NEW YORK (AP) — As a younger girl, Maleah Joi Moon used to affix the crowds outdoors Broadway stage doorways to cheer the celebrities and perhaps get an autograph. Now she’s the one that individuals line as much as meet.
“It all feels like a very vivid dream, if that makes sense,” says the New Jersey-born theater star. “If I could give anybody the advice that I needed then: Just trust your heart and just go do it.”
Moon has had fairly a 2024 — successful a finest actress Tony Award, going to the Met Gala, showing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Today” present, and main her musical at a wet Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Moon will add to her trophies this month — being named one among The Related Press’ Breakthrough Entertainers of 2024.
She calls it “the most vibrant and and dynamic year I think I’ve ever had in my entire life.” The whirlwind occasions after her Tony win “were all such wonderful sprinkles on an already really good cupcake.”
“Hell’s Kitchen” makes use of Alicia Keys songs to inform the semi-autobiographical story of 17-year-old Ali’s coming of age in Nineteen Nineties New York Metropolis. It has a few of Keys’ best-known hits, like “Fallin’,” “No One” and “Girl on Fire,” in addition to a number of new songs, together with the terrific “Kaleidoscope.”
“Alicia was very kind and very giving and very generous about how much of my own individuality I was able to channel into Ali,” says Moon.
“The show’s just about love, to put it as simply as possible — the love story between a girl and her first love, the love story between a girl and her community, and, of course, to bring it all home, the love story between a mother and a daughter,” she provides.
Ali’s mom is performed by Tony nominee Shoshana Bean, whom Moon recollects asking for her autograph when she was a highschool scholar watching Bean in “Waitress.” Now they’re colleagues: “It’s really insane. There’s no words for it,” says Moon.
“Hell’s Kitchen” stays a scorching ticket and critics have been impressed, with The New York Occasions labeling Moon “sensational” and the AP calling her “a jaw-dropping vocalist who is funny, giggly, passionate and strident, a star turn.”
For the Tony win, Moon, then 21, beat out stage veterans Kelli O’Hara in “Days of Wine and Roses,” Maryann Plunkett in “The Notebook,” Eden Espinosa from “Lempicka” and Gayle Rankin from “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club.”
Moon grew up not too removed from the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood — in Franklin Township, New Jersey — with a burning ambition to be on stage and blessed with loads of encouragement. She received the function of Dorothy for a faculty manufacturing of “The Wizard of Oz” at age 10 and auditioned for “The Lion King” and “Six” on Broadway. “I kind of just caught the bug,” she says.
A couple of irritating years adopted, ending when she went by the grueling audition course of to earn the lead in “Hell’s Kitchen” off-Broadway three years in the past, her first skilled function.
“I did lose sight, honestly, of what made me sparkle or what made me feel like I sparkled. But this process has been such a gift in the way that it has brought me back to what made me want to do theater to begin with,” she says.
What’s subsequent is anybody’s guess. Moon says she’d like to do movie, TV and extra theater: “This process has kind of showed me just how much I can connect with people through art.”
“I want to continue to see where my heart leads me,” she says. “I think that’s what got me here in the first place. And I hope that it carries me far in the future.”
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For extra on AP’s 2024 class of Breakthrough Entertainers, go to: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-breakthrough-entertainers
