Stephanie J. Block is Broadway theatre royalty, her most recent role on The Great White Way saw her pick up the Best Actress in a Musical Tony Award for The Cher Show, but Stephanie tells us that performing in concerts gives her most joy. As the latest guest in The Seth Concert series, Stephanie J. Block took us through her life and career from working at Disneyland to taking on the role of Elphaba.
Before playing a host of Princesses at Disneyland in California, Stephanie J. Block did the talent show rounds, telling us how the winner was decided by an ‘applause-o-meter’ operated by an assistant back stage. Her first Broadway role was playing Liza Minnelli opposite Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz, but prior to that she had workshopped Wicked and eventually she would take on the role of Elphaba in the first National Tour.
As always Seth, based in New York while Stephanie was in Cape Cod, delves in to the best backstage stories, and we were treated to a number of fascinating insights from Wicked in particular, and while we were still on that high, Stephanie gave us one of the best performances of ‘The Wizard & I’ that I’ve ever heard.
Stephanie J. Block has had an incredible career, and during the concert she relived great moments from Broadway productions past, including ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, ‘I’m Breaking Down’ from Falsettos, and ‘Woman’ from The Pirate Queen, a role that she confesses was tough to play.
A wonderfully romantic story about how her husband, Sebastian Arcelus, proposed set up a fantastic performance of ‘Unexpected Song’ from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song & Dance. Throughout the concert it was Stephanie’s incredible ability to take on new and different characters which shone through, something that was particularly noticeable in the two songs from The Cher Show that came towards the end of the set.
It was a true joy to hear Stephanie J. Block turn back time on the career that she has worked so hard to build and, through her close friendship with Seth Rudetsky, to hear some of the stories that accompanied those big Broadway roles. The only downside to these concerts is that you can’t hear any audience applause, but if we could have, the applause-o-meter would have been exploding off the scale.
Upcoming concerts in The Seth Concert Series include Rachel Bay Jones, Sierra Boggess, Karen Olivo and Jeremy Jordan.Â
