Diana Rogers perched on a steel sofa and followed a book as her budding River Ridge High School play students review their tools for Grease. If they were to be effective actors in a play set 54 years earlier, they would need perspective, a story lesson. She told them about 45 rpm vinyl records, pure pins, Cookie and his brush from 77 Sunset Strip.
“Anybody know who Fabian is?” she asked.
“Is he a one in a intrigue novels?” one lady responded as others scrambled for a answer on brightly colored intelligent phones.
“No, that’s FABIO!” pronounced Rogers, her voice rising above a giggles.
Rogers stopped them often, enlivening interpretation, priesthood comedic timing. She implored them to feel giveaway to insert their possess personalities.
The students hung on each word. She’s been to a towering top. They dream of removing there.
• • •
Rogers seemed some-more expected to turn a patrolman than a Broadway actor.
As a immature teen, she illusory herself dancing and singing on a stage, though as she recalls with immorality bluntness, “I wasn’t really good.” She couldn’t land even a bit partial in a propagandize play until her comparison year, and that came after a array of voice lessons.
She got better, grown a appreciative soprano and enrolled as an uncover vital during a University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. But an strident box of theatre trepidation singular her theatre options.
“I’d chuck adult during a suspicion of behaving in front of people,” she said.
She altered majors to military science, anticipating to follow in a footsteps of her father, a career patrolman in a circuitously suburb. But even with her connections, she said, a leaders of a tiny military dialect disheartened her. “They didn’t wish women as cops,” she said. “That’s all.”
She bagged groceries during a internal supermarket to assistance with college expenses, that is how she met John Rogers, one of a managers. Two years into college, in 1973, she forsaken out and married him. In another dual years, they welcomed a daughter, Heather, and in dual some-more years a son, Ryan.
Diana lifted a children and sang during a village theater, though she still battled theatre fright. “If we got a solo,” she said, “I’d get sick.”
She took a pursuit singing telegrams for Eastern Onion, that helped her conquer a nervousness. She thrived, inventing characters and costumes. “I still have my duck outfit,” she said. “It’s funny, anytime I’d wear it, I’d run into somebody we knew and it would be like, ‘So, Diana, 10 years out of high propagandize and you’re a chicken.’ “
With her kids starting school, she motionless it would be a good time to get some-more training. She enrolled during Northern Kentucky University and graduated during a tip of her class. She returned to a Conservatory of Music, this time on a full scholarship. She acted frequently in internal shows and during a summer in North Carolina. One week, in 1988, a inhabitant furloughed association entertainment Les Miserables came to Cincinnati. Its dance captain, always on a surveillance for deputy talent, set adult a room during a university for auditions.
“I still lacked confidence,” Rogers said. “My friends literally pushed me into a audition.”
She sang dual songs and a dance captain gave her dual giveaway tickets to a show. She surveyed a expel and didn’t see any womanlike characters that stood anywhere tighten to her 6-foot frame. She went home, wrote a appreciate we minute and returned to classes.
Five months later, a writer for a Les Miserables national debate called: “We wish we to come to New York.” Rogers assimilated dozens of determined actors for auditions. She won a partial as Madame Thenardier, flew to Denver to join a debate and began a “cram session” of rehearsals.
She transposed a many shorter actor who wore a distance 7 dress. “I was a distance 10,” she said. “The organisation usually had a day to adjust her dress to fit me. They hold my dress together with reserve pins.”
Rogers toured for dual years, a usually actor in a association with children. Heather and Ryan stayed home with their father and grandmother though assimilated her on a highway whenever possible. “We schooled a sorcery of room service,” she said.
When she left a debate in 1991, she finished work on her master’s class in museum opening and took a pursuit as a play clergyman during Indian Hill High School in an abundant village nearby Cincinnati. She enjoyed a vast bill for productions and suspicion she competence stay during this propagandize for a prolonged time. But a year into a job, she got an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“Diana,” a tourist pronounced from New York City, “can we be here Sunday?”
“Oh my God, yes!”
She would be Madame Thenardier again, though this time on a theatre during a famous Imperial, that non-stop on Broadway in 1923. Rogers would play a shiftless, immorality (but funny) innkeeper over a subsequent dual years. Andrea McArdle, who had gained celebrity starring in a Broadway low-pitched Annie, played Fantine. Robert Cuccioli, who would after turn famous for starring in Jekyll and Hyde, played Javert.
“All a performers were wonderful,” Rogers said. “I felt like a football actor contingency feel when he creates it to a NFL.”
Not that a gig paid all that many deliberation New York prices — $1,400 a week. “Glenn Close was doing Sunset Boulevard for $48,000 a week,” she pronounced with a laugh. “But, hey, we done it to Broadway.”
Rogers lived with a crony in a Manhattan unit 16 feet prolonged and 9 feet wide. “You had to behind into a toilet,” she said.
After dual years, Les Miserables sealed on Broadway and Rogers went home to Ohio. She found tools in furloughed companies, including Louise in Always Patsy Cline. In 1999 her husband’s supermarket closed, and he eliminated to Orlando. Diana taught play during a Millenium Performing Arts School in Sanford dual years, destined girl uncover in Orlando and acted in musicals. Her father supposed a government pursuit with Whole Foods in Tampa and she assimilated a expertise during River Ridge Middle School before holding over a high propagandize play dialect in 2004.
Rogers continued to act in plays during a Straz Center for Performing Arts in Tampa, many recently in Boeing Boeing. She wrote a low-pitched about students cramped to in-school suspension, presented it during a Ruth Eckerd Hall Hoffman Center and entered it in a New York Music Festival. Last summer she wrote another musical, Lessons From a Wayside Campground, geared toward center propagandize students. Currently she is essay a uncover to inspire children in kindergarten by third class to read.
“It seems we have a knack for essay music,” she said. “Who knew?”
With a big-screen chronicle of Les Miserables capturing Oscar nominations — and some churned reviews — those who know Rogers’ Broadway credentials wish to know what she thinks.
“I haven’t seen it yet,” she pronounced final week after travelling an hour from her home in Brooksville, feeding her 5 horses, training 5 classes and rehearsing for Grease. “I theory we should go. I’m kind of busy.”