From Hamilton via Netflix’s The Prom to West Side Story movie with Steven Spielberg, Ariana DeBose on her progress as an actress and woman of colour
- DeBose stars in Schmigadoon!, a musical streaming on Apple TV+, as schoolmarm Emma Tate and says of her role ‘It’s so nice to embody someone who isn’t a cliché’
- She talks about working with Spielberg and the racial segregation in casting, something which is changing for the better
In the fourth episode of Schmigadoon!, a musical currently streaming on Apple TV+, Ariana DeBose, playing schoolmarm Emma Tate, delivers the song All of Your Heart and leads a tap number that’s pure delight.
It’s also the latest proof of DeBose’s range. On Broadway, she was part of the original Hamilton ensemble, as the character known as The Bullet; in Netflix’s recent screen version of The Prom, she played Alyssa, the daughter of the Kerry Washington character, venturing gradually and then confidently out of the closet. Later this year, finally, we’ll get a look at director Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story, in which DeBose, 30, takes the role (Anita) played in the 1961 film by Rita Moreno.
Schmigadoon! is an affectionate Into the Woods-style mash-up of various musicals and musical theatre archetypes. DeBose’s character owes a lot to Marian Paroo, the “spinster” librarian in The Music Man. DeBose explains it is important to play an archetype without settling for cliché.
“We knocked it out in a day,” she says of the stand-out All of Your Heart number. “This was filmed during [the Covid-19 pandemic], in Vancouver. It wasn’t like summer stock, exactly, but more like a Broadway workshop. It was a time crunch: we’d show up, hit the step, and make it the best it could be.”
The number is great fun; it’s as if Marian the librarian somehow got onto a national tour of Anything Goes. Also, there’s a full minute in the dance break without a cut, so you can see what DeBose and an enthusiastic gaggle of preteen Canadian-cast boys and girls can deliver.