BANKING ON HER TALENT
She shuns finance for Broadway, stars in ‘Bad Cinderella’
Linedy Genao was just about ready to give up musical theater.
The powerful-voiced performer had managed a remarkable rise from a staid banking career before the pandemic, parlaying an open call into an originating Broadway role in “On Your Feet!” and then landing a swing spot on a national tour of “Dear Evan Hansen.”
But when COVID struck and Broadway closed, Genao shifted back to a remote banking job. After she spent 11 months as an independent contractor, her boss at Interaudi Bank was pushing her to commit permanently.
“I was like, you know what? I’m married. I have a family now. I think it’s time,” Genao recalled thinking to herself. “I’ve always said, I’m going to ride this wave until I can’t anymore.”
Two days before a deadline she had set to make a final decision between the security of banking and her Broadway dreams, she received the call.
“Dear Evan Hansen” was reopening on Broadway. She had an offer to join on.
She left banking behind. “Dear Evan Hansen” returned in December 2021, as the theater hummed back from its pandemic pause.
“Just when you think you have your life figured out, you don’t,” Genao, 31, told the Daily News. “And the universe sends you a huge sign.”
Fifteen months later, Genao, of Long Beach, L.I., is making another major move, starring at the Imperial Theatre in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-awaited “Bad Cinderella,” a take on a classic character that casts her as a brash rebel.
Genao has been playing Bad Cinderella since previews began a month ago; opening night falls March 23. Genao, who is Dominican American, is making history along the way.
She is the first Latina to play Cinderella on Broadway, and the only Latina to originate a leading role in a musical from Lloyd Webber, the powerhouse British composer behind “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Cats” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
Not bad for a Brooklyn-born kid who was late to dive into musical theater in high school and studied business administration at the University of Connecticut after facing rejection from top theater schools.
Her regional UConn campus did not offer any theater classes or opportunities, Genao said. “I’m still processing every bit
this experience every day,” of she said. “Because if I sit down and take it all in at once, it’s very overwhelming.”
Genao, the daughter of an educator, lived in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, until she moved around age 10 to Hamden, Conn., north of New Haven.
When she tried theater her sophomore year at Hamden High School, she was “raw” and “didn’t understand how to move on stage,” recalled Eric Nyquist, the school’s former theater teacher.
But her talent dazzled. And she gave everything she had.
“She had this really rare combination of being so genuine on stage, and yet so fierce,” Nyquist said. “She just had such a powerful voice.”
Once, during an audition for a production of “Into the Woods,” she held a final note for what seemed like an eternity, Nyquist remembered. Then she passed out on stage.
Another time, according to the teacher’s account, Genao’s performance of “Nothing” from “A Chorus Line” in a workshop drew stunned silence, before she asked if her singing had been bad. An audience member declared that it was perfect, Nyquist said, and the class applauded.
Prior to her arrival on Broadway, her theater experience amounted to a handful of high school productions, two community theater shows and scattered voice lessons, “just because I love to sing,” she said.
Tanairi Sade Vazquez, who performed with Genao in “On Your Feet!” and became her close friend, said an aura of modesty emanates from Genao.
“We all knew that she was a star,” Vazquez said. “But I don’t think she believed it quite yet.”
Vazquez said she encouraged her friend to stick with theater during the COVID shutdown. Before the clock struck midnight on Genao’s dream, Broadway called again.
Then Lloyd Webber did, too. Genao said she has been left to “pinch” herself each day.
“She’s still not quite sure that she belongs where she is,” Nyquist said. “But she does.”