SIBONGILE NGAKO

Harvard grad and Brooklyn native is finding her way back to the stage after moving to San Diego

She has sung opera at her alma mater of Harvard University and around the world, and has musical-theater roots dating back to childhood. But it took moving to San Diego for Sibongile Ngako to fall in love with performing once again. ■ Now, the Brooklyn native turned Pacific Beach transplant is making her mark on local stages (and venturing into film besides). She’ll next be seen as the French restaurateur Jacqueline in Cygnet Theatre’s “La Cage Aux Folles,” whose planned March opening was postponed indefinitely. ■ And it all was sparked by a show two years ago at a 118-seat theater in San Diego’s suburbs.

At the time, Ngako and her husband were busy raising two young kids (with a third on the way), and balancing that with careers in the financial world.

They had moved to San Diego from New York in 2016 because “we were seeking quality of life,” Ngako says, chatting at a cafe not far from the family’s P.B. home. “New York is wonderful and diverse and obviously a mecca for the arts and things — so wonderful in so many ways.

“However, it’s also increasingly unaffordable, especially if you have kids. So when I was pregnant with our second, we just found a change was needed. Most folks move to the suburbs, but we really wanted to broaden our thinking.”

The arts had been part of Ngako’s life since childhood, when her dad — an actor and drama teacher who once worked with the legendary Joseph Papp of New York’s Public Theater — would recruit her to help out on shows: “It was kind of the family business in that sense.”

She also performed with the TADA! Youth Theater (whose alumni include Kerry Washington and Jordan Peele), studied classical piano from age 6 and then took up singing at age 11: “I would watch opera on PBS, and I loved the grandeur of it, the pageantry of it.

“And then when I was 15, I saw what was then one of my favorite singers in concert,

Kathleen Battle, and I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ So I kind of totally redirected from acting and musical theater, and went full-force into opera.”

Her opera pursuits continued at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, then at Harvard (where she majored in French and African-american studies) and through graduate studies at Binghamton University.

But with Ngako’s family growing along with her financialservices career, the arts had started to “fall by the wayside a bit” even before the move to San Diego.

“We were here for about a year or so when I said, you know what, I need to kind of reinvigorate my creative side,” she recalls. “I have all these things I do. I dance, I sing, I’ve done opera. And I had this early childhood love of acting and theater in particular.

“I said, I’m just going to join an acting studio. I don’t really have a strategy or a plan around this. But I just feel a need to do something.”

That step eventually led to an audition with director Jacquelyn Ritz for the 2018 production of Alan Ayckbourn’s “Communicating Doors” at Scripps Ranch Theatre.

And “that experience, in working with her and just being onstage again as an actress (rather than) singing, kind of lit a flame,” Ngako says. “It was totally amazing. Just happenstance and divine intervention of some sort — it just reinvigorated this early love I always had for theater.

“That’s when I really started to explore the theater scene, and realized how rich it is here. And here I am!”

Her credits now include a distinguished 2019 ensemble turn in Coronado Playhouse’s “Cabaret” — quite a feat, considering Ngako was six months pregnant at the time. After her third child was born, she also took a lead role in a locally shot horror movie that is being pitched to festivals and streaming services.

Her “La Cage” role, Ngako says, feels like a good fit in several ways: For one thing, “I do speak French, so it’s fun — especially with the character I play, Jacqueline, who’s a very over-the-top and kind of French-ified businesswoman.

“It probably does feed into my acting wheelhouse a little bit,” particularly with Ngako’s own business background.

Ngako’s first name (pronounced see-bon-geel-ay), by the way, has South African origins and means “thanks for this beautiful gift.” (She was born the day after Christmas.)

And a beautiful gift is what Ngako seems to be discovering in her explorations of San Diego’s stage scene.

HOWARD LIPIN U-T