GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Ericka Hunter of 'Rock of Ages'

We all love a Cinderella story like Savannah Wise’s: plucked from the ensemble to take over the lead role in a hit Broadway musical. When one gypsy is bumped up to a star, another chorus member benefits too—the one who moves into the vacated ensemble slot. In Rock of Ages, where Wise was made the permanent replacement for abruptly departed star Amy Spanger last month, the other promoted gypsy has been Ericka Hunter.

Hunter is now performing Wise’s former ensemble track, which includes the Bourbon Room waitress with solos during “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and the “More Than Words”/“Heaven” medley. She also covers the other two female ensemble tracks in Rock of Ages: This weekend, for instance, she’s playing Katherine Tokarz’s roles as the reporter who interviews Stacee Jaxx (James Carpinello) and the featured “Heaven” dancer. In addition, Hunter has become Wise’s understudy as Sherrie, and she went on in the part twice last weekend—“living out a dream of being a leading lady on Broadway,” she says.

Billed as Ericka Yang in her two previous Broadway shows, 42nd Street and Flower Drum Song, Hunter has taken a circuitous path back to Broadway. Since her last Great White Way appearance, in 2004, she moved to L.A. and back, temporarily ditched theater for the fashion industry, performed alongside such chart-topping artists as Justin Timberlake and Rihanna, changed her stage name and started writing her own songs. And Hunter says that it’s only because of all those experiences, as well as her continued training, that she is suitable for the Rock of Ages cast.

“To be in the show, you really have to sing and you really have to dance and you really have to act,” says Hunter, who began her career as a Rockette, where singing and acting were minimally if at all involved. “I studied with a great [vocal] coach in L.A., Jessica Purse, and I feel she is the reason my voice came to be that I could be in a show like Rock of Ages. She really helped me find my voice [and brought me] to a place where I could be in a vocal booth and be considered a ‘real’ singer—and understudy the lead.”

Before the cast change at Rock of Ages, Hunter performed in the show every night—but not on stage. She was an “offstage voice,” singing backup for most numbers, unseen by the audience. Things kicked into high gear when she took over Wise’s part, which includes scenes as a stripper and a protester.

“Rock of Ages is really challenging, but it’s really rewarding,” Hunter says. “The female ensemble, we sing 23 songs in the show, and the music of the ’80s rock era is difficult. It’s at the top of my range, and at the lowest point of my range. And physically, the choreography that Kelly Devine has given us is so cool—like a video-girl thing—and you love doing the movement, but it’s hard, and you can’t do anything halfway.”

Don’t forget Hunter also has to know four roles: Sherrie and the three ensemble tracks. Plus, there are those revealing Sunset Strip rocker-chick costumes to fit into. “I think I’ve lost about 10 pounds doing this show,” she admits. “I only eat as much as I have to to get through the show: I have to be fueled up, but I have to show my midriff the entire time.”

Hunter made her Broadway debut in the 2002 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. It turned out to be a profound learning experience for her, not just as a performer but as a young woman of Asian descent. “It taught me a lot about my background,” says Hunter, the daughter of a Chinese father and Caucasian mother. “When we started doing Flower Drum Song, our director, Bobby Longbottom, really made us search within to find these characters that immigrated. It was my first time really acting, really understanding what you’re doing there. Every once in a while in rehearsals, we’d just stop and talk about our backgrounds. A lot of my castmates knew a lot more about what their parents had gone through to come to America. I didn’t know as much, so it sparked me to ask my dad questions, to ask my grandmother.

“I didn’t quite understand how much my family had sacrificed to get me where I am today,” Hunter continues. “My father was just 1 year old, and his parents left a very successful business to flee communist China for Hong Kong. They had to start an entirely new life in Hong Kong and basically start from zero, but for them, their freedom made it worthwhile. The sacrifices that my grandparents had to make for my father and his brother to have a proper future were endless. They sent my father and his brother to boarding school in London so they could have an amazing education.” She concludes about Flower Drum Song: “To be around an entirely Asian cast was amazing. And we did a cast album, which was great.”

Hunter is on the Rock of Ages cast album, too, but she wasn’t in last fall’s off-Broadway production; she was still living in southern California at the time. Prior to her two years in L.A., she had bowed out of performing and taken a job as assistant to Joe Zee, who was then a freelance stylist and now is the creative director of Elle magazine. Hunter had met Zee in a hip-hop class at Equinox gym taught by Nick Kenkel (a gypsy-turned-choreographer), and worked with him on styling ads for the Gap and Banana Republic, some Annie Leibovitz cover shoots for Vanity Fair and the cover of Justin Timberlake’s mega-selling album FutureSex/LoveSounds.

She says she’d decided to make a career switch because “I wasn’t sure I wanted to fit these molds anymore of exactly what they needed for these shows—Rockette-y type dancer who sang a little. All the work that I was putting into dancing and singing, I wasn’t sure I was getting as much out of it as I wanted.”

Eventually, though, she felt a pull back toward performing (meeting Timberlake’s backup dancers provided part of that pull). “I feel like the break I took from theater actually made me realize just how much I love it,” says Hunter. “It was one of those things where I needed to leave it to spark my passion for singing and dancing again.” Furthermore, she notes, thanks to her subsequent training and work experience, she’s evolved from a dancer who can sing to “a singer who moves.”

She moved to L.A. in late 2006, and the following year danced on the Grammys and Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards. On the Nickelodeon awards show, she appeared in the opening number, sung by host Timberlake (who remembered her from his album shoot). For the Grammys, she performed to “Hips Don’t Lie,” dressed in a similar gold lamé sarong and bra top as headliner Shakira, who dueted on her hit with Wyclef Jean.

Beginning with her West Coast work, she’s used the last name Hunter (from a maternal great-grandmother) professionally; since she is biracial, she thought it might open more opportunities than the surname Yang. While in L.A., Hunter also did rehearsal sessions with Rihanna. “It was cool to sing with an artist and sing with a band,” Hunter says, “which is kinda what I’m doing now, and eventually what I’d like to be doing down the line.”

Rock of Ages keeps her rubbing elbows with pop-music stars. Many artists whose 1980s hits are represented in the Rock of Ages score—including members of Journey, Twisted Sister, REO Speedwagon, Styx, Foreigner and Poison—have come to see the show, as have current hitmakers like Ryan Cabrera and Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger. Poison frontman Bret Michaels performed with the show’s cast at the Tony Awards.

Hunter’s appearances on nationally televised awards shows are a special treat for her family, who live far away. The Grammy gig with Shakira, says Hunter, “was the first time I stepped on a stage in California and my parents could see me in Ottawa live. Same with the Tonys. It was a surreal experience—they were seeing exactly what I was doing.”

Born in Ottawa, Hunter grew up in the suburb Nepean. Her mother, who’s of Dutch/German/English ancestry, had been raised on a farm outside Ottawa; her Shanghai-born father immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong to attend college. Hunter has never been to her father’s native country, but she did go to Hong Kong twice when she was very little. With their children grown and U.S./China travel easier than it used to be, her parents now return every other year; they’ll be leaving for their next visit at the end of this month.

Hunter, née Yang, attended a public performing-arts high school (that she had to audition for) but got all her dance training at another school, Greta Leeming Studio of Dance. She started dancing at age 3, following in the steps of her sister, Vanessa, who’s four years older. Hunter says her sister was probably the more naturally gifted one but quit dancing in her teens. “She was flexible, she had turnout, she’s taller than me—like a model—and didn’t really have to work for all of that, whereas I felt like I had to work for my flexibility and these things,” Hunter says. “She decided she didn’t want to put in the work required to keep going, but I’m a hard worker. I did a lot of dance competitions growing up, and I thought it was awesome to train to learn something, to better yourself.” Today, Vanessa is the married mother of a 1-year-old and expecting her second child in the fall. Hunter also has a younger brother, Warren Yang, who is a gymnast at Penn State (where he’s about to enter his junior year) and on the Canadian national team.

At age 17, Hunter began making the four-hour trip from her home near Ottawa to Toronto to audition for musical theater. Her first job, which she started just months after graduating from high school, was as a Rockette in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., production of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. “It really taught me a lot of discipline and teamwork,” she says of working on the famous kick line. “You have to be able to understand that there is strength in unity, strength behind making sure you’re in line because the other girls are in line. It taught me a lot that I needed to know before stepping into musical theater. My brain was constantly working when I was on stage because they’re so particular about where you stand, your dimensions and where your body is. Your body awareness is at the highest.”

Right after that holiday season, Hunter joined the Toronto production of The Lion King as a swing. Over the next year, she covered all the female ensemble roles—frequently. Hunter says that during her 13 months in Lion King, she went on seven out of eight performances a week. At age 18, “I was young to be swinging a big show like that,” she says, explaining: “I’m kind of a music nerd, so I took a lot of pride in, when I went on for a certain girl, doing her exact vocal part. The music in Lion King is really intricate. There’s so much about the South African language that you have to learn; then, within the melodies, learning the different harmonies. I really liked doing soprano one day, then second soprano, or alto—whatever they asked me to do.”

Working in Toronto, Hunter was able to see her parents often, and could also spend time with her cousins who live in that city. She stayed there for her next gig: a chorus part in the 2003 TV movie of The Music Man, starring Matthew Broderick and Kristin Chenoweth and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. Throughout the two months of filming in Toronto, Hunter would fly to New York regularly to audition. But she didn’t suffer the angst that can come with frequent auditioning: She was still very young and in it as much to gain experience as nab a role. “I really enjoyed auditioning,” she says. “I liked coming into a room and learning different [choreography]—like, if it was Beauty and the Beast, learning the Silly Girl dance, or coming into Chicago and learning Fosse choreography.”

At the age of 20, Hunter made her Broadway debut in Flower Drum Song. “It was a privilege to be asked to be part of a show, ’cause to hire a Canadian—with lawyers and a lot of extra things that they have to do to get you here—was a big deal. They could have hired an American more easily.”

Immediately following Flower Drum Song’s closing in early 2003, Hunter joined the cast of 42nd Street, by then two years into its revival run. She left 42nd Street after a year and a half to do David Zippel’s new musical Princesses at Goodspeed regional theater in Connecticut. The show, choreographed by Rob Ashford, was planning a Broadway run, and Hunter was hired as a swing for the Broadway production. But first, Princesses took a smaller company—which Hunter wasn’t part of—to Seattle for its tryout. Unfortunately, the show died there and never made it to New York. Hunter got to work with Ashford again this year, when he staged the opening montage of the Tony Awards.

Regionally, Hunter has also been seen in Aida at Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse in 2005. For that, she was reunited professionally with her best friend Alison Paterson, who met Hunter in 42nd Street and is now a New York-based Rockette. Another good friend, Nick Kenkel—whom Hunter first met participating in Broadway Bares—choreographed Aida. (She had the chance to work again with Kenkel recently: Hunter was offered a role in the buzz-generating modern burlesque musical Peepshow, which Kenkel co-choreographed with Jerry Mitchell, but turned down the Las Vegas show to do Rock of Ages.)

Aida would be her last theatrical production for more than two years—until she was living in L.A. post–fashion exile and performed in the ensemble of the November 2007 Reprise! production of Damn Yankees, with Jason Alexander directing an interracial cast including Lilias White, Ken Page, Jackee Harry and Cleavant Derricks.

A year later, Hunter returned to New York. Her first job back was an episode of the Denis Leary cable series Rescue Me, which aired in late June. She portrayed a singing and dancing nurse in a Busby Berkeley-like musical dream sequence involving Steven Pasquale’s comatose character, Sean.

In addition to her stage and screen performances, Hunter has a nascent career as a songwriter. Two of her tunes, “Could Love You” and “Around the World,” have been recorded by up-and-coming artist Ali King, whose debut single “Losing My Mind” features Fabolous. Listen to the Hunter-penned songs at King’s MySpace page here.

Photos of Ericka, below her headshot: in her Rock of Ages costume; with friend and onetime employer Joe Zee in 2005; not a Rock of Love episode, but Ericka and ROA castmate Angel Reed (left) with Bret Michaels; center, in her Broadway debut, Flower Drum Song, with (from left) J. Elaine Marcos, Eric Chan and Lainie Sakakura; during filming of The Music Man, with leading man Matthew Broderick; dressed for Aida in Ogunquit, with her friend and the 2005 production’s choroegrapher, Nick Kenkel. [Rock of Ages photo by Savannah Wise; Flower Drum Song photo by Joan Marcus]