ And that’s what ‘Soft Power’ felt like to all of us.”
It had been a long drive up to that point – yet for quite some time Ricamora’s life had focused not on theatre, but on tennis.
“You don’t know how many times in college I wrote in my journal ‘I’m going to win the US Open,'” he said with a laugh. “Wanting to reach Broadway was never a goal of mine, because I didn’t know it existed. I grew up on air force bases in a very toxic male culture, so there was no theater. There was no art at all.”
His military father, who had emigrated from the Philippines, moved with the family until he settled in Florida for an extended period, where young Conrad attended junior high and high school. His mother, who is white, left when he was a baby, and his father remarried when Conrad was 8.
He studied psychology at Queens University of Charlotte, NC, where he attended on a tennis scholarship. And then he had a revelation: In his freshman year, he took theater lessons and was assigned a monologue from Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky,” about a teenager who tries to make contact with his estranged father. “I remember thinking, ‘This is my experience — I just have to stand here and say these words because I know what this person is talking about,'” he said. “The electricity I felt in that moment, that connection between actor, playwright and audience, is something I’ve been looking for ever since.”
After graduating, he started acting in the local community theater and moved on to professional productions. Low point: that “anything goes”.
Highlight: “Shakespeare’s R&J,” in which he played Juliet opposite Evan Jonigkeit’s Romeo in 2008. “For a queer person, it blew my mind away,” Ricamora said of the Philadelphia production. “It felt like the world exploded in front of me. There was so much more that I could access in my work.”
He was nearing graduation in acting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when he saw the casting call for “Here Lies Love” and traveled to New York to audition.
“You could immediately sense that you were in the presence of someone very special and – I hate to use this word – starry sky,” director Alex Timbers said on the phone. “There was a real connection to the role, but also something where you want to be a part of that actor’s career early on because they go to extraordinary places.”
Hwang was also impressed: “He’s kind of a charisma machine.”
And yet the outpouring unleashed by Tesori’s question is terrifying. Yes, Ricamora succeeds three Tony-nominated actors in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but it’s also hard not to be a little frustrated with him: Why did it take so long to land a lead role? Why aren’t actors like Ricamora, Jason Tam (“Be More Chill”) or Telly Leung (“Allegiance”) better known?
“There have never been those roles for Asian romantic protagonists, which more or less didn’t exist,” Hwang said. “Even if you get a part like Lun Tha, which is a little bit along those lines, it’s still not the centerpiece.”
He added: “It’s hard for Asian women in a different way: they tend to be over-sexualized, portrayed as either lotus blossoms or dragon ladies, as we like to say it. So they’re also limited, but in a different set of stereotypes.”
Don’t mind the quality: even the quantity is missing. According to a report by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, only 6.3 percent of all available roles in New York City went to Asian-American actors during the 2018-19 season.
A partial fix is exactly what Ricamora is doing now: putting his stamp on an iconic role as Seymour. He admitted he “did it a bit” after being propelled onto the stage after just two weeks of rehearsal, so for now he’s concentrating on making the part his – “I’ll fill it in more and more as the run goes on.” on,” he said.
For Tammy Blanchard, who has played Seymour’s love interest, Audrey, from the beginning: “Conrad is very deep, very centered. Jeremy was very comical, but you also had such a feeling for him. I think Conrad will be more of what Michael Mayer originally intended with Jonathan Groff – a dark, kind of emotional journey.”
And when that experience ends, Ricamora is ready to tell more stories.
“I’d love to play Tom in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ or Hal in ‘Henry IV, Part One’ — my father problems run deep,” Ricamora said, laughing about his dream parts. “But especially after doing ‘Soft Power,’ I think the roles are still being written by playwrights I haven’t even met, by Asian-American playwrights I haven’t even met.”
The challenge is clear for that latter demographic: The coalition’s report points out that Asian-American playwrights, composers, librettists and lyricists made up just 4.4 percent of all writers produced on New York stages in 2018-19. When a promising run of Asian-American-driven productions finally lined up in 2020, Covid-19 struck.
Ricamora is willing to do his part there, too, albeit for now on television: He and his friends Kelvin Moon Loh and Jeigh Madjus just sold “No Rice,” a half-hour comedy series they write, executive produce, and starring in “The title comes from what people would say on Grindr or Tinder or Match or whatever,” he explained, citing racist shorthand descriptions. “Around 2015-2016 and earlier, it was all over the dating apps — people would freely write ‘no rice’, ‘no spices’, ‘no fats’, ‘no women’.” (He wouldn’t yet reveal where it will air.)
Meanwhile, he’s happy to be back on stage, battling a bloodthirsty plant and singing about loneliness and pain. “I love coming back to the theater so much because you can show up any day,” Ricamora said. “Theatre ground you – eight shows a week is no joke.”