Here's my story on UCF grad Michelle Knight, who's appearing in the national tour of Jersey Boys when it comes to Orlando next week:
Behind every Jersey Boy, there’s a Jersey Girl.
The quartet of young men who play the Four Seasons in the long-running Broadway hit Jersey Boys may be the stars of the show. But each of them plays only one character. Michelle Knight plays 15 or 16.
In the course of Jersey Boys, Knight — an Orlando native coming home with the musical’s national tour — plays Frankie Valli’s girlfriend, his wife and his daughter.
She and the other two women in the show also play nurses, waitresses, dancing girls and French rappers. They change their costumes in 30 seconds, more than a dozen times a show.
“There’s really not a lot of rest time,” she says.
Maybe that’s to be expected. After all, it’s the boys who are the central focus in Jersey Boys, the rags-to-riches story of how four young men from gritty urban New Jersey formed a rock ‘n’ roll band and how hitting the big time turned their lives upside down. For audience members expecting just a jukebox musical, Jersey Boys is something more.
“It’s like a rock show with a great story,” says Knight, who has played a Jersey Girl for nearly two years, in Chicago, Las Vegas and on Broadway. “It’s sort of like the tabloids of today — the rise of this amazing group and the disasters that come along the way. You can’t walk out without singing it.”
And she likens the boys themselves to The Sopranos – Lite.
“They are gentlemen, they’re bad boys. They’re everything rolled into one. When they’re onstage, the moves are refined, and the harmonies are perfect.”
Knight didn’t envision herself in Jersey — or on Broadway — when she started out at UCF with the idea of a career in opera.
But opera “just wasn’t my style. I met a boy in the theater department and followed him over there. The boy didn’t stick, but the career did. UCF was the best thing I ever did.”
After college she moved on to other stages. At Seaside Music Theater she was Belle in Beauty and the Beast, twice; she also played the sensual maid Petra twice in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, for Seaside and for Orlando Shakespeare Theater.
Lester Malizia, longtime artistic director at Seaside, hired Knight several times.
“She has the looks of a perfect ingenue, but she has the ability to do much more than people have seen her do,” he says. “I think she’s really amazing.”
At the same time, Knight was working at Disney, playing “every princess except for Pocahontas,” singing in the Voices of Liberty, performing in Finding Nemo and the Hoop-Dee-Doo Revue. A chance encounter between a UCF professor and a casting agent led to her playing bad-girl Rizzo in a national tour of Grease; a role at Mad Cow Theatre led to her being cast in a national tour of Annie.
Knight liked touring but found it hard on relationships back home. But she made good friends, and she learned about hard work.
Which came in handy when she won the role of “universal swing” for Jersey Boys — the person who can step into any of the female roles in any of the four U.S. productions. There’s a lot to remember: Each production has the women play different combinations of the female roles, Knight says; in Las Vegas, the show is half an hour shorter.
It’s all she can do to make sure she’s speaking with the right accent at the right time — much less that she’s wearing the correct costume and the appropriate wig.
A couple of weeks ago, in Las Vegas, the usual swing was out and another actress was ill. Knight and the one remaining actress had to do the show as a “two-girl version” — “the fastest show I ever did.”
Knight asked the show’s management if she could perform with the tour in Orlando, at Carr Performing Arts Centre, where she saw her first Broadway tour.
“It was my dream to be there before Bob Carr goes away,” she says.
Having performed in every one of Jersey Boys’ companies, she feels “accomplished and relieved.” But the feeling that anything can happen hasn’t gone away.
“It still feels like being shot out of a cannon,” Knight says, “except in 4-inch heels.”
Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.
Check it out
What: ‘Jersey Boys’
Where: Carr Performing Arts Centre, 401 W. Livingston St., Orlando.
When: 8 p.m. May 6, 8, 12-15, 19, 20 and 22, 2 and 8 p.m. May 7, 9, 16, 21 and 23, 1 and 6:30 p.m. May 10 and 17, 1 p.m. May 24.
Cost: $27-$150.
Call: 407-849-2577.
Online: BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com.
What else: Read a review of the show by noon Saturday at OrlandoSentinel.com/Attention.
Photos: Top, Michelle Knight, Alayna Gallo and Lyndsey Cole singing "My Boyfriend's Back." Middle: Steve Gouveia, Joseph Leo Bwarie, Josh Franklin and Matt Bailey as the Four Seasons, in the recording studio, in the national tour of Jersey Boys. Bottom: Michelle Knight as Mary Delgado. All photos by Joan Marcus.