In the midst of preparations for the Virginia Theatre Festival’s production of Cabaret, lead actor Ainsley Seiger missed a few rehearsals to fly to Monaco for the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.
That’s the cost of staging a play led by an actor with a regular role on NBC’s “Law & Order: Organized Crime.” And it’s a price director and choreographer Matthew Steffens is more than willing to pay to direct Seiger, an actor he and Virginia Theatre Festival Artistic Director Jenny Wales have worked with since she was 14 years old.
“We really wanted Ainsley because we know what she brings to the table,” Steffens says. “It not only feels like a performance that is in the late 1920s in Berlin, but also something that could be in Charlottesville on a Friday night down at the mall.”
In Cabaret, American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Keith Rubin) visits Berlin while working on a novel. There, he meets mercurial English nightclub performer Sally Bowles (Seiger), who is both manic and tragic, dominating every scene she is in. Meanwhile, behind the flash of song and dance, the growing specter of Nazism looms.
Steffens calls Sally a “tornado.” Seiger describes her as “unhinged.”
“Even when we did our first read-through at the table … I couldn’t stop moving around in my seat,” Seiger says. “There’s something about her that just begs to move. She wants to be in a different place at any given moment.”
It’s difficult to think of a character more dissimilar to NYPD detective Jet Slootmaekers, the stoic, introverted tech specialist Seiger has played on “Law & Order: Organized Crime” since early 2021.
“That’s been fun to play with, the huge dichotomy between someone who is quite small, someone who is learning how to take up space, like Jet … versus Sally, who I don’t think cares about any of that,” Seiger says. “She walks into the room, and it’s her room now.”
In front of the “Law & Order” cameras, Seiger shares Jet’s emotions with the audience through the minutiae of a pursed lip or a quick downward glance. Those nuances become impossible when she is trying to convey happiness and heartbreak to the last row of the Culbreth Theatre.
For Seiger, a theater kid since middle school, it’s freeing to return to a live performance.
“That was a bit of a learning curve for me, learning to exist within the frame of the camera. You really are bound by where that goes and where it takes you,” Seiger says of her TV work. “There’s a lot more freedom of expression physically on a stage, because you want to take up the entire space.”
Seiger’s theater career began in earnest after her sophomore year in high school, when she arrived at UNC Chapel Hill for a summer theater conservatory. There, Steffens and Wales were holding auditions for Hairspray.
Seiger won the role of Amber Von Tussle and found two mentors.
“They were really the first people to ever take me seriously as a performer and an artist that weren’t my parents,” Seiger says. “They were a very formative part of my development as an artist. As the years have gone on, that creative relationship has just deepened.”
During Seiger’s sophomore year at the UNC School of the Arts, Steffens reached out to her about joining the Virginia Theatre Festival for the 2018 production of A Chorus Line. Seiger describes it as her first “truly professional show.”
“I felt like I learned so much from that, and I’m drawing so much on that experience just being back here,” she says.
In Seiger’s return to the Virginia Theatre Festival stage, Steffens and Wales still see the talent they first spotted a decade ago.
“I can give her a very broad direction, and I know that she’s going to play in the sandbox with me,” Steffens says. “It allows me, as a director, to just direct freely.”
They’re also noticing the new confidence of a professional used to high-pressure television takes that, unlike theater, do not allow for do-overs the next night.
“I’ve been dreaming along with her, for her, for the amount of time that I’ve known her,” Wales says. “And now to have seen her transition into a fully professional career outside of school, and to come back and have a chance to work with her again—not to be cliché, but it’s like a dream come true.”
Seiger is not the only cast member leaving New York for a Cabaret summer in Charlottesville. Steffens (Into the Woods) and music director Justin Ramos (Moulin Rouge) were both recently working on Broadway, as well as cast members Janet Dickinson as Fraulein Schneider (Anastasia and How the Grinch Stole Christmas) and David Mattar Merten as Emcee (Afterglow, an off-Broadway hit.)
“It’s gratifying, because I think that there is something special about Charlottesville, and about the Virginia Theatre Festival,” says Wales. “These are people who want to return to our community.”
