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No place like home: A ‘Wicked’ dancer in Tampa
Photo: Facebook.
She must have been 11 or 12 years old, Alexia Acebo figures, when she experienced her first musical – it was the Broadway tour of Wicked, the bright, shiny, Tony-winning fantasy tracing the backstory of the two witches in The Wizard of Oz, at the David A. Straz Center in Tampa.
“I remember seeing the flying monkeys,” Acebo says, “and looking at my brother and saying ‘I will NEVER see this show again. This is the scariest thing I have ever seen.’”
Wednesday night, the national Wicked company begins another two and a half week residency at the Straz. And there in the ensemble, dancing and singing behind the principal actors, will be Alexia Acebo.
She’s a professional, New York-based dancer who studied for years at her mother’s Tampa studio, Rising Stars Dance Academy, then earned a BA in Dance (plus a BS in Psychology, for good measure) from the University of Alabama.
“I never was really into musical theater,” Acebo explains. “I was going to ballet school, and I’d go to the Joffrey in New York in the summer, and I did Orlando Ballet for a little while. I was competing. I was a competition kid. So it was all dance; that’s all I wanted to do. I had never sung a day in my life.
“The plan was never musical theater – it just kind of happened. I worked really hard and I ended up there.”
In New York, Acebo went on musical theater auditions; in 2019 she was cast in the national tour of Chicago. After a month on the road, the pandemic’s arrival killed the show (along with everything else onstage everywhere).
“We were in Palm Springs. I’ll never forget it. They said ‘You’ll be back in two weeks.’ I said OK, well, I’ll just go town to Tampa and hang out with my family for a little while. Get some sun and then we’ll be back.’ And two weeks was six months.
“Theater didn’t exist. Dance didn’t exist. It was the industry that completely fell off the face of the maps.”
Even though she was skeptical about turning in a video audition for the Wicked tour – “It’s the major leagues of what we do, I’ll never get it” – Acebo threw herself into it. She was surprised, she explains, when the producers offered her a position in the ensemble. Next month, this touring company celebrates its first year on the road.
“I feel really blessed in this show,” she says. “I do a lot of singing – I have a singing solo – so it’s kind of forced me into that consistency pattern. Because that’s something I admire about the principals all the time – they’re so consistent, and so confident in that instrument that can sometimes go haywire, you know? Your voice is a little different than your body sometimes.”
Many members of the cast will gather Monday (March 13) at Wine & Wood, 614 S. Howard Ave., Tampa, for There’s No Place Like Home – A Wicked Cabaret, a benefit for efforts to build safe houses and support human trafficking survivors in the Tampa Bay area and beyond.
The 7-9 p.m. event will feature musical performances from principal and ensemble cast members, a Wicked memorabilia silent auction and more. Find tickets here.
Acebo expects most of her (large) Cuban American family, as well as many friends from the Tampa dance community and beyond, to see Wicked during its residency (March 8-26).
“At this point,” she says, “it just feels really surreal to come back home and be like ‘Hey guys, I did it! I hope it was worth it. I hope that I’m making you proud.’”
