Actor living his dream in musical ‘Newsies’
Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, Pierre Marais dreamed of Hollywood.
His parents were trapeze artists with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and his father eventually become a stunt coordinator for films, including “The Constant Gardener” and the 2009 remake of “The Last House on the Left.” As a kid, Marais earned roles as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s son in “Wake of Death” and as a young Mathayus in “The Scorpion King 2.”
So how did he end up in Houston, playing a singing newsboy in a Disney musical?
“I’d always been a singing kid and a musical kid. But it was never, ‘I want to be on Broadway.’ That kind of classic inspiration, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, that didn’t quite translate to where I was in South Africa. It’s a quintessential American art form,” Marais says.
It was a tale as old as time that finally got him hooked on musicals. Through a friend of his father, Marais was able to sit in an empty theater and watch a full rehearsal of “Beauty and the Beast” during a tour stop in South Africa.
“I think it was a wrap from that point on. I was telling my parents, ‘I want to do this.’ And then they did everything in their power to support it,” Marais says.
He was just out of high school when he moved to New York a decade ago. For several of those years, Marais has been part of “Aladdin” on Broadway. He’s gone on several times in the title role and says it inspired him as a child, “seeing this kid run around and not be the tallest or the smartest or the strongest, but just wanna make it.”
Now to Houston. Disney Theatrical Productions granted Marais a leave from “Aladdin” to take
on the lead role of Jack Kelly in “Newsies,” running through June 2 at Theatre Under The Stars at Hobby Center. The show is based on a 1992 movie musical, starring a teenage Christian Bale, about the newsboys’ strike of 1899, led by young workers in New York who demanded better wages. It ran for more than two years and 1,004 performances on Broadway.
“That feels really easy to connect to, moving to the United States, to New York City specifically, where this is based. There’s a feeling of, ‘How do I make my dreams come true?’ ” Marais says.
The TUTS staging also stars “America’s Got Talent” diva Christina Wells and is directed by Ryan Scarlata, who helmed last year’s fantastic production of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” at Stageworks Houston. Scarlata calls Marais a “director’s dream” and says his performance is “lovable and bewitching.”
Scarlata also looked at some new elements for this production. He’s included political cartoons from the 1890’s, along with images from the real-life newsboys’ strike and equates them to how “young people (today) use various social media platforms to draw attention to injustice, challenge norms and fight for equality.”
Marais draws some of the same parallels. He was born in 1990 in South Africa, the same year Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and says he learned much of his country’s history in real time.
“There’s this real idea that I love about South Africa, about standing up for what’s right and standing up to bullies and standing up for the things that just make plain sense. There’s this really beautiful line in ‘Newsies’ where Jack says, ‘Ain’t no crime in bein’ poor, and not one of us complains if the work we do is hard. All we ask is a square deal.’ They’re fighting for themselves, but they’re fighting to exist in a fair way,” Marais says. “That is in the DNA of South Africa in such a way and in the DNA of Nelson Mandela and everything that he did.”