By: Michelle Solomon
an excerpt:
"maz: How did you end up partnering with the Arsht Center?
Natalie: We originally went to the Arsht Center to see about using the Carnival Studio Theater to put onInto the Woods last summer. JJ and I are originally from Miami and we wanted to bring New York talent and Miami talent together back here back home. As we talked to the Arsht Center about what our mission statement was and discussed what our goals were, the conversation eventually led to us being invited into the Theatre Up Close season.
maz: Did you stage Into the Woods because of the film just coming out?
JJ: I haven't seen the movie. Hopefully I'll see it after we close, but no the movie wasn't in our minds at all. We have been working on this for over a year and a half. After we had found the slot we realized that the movie was happening. It wasn't about anything in our strategy.
maz: Why this show? What attracts you to it?
JJ: When we talked about Dreamcatcher, our mission statement was that we wanted to find stories worth telling and to tell them. It's very simple – we want to be an artist driven company. We have a deep belief that as artists there are stories that we choose to tell and how we choose to tell them really matters and that can have an important impact on people's lives. This story has had a big effect on Natalie's artist journey and mine. It's our favorite musical. It's also Natalie's first musical – she was The Baker's Wife when she was 14.
Natalie: I went to high school at Gulliver Prep and it was my first show. It definitely was when the theater bug bit.
JJ: I remember seeing it when I was little and I said, "Can theater be that? Is that an option?" When we had to think about our first show, it was a no-brainer. This show gets across exactly what our mission statement is.
Natalie: Over the past year, we've been on a tremendous learning curve with the show. We're both professional actors and working actors. But we've really been learning what it takes to put on a piece of theater and it seems wild to have our journey mirrored in a show itself. JJ and I will have conversations after something will happen and it feels like a parallel journey of the show."