Why Ann Harada Is Excited About Her Crappy New Job
Performers
Songwriters
The Avenue Q star has a great sense of humor about her role in Emojiland: The Musical
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While Margherita, Lamon and Emojiland cocreator Laura Schein, who plays Smize, previously appeared in the show at the 2018 New York Musical Festival, Harada is new to the project. Dressed from head to toe in brown, she gets a single song, a rousing number titled, appropriately, “Pile of Poo.” Full of puns about excrement and featuring a backup chorus crooning, “Poo! Poo! Poo!,” it’s about getting back up when life knocks you down.
After more than three decades in showbusiness, Harada, 55, understands that sentiment. “You just have to keep going no matter what,” she says. “As a performer, I have had to go out and perform many, many times when I was personally very distraught. You just have to keep showing up.”
Harada’s professional acting aspirations started when she was 15 and a student at the Punahou School in Hawaii, where Barack Obama was a schoolmate. (“He was on the basketball team and I was in the drama club and, unlike High School Musical, those two groups do not ever overlap in real life.”) While playing Lucy in the school’s production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, she recalls, “I totally forgot all my lyrics during my song! But I just made them up and kept going because I did not know what else to do. At the end of it I thought, well, maybe I can do this.”
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“Cinderella was the most fun I ever had in my life,” Harada says. “We worked on it for a really long time before we got produced, so we all got to be really good friends.” As usual, Harada got a showstopper: the Act II opener “Stepsister’s Lament.” “Charlotte was delusional absolutely,” Harada says with a laugh. “But she was more comic than nasty.”
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“This is why representation is so important,” she adds, a sly reference to the industry’s diversity concerns. “We keep saying that, but it is true: All groups just want to see themselves represented, and I think that is lovely.”
But who wants to see—or play—poo?
“It made me laugh,” she says of the Emojiland script. She also admired many of her costars. Harada has no qualms about playing her part. “In this show, Poo is a truth teller,” she says. “Ultimately, she is not disrespected because of who she is.” Besides, “it’s good not to take myself too seriously. It’s impossible to be too pretentious when you have to explain to people that you’re playing a pile of poo.”
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Jonathan Mandell is a drama critic and journalist based in New York. Visit his blog at NewYorkTheater.me or follow him on Twitter at @NewYorkTheater. Follow TDF at @TDFNYC.
Top image: Ann Harada. Photo by Marc Franklin.
JONATHAN MANDELL