Title: Ms. Miz
Publication: Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
Author: Jack ZinK
Date: March 11, 1997
Tonight's arrival of Les Misérables at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts isn't just another whistle stop on the musical's repeated national tours. It's part of a grand setup for galas Wednesday in both Fort Lauderdale and New York to mark the show's 10th American anniversary. The unit at the Broward Center, the only one now on tour in America, is said to be a $4.2 million production that "replicates the Broadway production" of Les Miz. That would be similar to the lavish original road show that premiered in Tampa and Miami Beach in the late '80s. Some companies' production values were pared after that to travel more lightly and fit into smaller houses, though by normal road show standards were big.
The sets and costumes aren't the only things getting spruced up for the celebration. The cast is salted with a number of South Florida performers in featured roles, to enhance local interest. Chief among them is Catherine Hickland, a Fort Lauderdale native, with top-level billing as Fantine. She's the character whose dirges yank the chain on the greatest tear-jerker of all time.
Others are Hialeah's Aymee Garcia, plucked from Miami last summer just as her regional theatre career blossomed, Miami Beach's Ana del Castillo, and Coral Spring's Danielle Rainiere.
When the musical's original London production reached its 10th anniversary in October, 1995, producer Cameron Mackintosh recorded a symphonic concert version at Royal Albert Hall with hundreds of cast members from productions all over the world. The video of that session now rivals the original Three Tenors in Rome tape as PBS stations' fund-raising program of choice.
Mackintosh is now pumping up the American companies in order for them to generate a second box office wind to sail into the next century. But getting there caused a hullabaloo in New York several months ago. He closed the Broadway production for retooling, claiming it had become tired.
Rather than re-rehearse the company and put on a touch-up paint job, a different cast is being brought in, mostly from a recent road company. Wednesday's Broadway performance isn't billed as a reopening either. It's being promoted as "the premiere of a completely new 10th Anniversary Company."
All of this hoopla has Hickland more excited, in some respects, than she was for her Broadway debut as Fantine, back in 1995.
Hickland already was a hot soap opera figure via Loving and it's successor, The City, as Tess Wilder. She began singing lessons with an opera coach to determine whether she might have the chops for a musical career as well.
That's how Richard Jay Alexander, then an executive producer and director for several Mackintosh shows, got to read about her in People magazine. Alexander (who, coincidentally, was buying a home on Miami Beach about that time), was having a string of luck moving TV and pop stars into both Les Miz and Miss Saigon.
He called Hickland's agent and asked to have her try out. Months of tension-filled auditions and many more grueling singing lessons later, she became Broadway's llth Fantine. She also would help train the l2th, another Fort Lauderdale expatriate, Paige O'Hara, whose voice Hickland had admired in the smash movie version of Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
"I am really thrilled; it's an incredible experience," Hickland said recently from her Manhattan apartment, which she shares with husband Michael E. Knight ("Tad Martin" on All My Children).
"Richard Jay gave me my huge break, but I'd never have guessed that we'd be celebrating the 10th anniversary for ourselves.
"I can't even begin to say what it means to me. It means a lot to be able to perform for my family. And it's my hometown roots; I'm incredibly proud of the city and what it's become in the time that I've been gone," Hickland said.
She'd caught the show business itch early from visitors to her parents' home in northeast Fort Lauderdale. But she's never performed professionally here. An active thespian at Fort Lauderdale High School, she left in 1975 and soon after found herself in Hollywood, California.
"There was never anything else I ever wanted to do." she said. "My dad was a dentist and had a lot of interesting patients who would stay at out house. Johnny Weismuller taught me how to swim when I was a little kid."
"Burl Ives was in a movie called The Brass Bottle as a genie, and I always wondered how he got out of the bottle into my living room, where he used to sing his folk songs to us."
When starting out on her own, she paid the rent with a job at an answering service. Home machines and phone mail weren't the rage yet, so she forwarded messages to the other would-be actors whether they'd won or lost jobs.
Commercials led to soap operas (Capitol, Texas) and guest appearances in prime-time series (Eight Is Enough, Airwolf, Vega$).
Hickland's first movie role was as George Segal's mistress (Natalie Wood's rival) in 1980's The Last Married Couple in America.
After Capitol was canceled, she moved to Rome for two years and appeared in several Italian films. After moving back in California, she met and married Knight in 1992. He was between stints on All My Children, and they moved to New York when he returned to the show. A few months later, she landed Loving.
As far as Hickland was concerned at the time, she had everything she wanted in show business and a home life.
"I was in the drama department, the thespians, the music department and did all those musicals in high school," Hickland said "but I never had any formal vocal training until I came to New York.
Then I got turned on by all the musicals I was seeing and got inspired, to say the least. But I didn't know if I had anything. I had good pitch and all that, but not if I could develop into anything that would be worth hearing."
Hickland thinks that Alexander originally considered her for the American wife in Miss Saigon, a good featured role but without the seismic emotional impact of "Fantine" in Les Miz. His opinion changed as her voice lessons started paying off.
Fantine doesn't have much more time onstage than the wife in Miss Saigon, but it's all high-profile. She delivers the show's first big hanky number, "I Dreamed a Dream," which destroys many viewers' composure about 20 minutes after the curtain rises.
Not long after is Fantine's death scene, which melts the last of the hard hearts. Hickland says that delivered the knockout punch to her the first time she saw it: "I just lost it. I was gone for the rest of the show," she said.
Her last hurdle was stage fright.
"That's what kept me from theater for so long, because I couldn't cope with the anxiety. Les Miz was my baptism by fire, and it beat [the fright] out of me. Now I'm just a big stage ham."
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