A career in musical theater wasn’t on Angela Birchett’s radar when she was a youth growing up in Detroit.
The daughter of a musician and bandleader, she was on a singing path, studying classical and opera styles. But a role in a mid-’90s production of “Pearly” for Detroit’s Mosaic Youth Theatre proved to be an awakening.
“I was one of the youngest cast members playing one of the oldest characters,” Birchett, 47, says via phone from the Washington, D.C., stage adaptation of “The Notebook,” which kicks off the new Broadway in Detroit season this week at the Fisher Theatre. “I really kinda got my chops kind of digging in the dirt, being the green one who didn’t know anything.
“(Mosaic founder) Rick Sperling pushed me. He said: ‘You’ve got natural instincts. Now we’re gonna add some technique to it.’ That’s really where this all started for me.”
“This” has been an accomplished stage and screen career during which Burchett has appeared in Broadway productions of “Hell’s Kitchen” and “The Color Purple,” and in touring editions of “Hairspray,” “Dreamgirls,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and more, and on episodes of TV’s “Law & Order: SVU,” “The Equalizer,” “Blindspot” and “Kevin Can Wait.” The Renaissance High School graduate, who also worked for Detroit Public Schools, has appeared in “The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel” and “Kirk Franklin: A Gospel Christmas.”
“I’m still learning,” Birchett says. “I’m a forever student. I’ll never know it all — and I want it to stay that way.”
She’s also become adept at playing older characters.
In “The Notebook,” she is the oldest of three iterations of Allie Nelson/Calhoun, while in “Hell’s Kitchen,” Birchett was the matriarch/mentor Miss Liza Jane. And in “Hairspray,” her first major stage production, she was portrayed “Motormouth” Maybelle Stubbs.
“I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I kind of think about that sometimes,” Birchett says of the castings. “It’s been a world where I’m playing roles older than I am. But I feel that what is for me is for me. If everything aligns and it’s the time to do it, I do it and don’t worry about why. We’ll see what happens when I’m actually 60, or actually 70s.”
Detroit native Angela Birchett plays Allie Nelson in “The Notebook,” running Sept. 22 through Oct. 4 at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit. (Photo courtesy of ATG Detroit)
Birchett grew up the oldest of three sisters on Detroit’s northwest side, near the University of Detroit Mercy’s Outer Drive Campus. “When I go home, I always take a walk through the neighborhood,” she says. “Nothing much has changed. Some of the neighbors are still there. I’ve been all over, and it’s still my favorite place in the world.”
Her father, a weekend musician, sang and led bands, while Birchett and her sisters started out singing at Greater Grace Temple, and all went on to careers in music. “As soon as I was tall enough to be seen over the pulpit, they put me on a little box and started me singing,” says Birchett, who later directed the church’s choir. Her father taught her the rudiments of singing and harmony, as well as drums, with Motown and gospel as key influences. When she was 12, Birchett was also the youngest member of the Detroit Symphony Civic Orchestra, playing percussion.
“It’s always been part of my life,” she says. “I’ve always been singing. I tried to do other stuff, sports and all that, and, nah, that’s OK. (Music’s) what I’m here to do.”
Birchett studied vocal performance and education at Kentucky State University, graduating in 2002 and returned to Detroit to teach, helping to establish the choral department at the Paul Robeson Academy and serving as an assistant director in Mosaic’s music department. Nevertheless, moving to New York “really started pulling on me. Every six months or so, friends would call me — ‘Ang, when are you gonna stop teaching? You should be in New York!’” Her break came when an emergency replacement was needed in a production of “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” in 2006.
“They needed a replacement,” she recalls, “so I put myself on tape and got the part. I told my principal, who said: ‘OK, here’s the deal. Finish your report cards, turn ’em into me and get outta here. Don’t tell the other teachers, don’t tell the students — and don’t come back.’
“It was all on the fly. I didn’t have a plan. I drove to New York in 2006 and have been there since. It was kind of destined to be.”
‘A Hefty Challenge’
“The Notebook” was on Birchett’s radar before she began the show this summer. She saw the hit 2004 film adaptation before she read the Nicholas Sparks novel it was based on and became “obsessed, like everybody else” with the romance and its many twists and turns. She attended the musical — with Grammy Award-nominated songs by pop singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson — to watch a friend in the cast, and was impressed. “I was not sure how they were going to pull this off, both as a stage version and a musical, but it was really wonderful,” she remembers.
Playing the older Allie, whose Alzheimer’s disease has confined her to a care home, presented an entirely different kind of challenge than any of Birchett’s other roles.
“I’m used to being in roles where I have a lot of heavy singing,” she explains, “and in this, I really don’t sing at all, very little until the end of the show (“I Know”). So for me, it’s more like a play. Allie is watching this story that, unbeknownst to her, she wrote down before she started losing her memory
“It’s a hefty challenge, but I’m very happy to accept it. I rarely get to sink my teeth into a role of this magnitude, as an actor. I spend a lot of time physically on stage, watching the story happen. It’s a really cool exercise in active listening and being present. Your brain doesn’t get to wander off or zone out.
“And I’m enjoying the vocal break, I’m not gonna lie,” she adds, with a laugh.
Birchett says that serving as an observer in her character’s own story “is like a playground for me as an actor. It’s almost like it’s a new show for me every night. I can literally go into this world with no fear because (Allie) doesn’t know. I may have flubbed a line or said something a little bit off from what the script says, and it’s fine because she literally spends her entire time, up until the end, trying to figure it out.
“She’s not perfect, so as an actor, you don’t have to be perfect. We get to see her figure it out, because everyone around her knows what the story is except her. So each night it’s like I’m learning it for the first time.”
As she winds into her tenure with “The Notebook,” Birchett has other aspirations in the theater, among them taking on Mama Morton in “Chicago” or the lead role in “I’m Every Woman — The Chaka Khan Musical” now in London. Mostly, however, Birchett says: “I want to do some new things. I want to sink my teeth into stories that haven’t been written yet.
“I have some ideas of things — maybe something on a smaller scale, like a one-woman show. But I really like bringing other people’s ideas to life, so hopefully I’ll keep getting opportunities to do that.”
“The Notebook” opens Tuesday, Sept. 22 and runs through Oct. 4 at the Fisher Theatre, 3011 W. Grand Blvd., Detroit. 313-872-1000 or broadwayindetroit.com.