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Alexis Perry
Alexis and I met working on a show at the New College of San Francisco, 14 Times in 2 Weeks: I played a janitor and a guy in a restaurant, she played a trophy wife and a dancing cockatiel. The play was fairly silly but it was Alexis' first acting gig and she threw herself into it, which was fun to watch. She was a very coy and graceful cockatiel. Often we would walk home together and fell to talking about her dancing and recent move to the city, and when I decided to revive The Exiled I brought her on board to play Natasha, which she did with much youthful vigor and the proper dose of self-righteous bitchiness. On the first day of rehearsal she enchanted us all when she said she was nervous about working with such a professional group of actors. That may be the only time someone has described us that way. Since then she's continued to pop into the theater world, with a prominent role in Margery Fairchild's Hen!!! The Musical! and a handful of brief scenes as Jaquinetta in my production of Love's Labors Lost, for which she also helped create the choreography. Determined to bring a fresh look and feel to the classic, we added three full dance numbers set to pop music, and used them to tell parts of the story that weren't quite there in the text. The role most substantially fleshed out was Alexis', partly because her character needed it the most, and partly because she was our best dancer. The evening culminated in a tango/salsa pastiche between her and Chris Carlone as Armado and what I love about this number is that in addition to being the dance highlight of the night, it was also the comedic zenith, mostly a result of the disparity between Alexis's obvious grace and Carlone's adorable clumsiness, which she put to good use. Perhaps the finest metaphor for love ever staged, Alexis really can be summed up in this three minutes of stage time: a person of exceptional talent who exerted the vast majority of it in making others delightful to watch.
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