Robert Cuccioli finds the human side of a comic book monster

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF’s ongoing look at how actors create their roles

To understand the challenge of performing in a musical based on a comic book, just look at Robert Cuccioli’s role in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

At first, Cuccioli plays Norman Osborn, a brilliant, neurotic scientist who’s trying to improve the world with his genetic experiments. One of his mutated spiders escapes and bites a dorky teen named Peter Parker, giving the kid the powers that make him Spider-Man, but the spider’s escape also starts a chain of events that leaves Norman desperate and abandoned. In a frenzy, he performs an experiment on himself, which turns him into the villainous Green Goblin.

In other words: Cuccioli plays a human being and a spectacular freak, and as an actor, he has to honor both extremes. He has to craft a performance that contains recognizable humanity, but also acknowledges a comic book’s splashy fun.

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In the drag-heavy Broadway musical Kinky Boots, Stark Sands brings the straight man (ahem) to life

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

“Since the beginning, I’ve known that I’m the straight man in this. I’m the setup guy.”

Stark Sands is describing Charlie Price, his milquetoast-turned-provocateur character in Kinky Boots, which is now in previews at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. And rarely has the term “straight man” been used as aptly.

Charlie, the reluctant inheritor of a dying shoe factory in Northampton, England, comes up with the audience- and costumer-friendly notion of repurposing Price & Sons Shoes to create sturdy boots for drag queens. And as envisioned by composer-lyricist Cyndi Lauper and bookwriter Harvey Fierstein, there is nothing straight about Charlie’s drag queen business partner, Lola (Billy Porter).

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Inside her role in Christopher Durang’s new comedy

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing look at actors and how they create their roles

So how did Maggie Smith end up in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike?

Near the middle of Christopher Durang’s new comedy, now on Broadway at the Golden Theatre, Sonia, the put-upon sister of a famous film actress named Masha, reveals that she can do a perfect impersonation of Dame Maggie. Since Masha (Sigourney Weaver) is used to being the center of attention, she finds this very unsettling, especially since she and Sonia (Kristine Nielsen) are about to go to a costume party where Masha expects to be the star.

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How Keala Settle makes herself guffaw

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

It might be the most memorable moment in Hands on a Hardbody, the new Broadway musical now at the Brooks Atkinson. A group of Texans are standing at an auto dealership with their hands on a pickup truck, and the last one touching it takes it home. After several hours in position, they’ve reached a moment of weary silence… until Norma Valverde, a devout Christian with a warm heart and a Discman full of inspirational music, starts laughing. She’s just chuckling at first, almost to herself, but soon enough, she’s busting loose.

Norma guffaws for a long time, and there’s an electric thrill as her laughter spreads through the theatre. And then she starts singing “Joy of the Lord,” an a cappella gospel song that explains exactly why she’s happy.

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The Tony Award-winner brings a fairy godmother to life

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

The Broadway premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, now at the Broadway Theatre, is certainly family-friendly, but it’s far from childish.

The production’s ambitions are most apparent in the radically revised book by playwright Douglas Carter Beane, which gives Ella (Laura Osnes) a political spirit as she helps Prince Topher (Santino Fontana) realize he must take care of his neediest subjects. Meanwhile, new characters like a quasi-political organizer populate Cinderella’s village, and even the fairy godmother makes her first appearance as a bag lady named Marie. It’s only after Cinderella is kind to her that she reveals herself as a magical force of nature.

For Victoria Clark, a Tony Award-winner for The Light in the Piazza and a recent nominee for Sister Act, playing Marie means coming to terms with magic. “This part is giving me the opportunity to tap into the supernatural part of my life and the supernatural part of this world,” she says. For research, she’s read everything from Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology to Anne Lamott’s reflections on prayer, and she says those large ideas strike at Cinderella ‘s heart.

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