LODI, N.J. (AP) - Friday is big for Clifton’s Rachel Zegler.
It’s opening night for “Shrek,” her last musical at Immaculate Conception High School. It’s also her last day as a student in the halls of the Catholic girls school in Lodi.
That’s because Monday is even bigger.
It’s Zegler’s first day as a film actress, playing Maria in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” Filming on the iconic musical remake - a modern “Romeo and Juliet” set to music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Bernstein and a young Stephen Sondheim - is slated for summer.
Zegler will finish her studies online and plans to take part in the June graduation ceremony as the class salutatorian.
Spielberg chose Zegler, a pint-sized powerhouse standing 5 feet 3 inches (in heels), from more than 30,000 who auditioned.
“It’s crazy to go from this environment to whatever that one holds for me,” Zegler said, standing in a corner of a cramped basement costume room beneath the stage, before a recent dress rehearsal. “It’s a drastic difference.”
One in 30,000
Spielberg was adamant about casting Latino and Latina actors in the key roles of Maria, Anita, Bernardo, Chino, and members of The Sharks gang. The Colombian-American Zegler, 17, fit the bill.
“I feel like Maria is somebody I know really well,” she said. “I’m a young Latina growing up in the New York-New Jersey area. She’s someone I hold very near and dear to my heart.”
David Alvarez (“Billy Elliott”) is cast as Maria’s brother, Bernardo. Tony-nominee Ariana DeBose (“Summer: The Donna Summer Musical”) will play Bernardo’s girlfriend, Anita, a role that landed Rita Moreno an Oscar in the 1961 film. Moreno is cast again, in the rewritten, expanded role of the candy store owner in a script by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. Ansel Elgort (“The Fault in Our Stars”) plays Tony.
“This entire process has helped me realize more and more that we’re the same person,” Zegler said of the character she’s about to play for the big screen. “I think we all have a little bit of her inside of our heart: someone that is really hopeful for a future that is equal and beautiful and that one day we’ll find that place for us.”
’3 princesses and a diva’
The actress with the huge voice sums up her high-school career as “three princesses and a diva.”
As a freshman, she was Belle in “Beauty and the Beast”; as a sophomore, Ariel in “The Little Mermaid”; last year, she was the diva Dorothy Brock in “42nd Street.” This weekend, she’s Princess Fiona, a problematic princess with a big secret, in the musical based on a 2001 Dreamworks animated film. All three performances are sold out.
“When I was Belle, I was at the bottom of the high-school food chain,” she said. “I was a freshman theater student. I was the antithesis of popular high-school student, literally hiding in this corner waiting to go onstage because I was so scared. The fact that I grew up here and I can look back and say: ’Look what I did, look what this place did for me’ is really just heartwarming to me.”
Director Greg Liosi said he knew when Zegler was a freshman that her talent would carry her far.
“I always tell her, ’I just gotta make sure the spotlight bulb is working and I gotta point it in your direction,” he said with a smile. “That’s all I gotta do.’”
’I just knew her’
Zegler has history with “West Side Story.”
It was the first musical she saw at Immaculate Conception in 2014, the first time she had seen a live production of the musical.
That production announced that freelance director Liosi was raising the profile of the theater program at the school of 200 girls, where male roles are filled by Bergen Catholic boys (and, this year, one boy from St. Joseph’s Regional). It also convinced Immaculate alum Gina Zegler that her daughter Jacqueline (and later, Rachel) should attend the school.
She played Maria in a 2017 summer production at Englewood’s Bergen PAC, an experience she recalled as less than ideal. Still the role resonated.
“It’s a story I just knew in my heart,” she said. “I knew her character and I knew her the moment I read her lines. I just knew her.”
The story, which urges tolerance and understanding by depicting a lack of it, hits home with the actress, who seems older than her 17 years.
Social-media force
Zegler is a social-media must-follow.
Her Instagram (138,000 followers) and Twitter (65,000 followers) have blown up since she was cast. She now has “people” to handle interview requests. Her YouTube channel has 154,232 subscribers, with nearly 150 videos of Zegler performing.
The comments are mostly positive. But not all.
“I’m a young Latina woman growing up in a primarily white area of town where I live,” she said. “I’ve been called it all. My hate comments on YouTube tell me to go back to where I came from. I was born in Hackensack Hospital. I’ll go back there.
“But this is the world we live in and that’s why this movie is so important to come out again. It’s such an important story for a lot people.”
Fans of the 1961 film are critiquing Spielberg’s choice to touch the musical.
“A lot of people who are saying ’Why do we need a remake?’ aren’t looking at the world around them. And it’s not a remake. It’s our own take.”
A date with an ogre
Before rolling up her sleeves to play Maria for “Steven” - as she and her family have come to call Spielberg - Zegler has a date with an ogre, played by Frank Berrios, of Bloomfield, a Bergen Catholic sophomore.
Berrios said Zegler, who knows about carrying a show, has offered plenty of advice as he tackles the oversized role of an oversized ogre leading a cast of fairytale creatures.
Asked if he’s ready to see his co-star on the big screen, Berrios said: “Are you kidding me? I’ve been ready.”
As for the big adventure she’s about to begin, Zegler, always a theater kid, quotes Belle from “Beauty and the Beast.”
“Freshman year, my line was ’I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.’ I finally found it, so I’m really excited,” she said with a giggle.
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Information from: The Record (Woodland Park, N.J.), http://www.northjersey.com
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