"I did a play at the Western Stage when I was eleven - and then I was hooked. I wanted to be an actress." The speaker is Lauren Creager, and the show that launched her career was Rodgers and Hart's BABES IN ARMS in 1990. As we talked, Linda Smith phoned to remind the vivacious 22-year-old that she was to begin rehearsals the next night for her latest role - Salvation Army girl, Sarah Brown, in Pacific Repertory Theatre's forthcoming GUYS AND DOLLS. The assignment puts Lauren in a lead line-up of daunting local stars like John Newkirk, MaryAnn Schaupp/Rousseau and Michael Jacobs. But she comes to the job with a lot of applause still ringing in her ears from her work as Tevye's middle daughter, Hodel, in the Western Stage's highly praised FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.

Reg Huston as Tevye & Lauren Creager as Hodel in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
The Western Stage

Still at middle school level (but home schooled), Lauren moved out of the Western Stage ensemble into small but important acting (and sometimes flying!) parts in PETER PAN and STAGE DOOR. In Monterey she won the key support role of Lily in ANNIE first try in her freshman year at Santa Catalina School. By now she had already begun voice and dance studies with local teachers, and it was at Catalina that she formed a close mutual admiration link with her school dance teacher, Susan Cable, who is choreographing the February GUYS AND DOLLS in Carmel.

Lauren as Lady Larkin in ONCE UPON A MATTRESS PCPA Theaterfest

Still a freshman, Lauren returned to Salinas for the ingenue lead in BYE BYE BIRDIE; then as a sophmore she played the ditzy and tender-hearted Audrey in Catalina's LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. She insists that the title is a pretty apt description of what she went through as singer, dancer and actress in the rehearsal period of the show. "It was terrible. I was scared - I got laryngitis - lost my voice on dress rehearsal day - and what happened when it opened is nothing short of a miracle." The miracle climaxed when the Catalina student body voted that Lauren's work as Audrey merited the school's coveted annual Charlotte Perry award for the best female lead in 1996. Other roles in school included Sabina in Thornton Wilder's SKIN OF OUR TEETH ("I didn't have the slightest idea what it was all about, but neither did Sabina so it seemed to work all right."), then the challenge of playing the male (Dick Powell) role in the all-female Catalina production of 42ND STREET. "Early on at the Western Stage and then at Catalina, I did it all by instinct," Lauren says, "because I didn't know there was anything more to acting than that."

The "more," she explains, is intelligence. And that she was to learn in her first two college years, spent in the demanding dawn-to-midnight discipline of the Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts in Santa Maria. After a full morning of course work in theatre history, set design, costume and other drama theory, PCPA students work with established Equity lead actors in PCPA Theaterfest shows in Santa Maria and Solvang. Again, Lauren moved up out of valuable ensemble, chorus and tech work to take on major acting/singing roles like Princess Tuptin in THE KING AND I and Lady Larkin in ONCE UPON A MATTRESS. But asked for her most taxing and satisfying assignment with the Theaterfest company Lauren immediately and surprisingly responds, "ensemble for TOMMY. The choreography of that show is really tough: dancers are on the stage the whole evening - and getting all those cues and all that movement right brought the greatest sense of achievement I think I've ever felt... I did a lot of dancing at Santa Maria because PCPA didn't have a lot of good dancers at the time - and, well, I seem to be pretty good at it." (Just ask Susan Cable who steered Lauren to auditions for both FIDDLER and GUYS AND DOLLS.) "What I learned at PCPA was that you can't go on doing theatre on instinct - you have to apply intelligence - to researching the history of your character and their times, to the analysis of play scripts, to orchestrating a performance so that you start from square one and learn to make intelligent choices which, combined with your gut instinct, produce knowledge and understanding of a character and the ability to present an audience with the character's place in the play."

Armed with learning gained from the toughest work regimen of her young life, Lauren was then invited by a PCPA Theaterfest colleague to take part in an experimental play called THE COLLECTIVE AVITAR at Stark Raving Theatre in Portland, Oregon. The contrast with Pacific Conservatory at Santa Maria could not have been more stark. "PCPA taught us that theatre isn't just unrestricted creativity; it's a business and carries the responsibility of organizing and disciplining the artistic efforts of everybody involved...The theatre in Portland just let us get on with things by ourselves - create and print our own posters, organize our own publicity, do everything but sell tickets. They were scared to death when they found out that we were beginning rehearsals with a lot of improvisation and not a completed script. They cut our salaries down to practically nothing, so half the actors in the company dropped out. We did it anyway - somehow! I thought I was miscast - but (another miracle!) the show as a whole and everybody in it including me got rave reviews. And that scared theatre management also got back all its money."

TOMMY may have provided the biggest challenge, but as Lauren reveals, "the role I've longed to play ever since I saw the movie was Hodel in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. The whole experience of that show at the Western Stage was wonderful. The cast was the most united I've ever worked with, and the director, Jon Selover, was just as sympathetic and supportive as he'd been when I was a scared freshman doing Kim in 'BYE 'BYE BIRDIE...Of course even with FIDDLER I went through my standard routine. I always reach a point in rehearsals where I decide the whole production is a major mistake and that I stink. This time it didn't happen 'til a week or so before the opening...But as we finished tech, it all came together and - well, the reviews were great."

Lauren's "standard rehearsal routine" proves she has a gift for worry as well as for song, dance and acting. So she is "big-time excited" about winning the Sarah Brown role in GUYS AND DOLLS - but has already drawn up her check list of possible catastrophes. "I'm having to balance the show against my paying job (selling cosmetics at Macy's)...catching up on my university applications...picking up the needed units at Hartnell - and wondering when that antique Toyota I'll be driving to Carmel for rehearsals will die its final death... but then..."

But then, from Lauren, judging from the story thus far, there will be plenty of instinct, a lot of intelligence and the requisite number of miracles.