Tony winner Sutton Foster to sing in the new year in S.F.
Sutton Foster thinks of her concerts as time capsules — “little windows into who I am right now, 2019 heading into 2020,” she says. Before the end of the year, the twotime Tony Award winner plans to open one of those windows on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco.
Foster’s brassy voice has always been her calling card, and she plans to showcase it during a onenight special performance at ACT’s Geary Theater. It’s a voice she began developing as a child. “I remember making up operatic arias in my bathtub and carrying around a red cassette recorder and singing into it,” she says. “I had no idea I could sing or had pitch.”
She could sing, though, and that voice catapulted Foster into her first role as a child actor in a community production of “Annie.” She was so bitten by the performing bug that she left high school at 17 to become a professional dancer, joining the chorus of the national touring production of “Will Rogers’ Follies” directed by Tommy Tune.
Eventually, she moved to New York, where at 21 she landed the role of Sandy in the Broadway revival of “Grease,” which she played for three weeks.
“My brother, Hunter Foster, was an original cast member of the show — he originated Roger in the revival — and he was still in the show when I came into the company,” she says. “My very first curtain call on a Broadway stage I was standing next to my brother and we were holding hands. I’ll never forget it.”
Foster ground her way through an apprenticeship of chorus and ensemble parts until her 2002 breakthrough in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” She landed the role in a very musical theater way — promoted to lead from under