Micaela Diamond Is Finding Serenity in the Spotlight
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There was a moment in her high school production of South Pacific when Micaela Diamond felt that she just might have what it takes to be a professional actress. “I remember looking, and [my co-star] was singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ and I can feel myself within this character, loving being loved, and I could communicate all that to the audience. I felt like I could make words jump off the page.”
She continues, “Even now, in this moment, I don’t know if I want to try and explain it, because there’s a magic there.”
Diamond is now delivering that particular brand of magic eight times a week at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, co-starring in the musical revival of Parade alongside Ben Platt. In it, she plays Lucille Frank, the wife of Platt’s Leo, a Jewish man accused of murder of a young factory worker in 1913 in Atlanta, Georgia. Her performance charts Lucille’s evolution from wistful accessory to the outsider Leo as he is jailed for the crime he didn’t commit to an empowered, forceful influence helping navigate him towards a potential release.
That evolution is brilliantly, and beautifully, rendered in the music, which serves as her lodestar. “Jason Robert Brown has written this beautiful score for Lucille and, I've never talked to him about this, but I love that I get to have this beautiful arc in the show,” she says. “And I really feel like the emotional arc really matches my vocal arc.”
“Not to get too in the weeds about it, but I start in a kind of light, airy soprano and then slowly have a mix-y moment before Act One with ‘You Don’t Know This Man,’ she explains. “And then I get to have like, the mix-y belt moment for ‘Do It Alone’. And then the all-belt moment for ‘All The Wasted Time’ So he's actually written it to be like warmed up into. And that is such a gift as an actor because I can kind of be where I am. I just try and trust the script and the music. And once I'm on the train I know that it will lead me exactly where I'm meant to be.”
Beyond the music, Lucille is a juicy, complex role—a woman, a Southerner, and a Jew, forced to grapple with those warring identities and how they overlap in a time when all three were at odds. “I love the tension Lucille feels with her Judaism,” Diamond says. “I grew up in a conservative temple and, slowly, throughout my life have moved further away from the religious aspects of Judaism more toward it in a cultural way. That's true for a few of us in the show. There's so many beautiful juxtapositions for Jewish cast members in the in the piece—we all say the kaddish before going on stage every night but none of us go to temple. I understand Lucille’s desire to assimilate in a way that feels safe. I think a lot of Jews, at the turn of the century, were using their white privilege to adhere to a kind of safety.”
She adds, “What I love about Parade is it's not really a ‘who’s done it’ or a murder mystery. It’s a fact-finding mission. It's really a channeling of racist vitriol, and a community looking to find this candidate who will best fit the scapegoat.”
The piece feels just as vital today as it did during its first run, in 1998, and not all for positive reasons. This is, sadly, best demonstrated by neo-Nazi protests that took place outside the show during previews. “Lucille and I have both had to come to terms with our Jewishness,” Diamond says. “I grew up with a lot of acceptance and then suddenly there are neo-Nazis outside our theater and my face is on all these big billboards. And I realized … I am Jewish. It doesn’t matter if I go to a temple or say the kaddish or not, I am Jewish, and that’s been a beautiful lesson in playing Lucille.”
Despite being just 23 years old this is Diamond’s second Broadway outing, having sandwiched the COVID-induced theater shutdown with The Cher Show in which she embodied the mononymous icon’s early years. “She really has all these different versions of her life that are all true to her,” she says. “Rick Elice, the book writer of our show, would record these sessions where she would tell them about her life. Then we would get in rehearsal, and she'd be like, ‘That never happened.’ I think you become so famous that you forget the truth of certain moments in your life. And we all do this, to a certain extent; we all make up a narrative of what happened with that person or with your family member or whatever. And that is our version and that does not mean it's necessarily true or false. That was crazy to learn at 19 because it gives you a lot of grit, it gives a lot of grace to people and to yourself.”
Diamond remembers that Cher even called the cast for last minute changes on the afternoon of the show’s opening. “It was just one of those moments where you're like … Gosh, nothing changes. Like, Broadway is just high school … we're just, like, trying to be adults,” she says with a smile. “But I did love that moment. Because then we all stood in a circle before opening and she was like, ‘Thank you, guys,’ from behind her big glasses and hat that she never takes off. And I think she really meant it. I think she knows she's … unique. And, you know, we were like, ‘You're welcome. We're like giving this to you.”
If the two Broadway credits at the tender age of 23 don’t already make you feel like a slouch, consider this: instead of moping about or doing Instagram Live concerts during COVID lockdowns, Diamond, instead, found another love—cooking—and got to working training herself in its craft. It was, in part, inspired by Cher and the many lives she’s lived. “When the pandemic hit, I was like, ‘Well, if I can tell myself the version that I want, let's make my life the most it can be.’ So, I went to culinary school, because I've always loved food, and I love cooking and I was scared of food in some ways—what patriarchy puts on women and men—and I wanted to get rid of those fears. My thing has always been, if I'm scared of something then I need to, like, get under it. And so, I just wanted to eat it and understand what bread and pasta was … and to love it.”
“It was life changing,” she says. “I have so much joy surrounding food in my life.” While it’s taken a momentary pause, Diamond was, for a time, hosting a monthly supper club, where she’d cook dinner for a group of friends, which taught her that food, much like theater, is a means of building community. “My life's joy is cooking for people and eating with people and going out to eat with people and so, to be honest, I just feel like I've formed such a joy outside of theater. And, now, no matter what happens I will always have that, which is what every actor dreams of having, and I was able to find it because of this pause. So I’m very grateful for the pandemic.” (She loves to make dishes that center around braised meats, which, she says, is “very Jewish” of her.).
And despite now having worked on this show for some time, including its concert iteration at New York City Center, parts of Lucille remain a mystery to Diamond. Specifically the fact that she remained in the South after her husband’s tragic murder. “It is the one thing that I have … I've thought about for hours,” she says. “I just have never understood why she didn't just stay in Brooklyn after burying him. There are pictures of her on the steps in Brooklyn with his family just like heaved over, like fainted. And then to go back….”
“I think that is what is so brilliant about that opening number and starting at the Civil War,” she says. “The show is about the losers—you know, the South lost. And this is how they dealt with it.”
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