Plenty of actresses with good lungs and great legs have played Velma Kelly, the publicity-hungry killer in “Chicago,” now the longest- running revival in Broadway history. But Amra-Faye Wright, who has been in and out of the New York cast since 2006, will be the first to do the part in English on Broadway and then in Japanese overseas.
Between high kicks and all those versions of “All That Jazz,” she has been learning Velma’s lines and lyrics in a language she didn’t know at all until a few months ago. She headed to Japan recently to begin rehearsals for the part in a production that will play in Tokyo and Hyogo.
Ms. Wright, 49, who grew up in East London and South Africa, speaks English and Afrikaans, and a bit of Xhosa and Zulu, two African languages. During a career that has taken her around the world, she has sung in Italian, French and Korean.
“I didn’t think learning Japanese would be as much of a task as everyone else around me, who said, ‘Are you nuts?’ ” she said. Tall and thin (of course) with spiky platinum blond hair, she chatted in her dressing room at the Ambassador Theater, where her latest Broadway run ended recently.
Ms. Wright turned out not to be so nuts. Starting in January, she picked up the language rather quickly with the help of a Japanese tutor and an iPod, on which she listened to the lines in Japanese. First she learned the part phonetically; then she began to work on sentence structure and vocabulary. Ultimately it became difficult to do both at once, given the tight timetable necessary for her Japanese opening, Ms. Wright said.
“I am now learning the language,” she said, “but I am afraid if someone started speaking Japanese to me in the street, I will be a little bit lost.”
Ms. Wright has played Velma off and on for nine years, including in the West End of London and in Johannesburg. She visited Japan 18 years ago and immediately agreed when her agent told her late last year that the Japanese producers wanted to borrow her.
Like many Broadway musicals, “Chicago” has become popular in Japan. Sometimes it has been done in English, and sometimes in Japanese with an all-Japanese cast, said Ronnie Lee, the executive producer of Kyodo Tokyo Inc., the largest presenter of entertainment in Japan. Using a Velma from Broadway was a way to “put a new spin on it,” and bring in new audiences, Mr. Lee said.
When Ms. Wright began her Japanese studies, she had the iPod recording close at hand. “I listened to it every day, two hours a day, religiously,” she said. Now she faces weeks of rehearsal with the Japanese cast before the show opens on June 4. “Of course, I think the audience is going to be very sympathetic,” she said.
By FELICIA R. LEE
