Broadway star Carrie St. Louis returning home for her own McCallum Theatre show

I wasn’t the only one thinking Carrie St. Louis could be the desert’s next big thing while watching her win the 2004 McCallum Theatre Open Call.

Joanna Fookes, education program manager at the McCallum, heard her sing a song by Kristen Chenoweth, Broadway’s original Glinda in “Wicked,” and thought, “There’s something very special about Carrie.”

Desert Sun critic Jeff Britton proclaimed, “She blew the roof off with the opera-tinged ‘The Girl In 14G.’”

The La Quinta High School student, then 14, seemed ready to follow a long line of talented teens out of the desert and into show biz.

St. Louis had played the title role in “Annie” at the McCallum less than a decade after Alison Lohman, who had just starred in the film, “White Oleander,” at age 23. Carrie had won the Open Call Talent Project a year after Allison Jones, who was being trained by Songwriters Hall of Famer Michael Masser as his next Whitney Houston. She had won the 10 to 15-year-old Open Call category in 2003 by beating Kevin Francis, who had finished third in a national “Star Search” competition.

Carrie’s recent predecessors at La Quinta High included Aubrey O’Day, who would win MTV’s “Making the Band II” with the vocal group Danity Kane; Nora Kirkpatrick, who would win a Grammy with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and act, write and direct for film and television; and Tyler Hilton, who had signed with Madonna’s Maverick Records at age 18 in 2004 before playing Elvis Presley in the film, “Walk the Line,” and appearing opposite Taylor Swift in her video, “Teardrops on My Guitar.”

Even her parents, Dr. Peter St. Louis and artist Robin St. Louis of Palm Desert, thought this performing thing might become real after she won the 2004 Open Call.

“You don’t think she can do this for a living, especially musical theater,” said Robin. “There are just so many talented people. But when she did Open Call, especially the year she won — the third year she did it — we just thought, ‘Wow! Maybe ...’”

Unlike her talented contemporaries, Carrie St. Louis left the desert after her sophomore year to attend the boarding school her father had attended in Massachusetts. That began a somewhat circular path to Broadway. She studied opera on weekends at Boston University. She returned to Southern California as a USC voice major and began working professionally. Eventually, she took over the role Chenoweth had created on Broadway in “Wicked.”

Now, she’s returning to the McCallum a star. She’ll perform a customized cabaret act at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 22 with a Los Angeles band and a student she coaches. Tickets are still available at www.mccallumtheatre.org.

Her return may be emotional. Even after hundreds of shows nationwide and TV appearances with Broadway legends Audra McDonald and Sutton Foster, St. Louis teared up at the suggestion she had “made it” in a recent Zoom interview from New York.

“I don’t know if you ever feel you’ve made it,” said St. Louis, 34. “But this McCallum show really does feel like making it, in some way. I could cry right now, talking about it. For my family, it’s very, very special. I’m very thankful to Mitch (Gershenfeld, McCallum president, CEO and artistic director) for being like, ‘We want this. You’re ready for it.’ I’m very much looking forward to it.”

Her student is Torie Mendoza of the musical theater program, MTU, at Rancho Mirage High School. They’ll sing a song from “Wicked” that will help bring St. Louis’ journey home.

“My parents found a video of me singing the Glinda solo, ‘For Good,’ for the La Quinta High School Choir concert when I was (Mendoza’s) age,” said St. Louis. “So it’s throwing back to that and having someone who’s growing up in the desert singing with me. It will be a fun little moment.”

She’ll perform songs from her New York shows, also including “Rock of Ages,” “Kinky Boots” and off-Broadway’s “Titanique,” and talk about growing up in the desert. Her first local voice teacher, Bill Reynolds, now in his late 90s, is expected to attend. Her “Kinky Boots” co-star, Callum Francis, is flying in to sing with her.

“I’ve written three separate solo shows that I’ve done at 54 Below here in New York and all over the U.S.” she said. “This is a conglomeration of those shows with a huge focus on the desert.”

Desert beginnings

Robin St. Louis remembers her daughter loving to act almost since she could walk. Like Mickey Rooney in “Babes in Arms,” she always wanted to get her friends and put on a show.

“You know how kids have a typical thing they like to play?” said Robin. “When she was little — about from age 5 on — she and her friends would always put on a show, and the moms would come and watch. She was always the director and the star. The other kids would like work the lights, which was like operating the mini-blinds.”

Carrie recalled going to the old Broadway Joy’s ice cream parlor in La Quinta, where Lohman, O’Day, Jones and several Open Call contestants regularly sang showtunes. But the theater bug really hit when Carrie began getting cast in shows such as “Annie,” “The Sound of Music” and “The Wizard of Oz” with the On Stage Theatre Company.

“She and my older son were both involved with that company pretty much from the beginning,” said Robin of the now-folded youth theater troupe. “They started on ‘Oliver’ — Carrie was 7 and Andy was 10 — and did almost all of those shows (over) eight years maybe. They did two shows a year at the McCallum. That was a big extracurricular activity and she loved it.”

Carrie got her start playing Singing Milkmaid No. 2 in “Oliver.”

“I had one solo and I thought if you did the choreography faster than everyone else, you were the best,” she laughed. “So I was on and off that stage! But I was hooked.”

Family legend has it that Carrie was so driven to sing, she knocked on the door of Reynolds’ house at age 7 and asked for vocal lessons. But her mom says there’s more to that story.

“I heard from another mom there was a voice teacher in our neighborhood,” said Robin. “So I called him up and made an appointment. He taught her for several years. She wanted to sing musical theater songs and he made her do classical Italian stuff.”

His bel canto lessons taught Carrie to breathe properly, which separated her from most amateurs.

“He was so instrumental to me learning the voice and how it works because eight shows a week on Broadway is no joke,” Carrie said. “I’ve been in the industry for over a decade, and I’ve been very lucky. But it’s a lot of hard work and discipline. I now have a vocal studio and I translate those same overall techniques to my students.”

St. Louis never went to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival as a kid or young adult. Instead, she focused on opera.

She sang the humorous “Soprano’s Lament” in her second Open Call and felt acceptance. That camaraderie, she said, helped her view each future competition as more fun than cutthroat.

She competed in the Spotlight Awards at the Los Angeles Music Center after winning Open Call and made it to the semi-finals.

“I didn’t win Open Call on the first try and I didn’t win the Spotlight Award,” she said. “In high school (at the Phillip Academy in Massachusetts), I was the lead in my junior year musical and my senior year they didn’t even put me in my senior year show. Every step of the way I’ve had a momentum of, ‘I want to keep growing and keep getting better.’ Nothing was ever really given to me. I think that’s important because it taught me to maintain my sense of a north star and there’s always more work to me done.”

She auditioned to get into a college opera program during her junior year by singing two arias at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She chose the University of Southern California from several college offers and realized, “Oh, maybe this is really something.”

She took a class from Tony Award-winning composer and playwright Jason Robert Brown during her senior year at USC. Brown was working on his next Tony winner, “Bridges of Madison County.” So when Brown told her, “You should be doing this — 100%,” St. Louis said, “OK, I’m going for it.”

Going pro

She entered a contest called L.A.’s Next Great Stage Star, which was judged by agents and casting directors, and again finished second. But being L.A.’s second-best young stage star got her a cabaret show and a music director, and meetings with three agents.

The agent she selected sent her on auditions even before she graduated. She got major parts in a Long Beach musical called “The Fix,” featuring current MTU instructor Alix Korey, and an L.A. musical titled “Justin Love.” Three months after graduation, she auditioned for the Las Vegas production of the jukebox musical, “Rock of Ages.” She got cast as Sherrie Christian, who sings such songs as Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself For Loving You” and White Snake’s “Here I Go Again.” The latter became the title of her cabaret show, which also debuted in 2012.

It all happened so fast, St. Louis was struck with a serious case of imposter syndrome.

“I was like, ‘How am I going to do this?'’ St. Louis recalled. “In college, I’d never done longer than a weekend run of shows. I was so lucky. A lot of young people start out being an understudy or being in the ensemble. I was just like The Lead. So it was a crash course for sure.”

“Rock of Ages” had been playing the 597-seat Helen Hayes Theatre in New York. In Vegas, it moved to a 2,000-seat theater in the Venetian Hotel. So St. Louis worked with the New York team to retrofit it into a 90-minute musical.

“I have replaced in a lot of shows, and you usually get two to three weeks with the dance captain and the associate director,” she said. “Then you’re in the show because it’s already happening. This was different. They were blocking things. We got to find my Sherrie, my version, and that’s just so rare. To have that when I was just starting out taught me a lot about how to work with creative teams — how to trust myself and what worked for me. I really learned the ropes.”

St. Louis did the Vegas show for 18 months. Then she got a call to join the Broadway cast.

“I got my Equity card starring on Broadway,” she said. “Who gets to say that? That’s just everybody’s dream.”

“Rock of Ages” closed on Broadway in 2015, but by then, she had already won the part of Glinda, the “good” witch in the national touring production of “Wicked.”

“I was rehearsing for ‘Wicked’ from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the day and I would do ‘Rock of Ages’ at night on Broadway,” she said, feeling exhaustion. “I finished ‘Rock of Ages’ and the next day joined the tour of ‘Wicked.’ It ended up being five years straight because the ‘Wicked’ tour wound up being ‘Wicked’ (on) Broadway. I missed a lot of weddings.”

For Robin St. Louis, seeing her daughter play Glinda on Broadway was a pinnacle moment. The “Wizard of Oz” re-invention was a bookend to all those years she worked on props for On Stage Theatre, including their production of “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Watching her in ‘Wicked’ on Broadway, coming down in the bubble,” she mused. “Glinda makes her entrance in a bubble from the rafters, singing this very high song. She’s in this big blue ball gown. You think, ‘I can’t believe this is happening!’”

Carrie called the “Wicked” Broadway production “a machine.” But after touring with the show for months, she had gained the confidence to be funny as her own Glinda.

“I wasn’t swallowed whole by just ‘I’ve got to fit into this machine,'” she said. “I never succumbed to that pressure because I knew my Glinda worked in all these different places.”

Carrie has even more exciting times ahead. Last spring, she got to do a table read playing Dolly Parton in a new musical about the beloved country singer. She doesn’t know if she’ll get the part, but she’s already treasuring the experience.

“I got to play Dolly Parton for Dolly Parton,” she said. “Who gets to say that? They’re ironing out what it’s going to look like and you never know with anything in this industry. But just to have the opportunity to sit in a room with Dolly Parton and laugh and cry with her and tell her story, it could not have been lovelier. The songs are incredible. I have no doubt it will be a humongous hit on Broadway.”

And finally, after missing so many friends’ weddings and so many other youthful experiences because of work, St. Louis is getting married. She met a guy in New York who works for a mergers and acquisitions firm — and is also from Southern California. They haven’t settled on a date or a wedding venue, but it will be in the desert.

“It’s the best place,” she said glowingly. “I’m so happy my parents still live in the desert.”

Bruce Fessier is a former Desert Sun editor and reporter. He’ll be inducted into the new Coachella Valley Media Hall of Fame Feb. 28 at a Thunderbird Country Club luncheon. He can be reached at jbfess@gmail.com or Facebook.com/bruce.fessier

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Carrie St. Louis is returning to the Palm Springs area a Broadway star