![]() ![]() ![]() He majored in psychology at Queens University of Charlotte, N.C., which he attended on a tennis scholarship. His mother, who is white, had left when he was an infant, and his father remarried when Conrad was 8. His military dad, who had emigrated from the Philippines, moved the family around until settling for a longer spell in Florida, where young Conrad attended middle and high school. I grew up on Air Force bases in very toxic masculine culture, so there was no theater. “Wanting to get to Broadway was never a goal of mine because I didn’t know it existed. Open’ in my journal in college,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how many times I wrote over and over again ‘I’m going to win the U.S. It had been a long ride up to that moment - yet for quite a while, Ricamora’s life was focused not on theater but on tennis. “We all wonder, ‘When are we going to get a chance to exist fully?’ And ‘Soft Power’ felt like that for all of us.” “When you see Asian Americans standing up onstage in the theater, they’re overcoming so many years of people telling them to push that aside and be a stereotype,” he continued, tearing up. As Asian American men, we’re constantly asked to get rid of our sexuality completely and to be the butt of the joke and to be treated as third-class citizens. “Here’s what it costs us: Women are constantly made to play prostitutes and just sexual beings. “What does it cost me, us all of my Asian American brothers and sisters?” he recounted, his voice shaking. Reliving that moment, Ricamora turned her question on its head, and was once again overcome with the pain and anger the question had unlocked as he thought about the cast getting the still-rare opportunity to play fully human characters after so many years of stereotypical roles. One day, Tesori asked the largely Asian American cast what it had cost them to tell such a personal, emotional story in the show. And then there was his ardent romanticism as the doomed Burmese scholar and lover Lun Tha in the 2015 Lincoln Center production of “The King and I” - oh, those duets with Ashley Park’s Tuptim! This versatility won’t be news to those who have seen him onstage before - yes, Oliver stans, he can sing! There was the way Ricamora would summon a shamanic intensity as the magnetic political leader Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne and Fatboy Slim hit show that opened at the Public Theater in 2013. When he sings “Someone show me a way to get outta here / ’Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outta here” in the opening number, the ache is palpable. 11, Ricamora, 42, has been taking center stage at the Westside Theater, and while he displays serious comic muscle, he also taps into the character’s painful loneliness. “I played a nerdy IT guy for six years on ‘How to Get Away With Murder’ so I don’t know if there’s a full consensus that I’m in the Jake Gyllenhaal Hall of Fame of Hot Actors,” he said. ![]() When asked about joining this, ahem, hot streak, Conrad Ricamora burst out laughing. Not many roles have been played by both Rick Moranis (in the show’s 1986 movie adaptation) and Jake Gyllenhaal (in a 2015 concert production). This reflects the casting evolution of the character, a painfully shy plant geek. Since it opened in October 2019, Michael Mayer’s well-received “Little Shop of Horrors” revival has drawn quite the handsome string of leading men: Jonathan Groff was the first to step into Seymour Krelborn’s Converse sneakers, and he was followed by Gideon Glick and Jeremy Jordan. ![]()
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