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Canwest News Service
On stage
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Where: Vancouver Playhouse, Hamilton at Dunsmuir streets
When: Until Dec. 27
Tickets: $38-$69 at vancouverplayhouse.com or 604-873-3311
Elena Juatco switched university majors from biology to drama in first year and hasn't stopped working since. But there's a bit of science to her latest role in the clockwork comic plot of the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
"There's mathematics to it," says Juatco, a one-time Canadian Idol finalist who co-stars as the ingenue Christine Colgate in the musical about two Riviera conmen and their mark.
The stage musical is an adaptation of the 1988 movie comedy starring Michael Caine, Steve Martin and Glenne Headly, about two rival conmen who team up to bilk an heiress. The musical replicates the story's multiple levels of subterfuge — with the two grifters not knowing how much they can trust each other and the heiress turning out to be smarter than they thought — and that's where the dramatic calculations come in for Juatco, co-stars Andrew Wheeler and Josh Epstein, and director Max Reimer.
"That's what we've been working on in rehearsals — who knows what when, who sees that happen, who thinks this when actually it's that," Juatco says. "Because the audience, if there's one second where they're — Oh, how does he know that? — then you're completely out of the show. It has to be so clear where everybody is in this complex web of lies."
Just into her early 20s, Juatco is already a seasoned performer on Toronto stages but is making her hometown debut with this Vancouver Playhouse production. More mathematics for the Vancouver-born Juatco, as great numbers of extended family and friends are set to pack the theatre.
"Cousins, aunts, uncles — I've been out east for so long and it's hard to explain to my little cousins, oh this is what I do," she says. "My mom wants to come a lot of times, people who haven't seen me since high school are coming."
The self-described shy kid was an anonymous member of the school choir more than a decade ago when she mustered the courage to enter a karaoke contest at Meadow Ridge middle school.
"I just kind of came out of my shell," Juatco recalls. "Getting the balls to get up and sing in front of my school. I was obsessed with Alanis Morissette, and so I sang 'Ironic.' Something came over me — I wore a big sweater, and in the music video she's wearing a big sweater. I started swinging my sweater sleeves around, singing Alanis. I loved it so much and I wanted to do it again."
She worked her way up to musical theatre leads in high school at Crofton House, but when she headed to Queens University, she hedged her bets and took biology. In 2004, the summer after first year, Juatco joined the line-up of hopefuls auditioning for the first Canadian Idol TV competition.
"It was pure curiosity," she recalls. "I knew I was high-school good, so I thought, let's see how far I go."
She ended up in the top six after a summer of performing, and switched majors to drama when she went back to Queens for second year.
"After Idol I felt I could go through anything because I'd never been so nervous," she says. By third year, she was ducking out of classes early to catch the train from Kingston to Toronto for a lead role as Snow White in the big Elgin Theatre Christmas pantomime. The role earned her a Dora award nomination.
Other roles followed; a Toronto production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the lead role in Miss Saigon, and as Gabriella in the Canadian debut stage production in Halifax of High School Musical.
gschaefer@theprovince.com
