This article is from the November 2010 issue of KC Stage
Olivia Marsh can’t remember how young she was when she started putting on shows with her sister in the living room, and unfortunately, records of the transformative era are lost. Memories of the period can be pried from Marsh’s steel-trap mind, however. She recalls the seemingly innocuous gift of a “sound” book, with buttons along one side to enhance the story with aural cues, and how it changed her life—and ultimately, those of the theatre-going community’s. “My mother got us one for Christmas that was all Christmas carols, and so my sister and I worked out this plan that we’d put on this little Christmas pageant in my family’s parlor,” she recollects. “We brought our parents in and made them sit down, and we hid behind the Christmas tree—which was wedged up against the wall, so I don’t know why we thought that was a good idea—and we had to take turns. One of us would stand behind the tree and push the button while the other one went out and sang. I sang a song that had two verses, so Kaitlin had to push the button twice so I could get through the whole song, and then we’d switch.” The sisters’ variety act even had state-of-the-art tech for their early show-stopping performances. “We put the Christmas tree lights on different settings for our little songs.” She laughs at the memory. “We were really cool.”
At the tender age of nine, however, came the character that forever put her name on the lips of the nation. “That’s the first full-on performance where I had to learn lines,” she says of her pivotal role as the caterpillar in James and the Giant Peach. “It was awesome. I totally wore so much make-up. All the girls who played the bugs, we were like, ‘Oh, it’s a show! We have to put on make-up!’ We had all this crazy, weird blue eye shadow with no mascara, and all this bright lipstick, and I just thought I was so hot in my caterpillar-costume potato sack with little felt arms sticking out of it. It was form-fitting, and very flattering,” she recalls with a smile.
The following year, though, brought tragedy to her fledgling career. Directors are a vindictive lot, and frequently refuse to take former triumphs into account as they cast their current projects. Like so many young actors immersed in the glow of past stage victories, Marsh was an unfortunate casualty in this cruel game, and experienced her sophomore slump when she was cast in a role obviously beneath her considerable capabilities: Babe the Blue Ox. “I was kind of mad, because I was the caterpillar the year before, then I had to be some blue bull,” she says, still stinging from the pettiness of it all.
It could have spelled disaster for this fifth-grader. But Marsh bounced back, with her parents’ support. They had wisely enrolled her in summer theatre camp in their hometown of Topeka, where young Marsh spent every summer. In high school, it was the Bath House Players, where she participated in a full production each year. After graduating, she returned to mold the next generation of theatre minds. “It was a lot of fun to play with the little kids and see them understand plays and a storyline, and see them dancing and laughing and playing pretend and enjoying it, because that’s what we do. I still think it’s fun.”
In high school, her thoughts turned to the weighty issue of what to do with her life. “I thought for a really long time that I was going to be an engineer,” says the stunning and intelligent brunette. Many of her decisions were made with her beloved identical twin, Kaitlin, in mind. “My sister and I, until we were 19, had never been separated for more than a couple of days, so we made similar decisions. We were always involved in the same kinds of things. My sister did theatre with me all through high school. When we were looking at colleges, that was the point when I realized that when I applied, I needed to know what my major was going to be, and I realized, ‘I don’t really want to be an engineer. What I really like doing the most is theatre, so I’m going to go to school for that.’”
Her sister had her heart set on going to Kansas State University in Manhattan. “They seemed really nice, like they had a good department, and that’s where my sister wanted to go, which was the most important thing to me,” Marsh bravely recollects. “So I thought, ‘If I don’t like it, I can always transfer later, if it’s not what I need.’”
But misfortune struck again. “Kaitlin transferred to another school after our first semester, so that was really scary for me,” Marsh says, blinking back tears at the painful memory. “But I ended up really, really liking the theatre department there. It’s small, but you get a really good education there. I learned a lot, and since it’s small, it’s like a little family, and it was a lot of fun. Then I never wanted to leave.”
“I did a lot of musicals in college,” Marsh states, fearlessly facing the possible repercussions of such a claim. Her freshman year, she boldly took on an ensemble role in the enormously controversial yet imminently hummable Pippin. “Our director was really cool. She made us make up little characters, and we all had to pick a name to put in the program. I picked ‘Heiress,’ for some reason, and my roommate picked ‘Sprinkles.’” Marsh also ventured outside of the relative safety that campus theatre life afforded. “One of our directors was doing Doubt at the community theatre, and I auditioned for him, so I got to do some straight plays too, because I was usually cast in something comedic or musical [in college].”
Then, in 2008, Marsh made a spectacular leap, and traveled the unforgiving landscape to Kansas City to audition for a production of Reefer Madness. “It scared the crap out of me,” she confesses, as professional auditions were still alien to her at the time. “We had talked about it [in college], we had classes about it, and set up fake scenarios and things like that, but it’s totally different in real life,” she says. “I was petrified of driving on the highway, and driving in Kansas City, because I didn’t know my way around. I was scared out of my mind. So my parents brought me, and I came and did my audition, and then they took me home.” Of the monumental audition itself, she admits, “I felt very awkward. I had my audition on a day that they didn’t have an accompanist, so they had you bring your own track. I didn’t have any software to cut a track or anything, so I got a karaoke track for my song, without any back-up vocals.” When her “cutting” of the song had ended, “I said, ‘That’s all!’ The track just kept playing, because I didn’t know how to cut it. ‘That’s all I have!’” Ultimately, however, she was cast in the show, and Kansas City has never stopped talking about her poignant performance as “Ensemble.”
“But,” Marsh is quick to add, “That is actually not the worst audition I have ever had.” She tells the harrowing story of her audition for a company in Kansas, which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent. Okay, it was Music Theatre of Wichita. “I was super-nervous for that. I don’t know why,” she says mysteriously, almost as if she knows the ending to this story. “I prepared my pieces, but I was paranoid that I was going to forget some words or something, and there was a dance audition, and dance auditions always make me nervous. I don’t know why. I’ve had training, but it still makes me scared.” Difficulty finding the audition location meant that Marsh showed up just minutes before the dance portion was to begin. The complex combination was taught, and then it was announced that they would be auditioning in groups of three. It was Marsh’s first experience with a stage measured out in numbered positions, and so she was understandably confused by the infuriating instruction to ‘stand on five.’ “I walk out there, and I’m looking, because I knew that there were numbers on the floor, but I had never seen a stage with numbers on the floor before. Ever. And so I’m walking around, and I’m looking, and I’m looking, and I’m starting to panic, and everyone else is in their spot, and they say, ‘Sweetie, what’s wrong?’” Panicked, she cried, “I can’t find five!” Their reply, says Marsh: “‘It’s right there, between four and six, honey.’ I was like, ‘Oh… God…’” Swallowing her pride, she returned an hour later for the singing portion of the audition. “I go in to sing, and I ask, ‘Where would you like me to stand?’ And they say, ‘You can stand wherever you want.’ I said, ‘Well, would you like me to stand on five? Because I know where it is now.’” At present, she can laugh about it, the years of skill occluding the sting of humiliation. “That was not my finest hour. I didn’t get called back. They were probably like, ‘Let’s not call back the girl who doesn’t know where five is.’” In her own profoundly inspiring way, she has spun this event—what would have caused a lesser person to run back to engineering as a living—into a stirring example of lemons-to-lemonade.
“Now I go into auditions and think, ‘It can’t be as bad as Music Theatre of Wichita.’ Because I thought I was going to die. It was so embarrassing.”
The conversation suddenly takes a darker tone, completely veiled by her casual exterior, and you’d think that emotion would cloud Marsh’s striking features, but it doesn’t. She valiantly sallies forth, and quietly acknowledges an inner truth. “Something I discovered about myself in college, and afterward, is that I’m kind of a late bloomer,” she states with a self-awareness that defies her age. “But I’m okay with that. I feel like there are a lot of people, especially in theatre, that are really good at jumping on opportunities, and really putting themselves out there, and I would really consider myself to be kind of a shy person,” she intimates. “So I have to be comfortable, and then go, because sometimes when I push myself, everything just falls apart, and then I can’t find ‘five.’ I just get so nervous that I get in my own way…. It’s better if I figure out how to do it myself, than if I let someone push me into doing it. So I’m a late bloomer.”
Her teeming throngs of adoring fans would never know it, though, by her immaculate post-college career, which has included a deranged drug fiend in Reefer Madness, a sex-driven dingbat in Lingerie Shop, and an overly-ambitious lisper in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Her current roles, in Egads Theatre’s production of Evil Dead, The Musical, are those of a “Dear Penthouse, you’ll never believe this” sexpot and a clothes-rippingly attractive scientist. “Our cast is really talented, just full of energy and committed to making it a lot of fun,” she says graciously. “Everybody has really great ideas, and really great contributions. The stuff that people come up with, night to night, is so funny. The blood effects are awesome,” she gushes. The production was not without its backstage hitches, though, as Marsh struggled with her vast number of perilous quick-changes in rehearsals. “It’s kind of embarrassing, because for tech, we had to stop three times because I had to yell from backstage, ‘Naked!’ because I couldn’t get my costume changed.” Strangely, no one working backstage on the show came forward to declare this a setback.
When asked to narrow down her astronomical strengths as an actor, Marsh ponders. “I think I have a good sense of humor, and I think that helps, because humor helps even in dramatic pieces. It provides a lot of variety. I would like to think that I’m a very specific actor, and a very honest actor. Especially since humor is so important to me, I feel like the best humor is honest humor, that comes out of something truthful.”
This ridiculous article notwithstanding.
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