She’s known her passion forever: the desire to be center stage, in the heat of the lights, acting and singing her heart out. “I remember being three years old, taking my clothes off and saying, ‘Look, I’m Gypsy Rose Lee.’” While the stages have changed and the costumes have been a bit more complete, the passion of theatre and the drama of drama have stayed right in the heart of Groeschen (Ingersoll).
Angela Groeschen, in the few years that she has called Memphis home, has been actively thrilling the Memphis audiences through her work at Playhouse on the Square and their family of stages. Groeschen came to Memphis from Indianapolis, where she grew up as a child, Ithaca, New York, where she attended college, and New York City, where she waited tables and did the struggling actor’s thing. There was the year back in the Midwest doing more regional theater before she and Michael Ingersoll, boyfriend and now her fiance, were both accepted by Playhouse on the Square to become part of the team. Groeschen spent a year as an intern before becoming a resident member of the company and more than a team player for all-that-is-Memphis-theater. She’s a star.
Glimpse into the process of staging a great Shakespearean tragedy as CST actors Wallace Acton (Richard III), Angela Ingersoll (Lady Anne), and Jennifer Harmon (Queen Margaret) answer probing questions from audience members following performances of Richard III.
Showbiz couples learn to cope when parts keep them apart — and bring them back together again
John Cudia and Kathy Voytko celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary together on a recent Thursday night. Both were in the arms of another person. Such is the life for married actors who are in separate shows. “We both celebrated it the Monday before,” Voytko says. “Sometimes, you have to fudge the actual date.” Voytko is currently playing the role of Clara in Stephen Sondheim’s chamber musical Passion, which finishes its run today at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Cudia is portraying the title character in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera at the Cadillac Palace Theatre.
NPR Station WKNO: Host Kacky Walton interviews Angela Ingersoll on her award-nominated role as Aldonza in Man Of La Mancha, live from the stage of Playhouse on the Square. Topics include Cervantes, compliments, and corsets. 2005
It’s hard to imagine actors with this much talent attributing their success to “perseverance” and “discipline.” But that’s exactly what Michael and Angela Ingersoll say when asked by Metropolis Insider. The husband and wife teamed up with actors Julie Burt and Steve O’Connell in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Metropolis’ opening production of the 2006/2007 season. This was the second time in these roles for the Ingersolls, both having performed in Love/Perfect at Playhouse on the Square in Memphis. But to become such a successful husband – wife team, they had to become a husband and wife.
Six years ago at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, the company manager made the announcement he makes every year to his company of actors, a profession that is particularly known for its- closeness. “Nobody touch each other.” Two weeks later Michael and Angela began dating. After a year together in Cincinnati and three in Memphis at Playhouse on the Square, they married “On a Monday,” says Michael. “Cause it’s the only dark day [known as dark days, theatres are traditionally only closed on Mondays].”
Michael: “One of the people we met in the theatre got ordained, to marry us. And yeah, we got married on a Monday so that we could-”
Angela: “So all our theatre friends could go. Our artistic friends built the set. When all of your friends are entertainers and party throwers, it’s the best wedding ever.”
Angela Groeschen (Ingersoll) doesn’t want to talk. It’s just before 9 on a Monday morning and she’s in the first group about to go onstage. It is the third and last day of the auditions and she’s pacing around the scene shop, oblivious to everyone else. And then, even in the din of performers practicing lines and lyrics, she suddenly stands out. Angela emits this piercing, unearthly yelp that rises and falls in a fashion at odds with this tiny (5-foot),young (26) actress in a vivacious raspberry dress.
What is that racket? Later she explains: “A siren. It’s a good vocal way to go through breaks in your range.” The siren helped her through the pre-audition jitters, which, she said, were enhanced from lack of sleep.
But the main thing, right now, minutes before going on, is to focus. Focus. Make the most of time, of opportunity and get through this. When she was a neophyte, she was acutely aware of everyone else in the warmup room. Urgently competitive actors like to intimidate by showing off great range or ability. It psyched her out then. “Now I just stay in a corner and ignore everybody. Everybody wishes they had a private space. I got up early and took a shower — you go through the scales in the shower.”
She is one busy woman. It’s one thing to say, “theater is your life,” it’s another to live, breathe and eat it 24/7 for three straight years. Playhouse on the Square resident company member, Angela Groeschen (Ingersoll), the star of Playhouse on the Square’s immensely popular The Wizard Of Oz, is arguably the hardest working woman in Memphis today, and has no plans for letting up.
In an effort to talk to her about playing our community’s “special friend,” we had to interrupt her work on publicity for POTS’s upcoming production of Picnic. That’s right, when she’s not onstage or in rehearsal, she spends her time doing publicity for the theater and/or teaching local Memphis children the art of acting. She and her fiance, Michael Ingersoll (another POTS resident company member) just have signed on for another year at Memphis’ only professional resident theater and was more than willing to share her experience of playing that infamous girl with those ruby slippers.
The annual Tony Award for regional theater is big news — for the company that wins it. Elsewhere, however, the prize makes a much more modest splash, since New York is the only city to which the average playgoer ever travels solely to see a play. Might Chicago’s knockout showing at Sunday’s Tony ceremony help to change that unfortunate state of affairs? I hope so, not least because Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which brought home the regional-theater award, is one of America’s liveliest and most consistently satisfying drama companies. I’ve gone there two or three times a season since 2004, and every show I’ve seen was worth the trip.
I didn’t know that Chicago Shakespeare would be receiving a regional-theater Tony when I made plans to see Barbara Gaines’s production of The Comedy of Errors. It’s pure dumb luck that this review is running less than a week after the company was honored for the unfailing excellence of its work — and that the show I came to town to see is a model of its intelligent yet accessible style. “I don’t think Shakespeare set out to teach us anything,” Ms. Gaines, the company’s founder and artistic director, has said. “He just wanted to tell a great story.” If so, then this Comedy of Errors must be what the Bard had in mind, for the only “lesson” it teaches is that loud laughter in large quantities is good for the soul.
EXCERPTS: Host Martha Ellen Maxwell interviews Company Member Angela Ingersoll and Music Director Paul Seiz on their work at Playhouse on the Square. Topics include Beauty & The Beast, Bat Boy, and more.
