BWW INTERVIEWS: Every Little Step: Natascia Diaz

Every little step an actress takes can lead her to a Broadway musical. Or a regional theater. Or a cabaret. Or a Fringe show.

As the 12^th annual New York Fringe Festival kicks off, Natascia Diaz is getting ready to star in Two on the Aisle, Three in a Van, a new comedy by Mary Lynn Dobson. It’s only the latest step in a tumultuous year-and-a-half: Last year, she starred in Kiss of the Spider Woman at Signature Theater in Washington, D.C., and earned a Helen Hayes award for her performance in MetroStage’s production of Rooms. She has also performed several cabarets of Michael Pemberton’s songs at Signature Theater’s music series at in New York City.

But what’s earning her recognition on the street these days is the documentary film Every Little Step, which follows the casting of the recent Broadway revival of A Chorus Line. A year after the revival closed, the documentary has opened the drama of auditioning up to the masses, giving them an insight into a part of the theatrical world they might otherwise never see.

The movie is “one of the most unparalleled dynamics that I’ve ever experienced,” Diaz says, and muses on such a private part of theatrical life becoming so public. “It was just amazing, because not only is there nothing like this that showcases and really lets people in to the Broadway world the way it really is now, but auditioning is like being born or dying—you do it alone. Nobody shares that with you. And here we have this testament to my and everyone else’s process with this.”

The pressure at the auditions, she says, was “pretty astronomical,” and she took casting director Jay Binder’s advice to heart: “The way to get a job is to go in there and give an opening night performance. And God only knows—I woke up that morning, and I had lost ten pounds that they’d asked me to lose, I’d worked on my turns…I did everything they asked, and I went in there and I left it all on that stage.” By the time she left the theater, she remembers, she was thinking, “I don’t have any better than that. You got the very best of me.” She calls the final documentary “one of the most beautiful and special things that I’ll ever have; the fact that I can share it with, not only the theatrical community, but with people who don’t even know theatre and who don’t even know Broadway and who don’t even know A Chorus Line? Then my work will be forever linked with A Chorus Line in this way, in this poetic way, is just an unspeakable honor and a thrill for me.”

Having cameras and a film crew at an audition is not a typical part of the process, and the Observer Effect 
applies to theater as much as science: The act of watching something changes it. “I think initially a lot of people were really quite annoyed [by the cameras]” Diaz says. However, she quickly adds, “you can tell from the way it’s shot and from the scenes that nobody was really paying them any mind. At all. I mean, we were not posing in those work sessions, they were work...So we were not there to look pretty or impress or act like anything, we were just, like, ‘Okay, give us the information we need to get this job.’”

In recent years, Diaz has made a name for herself in D.C.’s theater scene, starring in Kiss of the Spider Woman at Signature Theater and earning a Helen Hayes Award for her performance in Rooms. In fact, the award was shared with Chita Rivera for her performance in Signature’s The Visit, and perhaps somewhat prophetically, in an interview she gave while performing in Spider Woman, she had said that if it weren’t for Chita Rivera, she wouldn’t have a career. Winning the award, she says, was “a lovely gift, and that was amazing, and to win it with Chita was amazing. I was shocked. I was shocked and thrilled… I mean, I wept, I just absolutely wept. I’m so used to not getting it or almost getting it or getting cast in it and having to leave the show before New York—I mean how many times has that happened to me? And the fact that here was this community going, ‘You know, we appreciate your work, we value it,’ was just really, really—well, it’s what we all wait to hear.”

The award has encouraged Diaz to broaden her horizons and try for new roles. “I want to run the gamut,” she says. “There are still parts I’m dying to play—I really want to do Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie, I would love to play Sally in Cabaret one day, and I know those will happen.” The award also encouraged her to look beyond New York for opportunities to play her dream roles. “There’s so much fertile soil in places, Signature Theatre being an obvious one,” she says. “It’s just a very loving community there, for me, really fantastic. It’s been very very cool and welcoming and energizing. The scene in D.C. is really exciting.”

Ultimately, she believes, the award and the documentary’s success have “deepened my faith in my possibilities, in the possibilities there are for me, and what life has to show you and your maturation as an artist calls to you. It’s a difficult time, and I think more than ever it’s important to stay true to principles of theatre that are pure, that come from a reverence and understanding of what makes theatre work. Keep it you. Keep it real.”