Meet the Actors and Characters of A Walk on the Moon

-
By Taylor Steinbeck

In just a few weeks, A.C.T.'s world-premiere musical, A Walk on the Moon, will land on the Geary stage, and with it comes fresh faces, original characters, and new songs for San Francisco audiences to enjoy for the very first time. We caught up with some of the actors in Moon to get to know their characters.

The cast of A.C.T.'s 2018 production of A Walk on the Moon at the first rehearsal. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck.
Brigid O’Brien (Alison Kantrowitz): Alison is a fiery teenager. She's fun to portray because she has a lot of emotions—anger, excitement, passion—I feel like I can relate to her in that way. Also, she’s close to my age, which helps. Sometimes in stories with young people, writers try to dumb them down, but I think our book writer, Pamela Gray, has done an amazing job of creating honest human emotions for this character. Teenage angst is so real!

Jonah Platt (Marty Kantrowitz): Marty is the patriarch of the Kantrowitz family. He’s a hardworking TV repair man who lives for his family. His relationship with Pearl is very complicated. They got pregnant on their first date when they were teenagers and have been together ever since. He had dreams, she had dreams, but everything became about their family. They did what they needed to do.

Katie Brayben (Pearl Kantrowitz): Pearl is a wife and mother who is in the midst of a lot of change. She’s in her early thirties, but she gave birth very young, so her journey is a coming-of-age story at an older age. Pearl has a pretty typical mother-daughter relationship with Alison. Her daughter is a politically aware modern young woman and Pearl can see that, but it’s difficult for them to understand each other because she never had the possibilities that Alison had.

Nick Sacks (Ross), Brigid O'Brien (Alison), Jeffrey Brian Adams (Neil), and Kerry O'Malley (Lillian)
at the first rehearsal of A.C.T.'s 2018 production A Walk on the Moon. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck.
Zak Resnick (Walker Jerome): Walker is a free spirit. I think he’s someone who participates in free love. He is empathetic and caring; he wants what’s best for everyone. Walker is the one person in the story who doesn’t really belong in the world of the play—he’s the outsider. He goes to the bungalow colony to sell blouses and then his whole world is changed in an instant when he meets Pearl.

Kerry O’Malley (Lillian Kantrowitz): Lillian is Marty’s mother, and like Pearl, she was also young when she got married and had her child. Her husband left her, so she hopes that Pearl will make the choice to keep her family together. You can see from Lillian to Pearl to Alison the trajectory of women in America and how their opportunities have changed according to the time they lived in. This is a very female-centered story about a woman finding her own power and making decisions about what she wants to do in her life.

A Walk on the Moon begins at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater June 9. Click here to purchase tickets. Want to learn more about A.C.T.’s production of Moon? Order a copy of Words on Plays, A.C.T.'s in-depth performance guide series.

Popular posts from this blog

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

-
Image
By A.C.T. Publications Staff The opening line of Hamlet ’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet ’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries. Hamlet ’ s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as: To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die, ...
Read more

The American Sound: The Evolution of Jazz

-
Image
By Cecilia Padilla There is nothing so uniquely American as jazz music. In its simplest form, jazz embodies the essence of the American people: bold and inventive. The improvisation of the jazz ensemble can even be seen as a metaphor for the American democratic ideal: musicians playing solos have the liberty to express themselves as long as they adhere to the overall structure of the tune—individual freedom but with responsibility to the group. The evolution of jazz music also carries with it the social development of our nation from slavery to the swinging songs of World War II. Musically, jazz contributed immensely to the way contemporary musicians approach instrumentation, composition, and vocal arrangements. It is difficult to find a popular tune today that does not derive from such jazz icons as Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Jazz is the great equalizer; for more than a hundred years, it has been the common ground between blacks and whites, me...
Read more

A Hell of a Businessman: A Biography of Joe Glaser

-
By Simon Hodgson Born in 1897, Joe Glaser was the son of a successful Russian Jewish physician in Chicago. He originally intended to follow a similar career and entered medical school, but after passing out in the operating room, he realized he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. He started off in business selling used cars, but found better luck managing prizefighters. In his biography of Al Capone, Laurence Bergreen notes, “Glaser’s power to fix fights earned him a reputation as a sage of boxing, especially among reporters.” With advanced word as to which fights were fixed, Glaser could predict the results—and even the number of rounds—of many bouts in Chicago. His connections with organized crime continued in his next career change, when he began running nightclubs and whorehouses in the South Side for the Chicago Outfit, the powerful underworld gang led by Capone. Glaser’s tendency toward illegal action nearly ended his career. In 1928, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for ...
Read more