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What piece of art changed your life? How did it affect you?
I guess it's too cliché to say Rent, so I won't. What I will say is when Les Miserables came to Baltimore, I saw it at the Mechanic. I was probably around 12... I had never been moved to tears by anything before in my life. I never understood how it worked. We used to watch West Side Story all the time, and my mom would cry EVERY time - even though she not only knew what was going to happen, but also knew that it was make-believe. It always confused me. Until I saw Les Miz. Now, I didn't know what was going to happen, but I'd been going to plays all my life, and was already taking acting classes and had done a few plays myself. I knew it was all make pretend, and had so much fun doing it... I even knew what it was to rehearse and put on a play. But what happened to me in that theatre had never happened before. I had never been...overwhelmed in that way by anything. And that's when I first understood the power of theatre. That's when I knew I wanted to do it for the rest of my life. Sure, I doubted myself plenty of times after that and even tried to do other, more stable things with my life and keep theatre as a hobby, but it kept pulling me back in :-) But that moment was when it first happened. When I first fell hopelessly and irreversibly in love with the theatre.
A graduate of Baltimore School for the Arts, Tracie Thoms starred in the Broadway and film versions of Rent. She appears at Germano's Cabaret on January 2nd.
