Conrad Ricamora ’01 took the stage in January as Seymour in a revival of Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Teatre in New York City.
Conrad Ricamora’01 may have starred in one of Broadway’s longest-running shows, but you might say the actor faced more drama just getting ready to take the stage. “It was a crazy few weeks,” he laughs. “I had just
started Little Shop of Horrors and I got COVID right before I started rehearsals. I lost my voice for a week and then I got food poisoning and tore a muscle in my ribcage from being so sick with that. So, I only had two weeks to learn the show before I was in front of an audience.”
Te 43-year-old is used to overcoming obstacles.
He loved dancing and singing as a kid but pushed his artistic sensibilities aside throughout most of his childhood because he grew up on Air Force bases around the country where he says creativity was discouraged.
“If there had been some sort of outlet for artistic
expression, I definitely would have followed that,” he said. “But there was no outlet for that for boys or men in that culture because it was actively discouraged. Instead, I chased sports and joined the tennis team.” He aced that, even earning a tennis and academic scholarship to Queens University of Charlotte. Ricamora had several other offers but chose Queens because the school and the city felt like just the right place for him. It was on the Queens campus that he once again
found his creative passion after randomly signing up for an acting class his junior year while studying psychology and training to be a professional tennis player. “Tere was a connection with the material and with an audience that was electric for me,” he said. “I was only assigned the monologue at first but the electricity just went through me and set me on this journey.” His professor, Jane Hadley, remembers that
Summer 21
Photo by Emilio Madrid
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