Going places

Surprise opportunity adds twist to actress's final days at Boston Conservatory

She's learned the song. She's picked the dress. She's prepared her resume. She's caught up on her sleep.

Boston Conservatory student Stephanie Umoh is ready for Senior Showcase, a high-stakes performance by graduating musical-theater majors for casting agents, directors, and producers. There will be two shows in Boston, followed by two in New York.

For a rare time in the always-hectic, often-frenzied life of a student who dreams of a career on Broadway, Umoh has things under control.

The day of the first Showcase performance, however, she was seeing omens everywhere. It was raining. Bad sign. She ran out of granola, her favorite breakfast. Bad sign. Her umbrella snapped while she was doing an errand. Very bad sign.

Deciding a manicure might give her an edge onstage, she walks to a nail salon near the Prudential Center and - bad, bad, bad - it is closed, for no obvious reason. "Is today a holiday?" asks Umoh, 22, disoriented and anxious.

Her spirits lift, though, when she spots an open nail salon nearby. She sifts through the nail polish rack and settles on something sheer but shimmery, turning the bottle over to see the label. It reads: "Rosey Future."

Good sign.

She needs one, given what happened a few days ago. She was on her way home from a shoe-repair shop, the soles of her shoes newly rubberized to make sure she doesn't slip on stage during the all-important performance.

Her cellphone rang, but Umoh didn't recognize the number and, anyway, she was too preoccupied to answer: "I couldn't deal with it," she says.

But later, when she listened to the message she was startled by the voice on the other end. It was a casting agent who had given a workshop at the Conservatory a few weeks earlier and had heard Umoh sing. She was looking to cast performers for "Grease" - on Broadway - and had Umoh in mind for the important part of Rizzo.

"I was like, 'What in the world are you saying?' " Umoh remembers thinking. A Broadway show? Playing Rizzo? Umoh, who is biracial, hadn't imagined herself for the part, which has typically been played by white actors.

Unbelievable sign - except for three things. Umoh had never seen the show. She didn't know the music. And her audition was scheduled for the same May day as the New York Showcase, sandwiched between the two performances with her fellow students.

Bad sign, definitely.

Trying to charm

"If you can make them laugh or cry, that's good," Fran Charnas tells her students. "It's about holding the stage."

Charnas, a musical-theater professor at the Conservatory, co-directs Senior Showcase. It's a fast-paced series of song and dance performances choreographed to run no longer than 70 minutes; every student is required to sing a solo. The goal - almost comically improbable - is to project strong vocal and acting chops, personality, charisma, composure, flair, and rhythm, all in under two minutes.

While she encourages her students to be distinctive, Charnas is careful to downplay what will come out of the event. Some will be signed by an agent or cast in a show. "Some will get agents and no jobs, and some will get into a Broadway show and never get into a second one," she says. "Anything can happen."

For an undergraduate, Umoh has already had a good deal of professional experience. She's been a featured soloist with the Boston Pops and starred in "Ragtime" at the New Repertory Theater and in SpeakEasy Stage Company's "The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin." This spring alone she performed leading roles in two back-to-back Conservatory productions, "The Life" and "Dessa Rose."

But in the days before Showcase, she is taking nothing for granted. "I've done my best to prepare myself for the worst," Umoh says.

Her first ordeal was finding the right song.

Initially, Umoh favored the upbeat "Gotta Move" which had been popularized by Barbra Streisand, but she couldn't find the sheet music for the piano accompaniment. Her teachers suggested a ballad, but Umoh had misgivings. "Ballads are hard to pull off," she says. "They can get boring. You can lose people really quickly."

She considered "Your Daddy's Son," the poignant lament to a dead baby she'd sung in "Ragtime," then nixed it on strategic grounds. "The subject matter was kind of negative. It's a heavy topic when you're trying to charm people." Plus her idol Audra McDonald had performed it on Broadway, and Umoh worried this would work against her.

Finally Showcase musical director Bret Silverman suggested a Whitney Houston song, "Saving All My Love for You," about a woman in love with a married man.

Umoh wasn't so sure about it - it was a ballad - but with her options diminishing she agreed to try it. The song won her over; she loved the fact that there was some drama in the story. "I made a connection to it, acting-wise," she says.

But even a good song couldn't hide her vocal problems. All the performing she'd been doing the last few weeks had taken its toll on her normally robust voice, which was sounding hoarse and husky. "I was getting vocally tired very easily," says Umoh.

She consulted a doctor specializing in voice rehabilitation at Massachusetts General Hospital. She was urged to rest her voice and do exercises to reduce the stress on her inflamed vocal cords.

Next worry: Money. Though she's received scholarships and held a patchwork of jobs the last four years, she still owes $130,000, before interest, for her student loans. And getting ready for Showcase wasn't cheap. There was the trip to New York for $700 promotional head shots. The rubberized soles. The haircut.

And she needed a dress, which had to pass the Charnas test. ("I convene a panel," says Charnas. "It's a big thing.")

Umoh is as particular about what she wears when she's singing as she is about what she sings. "If it doesn't speak to me, I don't want to wear it," she says. But with no money for a new outfit, she contemplated the $30 teal blue American Apparel dress hanging in her closet. Luckily, Charnas signed off on it. (Two days before Showcase, however, Charnas reversed her opinion on the grounds that it was too cheerful for a sad song. Umoh swapped it for another outfit in her closet, a serviceable black skirt and red blouse.)

Almost all that was left on her to-do list was the tedious but critical detail of gluing her resume to the back of her photos so they could be distributed to agents.

Unfortunately, Umoh, whose finest trait is not time management, waited too long to buy the glue she needed and the art supply store ran out, forcing her to take a chance on a different brand. It was around 11 p.m. at an impromptu gluing party with friends four nights before Showcase that she realized, to her horror, that she'd made a huge mistake. The resumes were a disaster, buckling and peeling away from the $700 photos.

Luckily, in a fortuitous deus ex machina intervention, she remembered the can of spray adhesive that one of last year's graduating seniors had bequeathed to her. She was done by 2:45 a.m. with no serious after-effects other than a sleep deficit and a mild case of glue fume intoxication.

Keeping news to herself

She told nobody.

Not nobody, exactly. She shared the news with two of her closest schoolmates, Anich D'Jae and Nic Rowe, with whom she planned to live in New York. But even while rehearsing with her classmates, getting nervous together, Umoh decided to keep the news about "Grease" to herself.

"If I don't get it, everyone will know," was how she explained it. "You start feeling untalented."

Probably she'd have to explain eventually. After all, she was called to audition at 3:45 p.m., right after the 2 p.m. New York show and before the 6 p.m. show.

But there was no time to dwell on it. She got through the Boston showcases, and at 8:30 a.m. on April 30, she boarded a train for New York, where she would perform with her classmates and, separately, audition for a part on Broadway.

She still hadn't learned the song from "Grease." She'd only been sent the music the night before.

She spent most of the trip with her headphones on, humming the lyrics in an intense effort to learn the song. As for "Saving All My Love for You" - the song which took her so long to embrace - she didn't worry about it at all.

A tale of two performances

Everyone seemed to be whispering.

Agents filed in quietly. Parents and grandparents who had made the trip to New York stood against the walls of the Westside Theatre, looking worried.

Meanwhile, Neil Donohoe, the director of the Conservatory's theater division, solemnly distributed to the agents blue folders with the students' photos and resumes, and a response form they were to return after the show.

Backstage, Umoh was talking herself down from an earlier crisis. The night before she'd stayed at a friend's apartment and inexplicably developed respiratory problems so severe she could hardly sleep. Her chest felt tight and she couldn't stop sneezing.

At the theater, someone gave her an antihistamine and her breathing improved; in an hour or so she was back to normal. Oddly, she wasn't nervous anymore. "This is the last time we'd be singing together as a class," she realized, her mood improving as the crisis passed. "I decided just to enjoy being there."

In fact, she seemed exultant during the shows. Her voice - unsteady just a week ago - was strong and assured, and audience members were riveted. Even Umoh, a harsh self-critic, thought her performance went well.

A lot better than the audition for "Grease."

As other students celebrated in the theatre lobby, Umoh had slipped out and bolted to the audition, saying she had to run some errands.

The audition, she reported later, was not stellar. "It was not like a big train wreck," she said, but it didn't help that she'd never sung the song out loud before. Or that her eyes stayed glued to the music. "I didn't know if the notes were right," she said. "It was like, 'Sorry for wasting your time.' "

'So much to do!'

The morning after the two New York showcase performances, the 30 Boston Conservatory seniors met at Fran Charnas's hotel, tantalizingly within sight of Broadway's sparkling marquees, to find out what New York thought of them.

Umoh was more tired than nervous when she was handed an envelope with the results, which were excellent: More agents wanted to meet her than she could possibly have time to meet.

"I have so much to do!" she said jubilantly as she left the hotel with Nic and Anich. "I have to make phone calls. We have to find an apartment."

And she had to see "Grease." The casting agent had called again: She'd gone to the second Showcase, was impressed with Umoh's performance, and wanted her back the next week for another audition.

Learning to wait

The next few days were a blur. Umoh met with "eight or nine" agents interested in representing her. She auditioned for the casting agent of "Grease" again on Monday, the director on Thursday, and the creative team on Friday.

"Everyone was extremely wonderful" to her, she said, and then:

Amazing news.

She was told there were only two people still in the running for the part, and she was one of them.

They contacted her for one more callback the following Tuesday. It was a dance call, to learn a "hand jive" from the show. This time she wasn't alone: There were actors auditioning for other roles, as well as the other Rizzo contender. "It was a room full of blondes, mainly," said Umoh. "Nobody was black."

Dancing is not Umoh's strongest suit, and though she felt she did well enough, she knew the other girl was a better dancer .

She was told the decision had to be approved by the show's creators. A week went by. No word from "Grease."

On May 17, Umoh graduated from the Boston Conservatory, her mother having flown in from Texas, as she had for so many of Stephanie's shows over the four years, along with other family members. Soon after, Umoh zipped back to New York for more meetings and selected a talent agency from among the many that were interested in her. She, Nic, and Anich found a three-bedroom apartment in Harlem - only to have it fall through.

And still no call about "Grease."

Every time her phone rang, Umoh jumped.

She auditioned for a part in a Chicago production of the Elvis musical "All Shook Up," but never heard back.

She began to think about finding a cocktail waitress job to help cover her first month's rent.

She wondered whether - despite more nontraditional casting on Broadway - it was reasonable even to think that a musical like "Grease," set in the 1950s, would ever feature a non-white girl in a major role.

A month after her first "Grease" audition, Umoh said that she was starting to forget about it. "It's dwindling as if it never existed," she said last week.

But when the bad news came - an apologetic message on her cellphone - it still stung.

Moving

Stephanie Umoh and Anich D'Jae moved to New York last weekend, with a one-month sublet in a sketchy part of Brooklyn. (Nic Rowe won't move until the fall.) Cellphone reception is bad and she doesn't have Internet access in the apartment. Umoh has to climb a ladder to get into bed.

This wasn't the way she'd pictured her move.

"I guess it's just that we were both thrown into the real world very abruptly," Umoh said earlier this week. "I've never had such a dramatic shift from comfortable to uncomfortable. And this time I don't have a lot of hands holding mine."

Still, she emphasizes, this was her choice - "I made the decision to hurry up and move to New York" - and she's prepared to live with it. She is getting ready for auditions and looking for a job. She takes comfort in encouraging words from the "Grease" casting agent, who said, "I know something else will happen for you real soon."

Four years ago, when she arrived at the Boston Conservatory from a suburb of Dallas, she could not read music and had never seen a Broadway show. Thanks to her teachers, her friends, and her family, she's experienced all that and more.

She can't begin to guess what lies ahead. And she knows better than to try.

"It's kind of like being on stage," she says. "You have to be in the moment."

Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com.