St. Pete’s Rachel Prather brings home a bit of Broadway

The last time actress/singer Rachel Prather’s hometown audience heard her sing, she was playing the lead role in Once: The Musical, a touring production of the eight-time Tony winner, at the Straz Center in Tampa.

That was in 2015, just before she appeared in the original Broadway cast of The Band’s Visit (six Tonys) and a hot Broadway revival of A Christmas Carol.

Prather’s back in St. Pete working on a play this month, and to celebrate, she’s doing a one-woman cabaret Monday (May 5) at The Studio @620, accompanied by Michael Raabe on piano and Paul Stoddart on guitar.

“I thought it would be so great to sing for people who haven’t hear me sing since high school,” she said.

Prather, whose father Chuck owns The Birchwood and several other downtown properties, is a 2008 graduate of St. Pete Catholic High. She was 9, she recalled, when she “got the acting bug” while participating in American Stage’s theatrical summer camps.

With the Bravo Center for the Arts, located in the (now long gone) Pinellas Square Mall, Prather played the title character in Annie. Shows with Bravo led to community theater work, and eventually she became an integral part of the drama department at St. Pete Catholic.

One of her closest friends in the theater community was Stephen Riordan, another St. Pete native, who’d graduated from SPC a few years earlier.

“Stephen would come back and help with the musicals,” Prather explained. “Putting them up and helping us learn lines, and different things we were working on in our drama program.

“In my senior year, he wrote a two person, one-act play for me, and I took it to the district competition – and won best actress in the district. With Stephen’s play. That was a pretty amazing moment down here in my life.”

She got a BFA in Musical Theatre from Boston Conservatory and headed directly for big, bad New York City, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

“I really think it’s ignorance is bliss,” she laughed. “You’re told that it’s really competitive, and you kind of get a sense of it when you audition for these colleges. At the time I was auditioning with 1,000 kids, and they only needed 10. You definitely got a sense of how competitive the real world would be.

“But I had really no idea how big the pot was until I got there and tried it myself.”

Luckily, she landed an agent and was soon on her first fully-professional gig, playing Tzeizel in a production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Westchester Broadway Theatre.

Last February, Riordan was in New York and saw Prather in Cult of Love.

Over drinks, he recalled, “I was telling her we were doing Venus in Fur. And any time you mention that role to an actress, their eyes light up because the role is so great.”

With his Dead Canary Theatre, Riordan is directing David Ives’ sexually-charged dark comedy May 15-25 at The Studio@620, and he was able to convince Prather to come down, see the fam, and play the central character, Vanda, in his production.

It actually didn’t take much convincing.

“I said ‘Too bad you’re a big fancy Broadway star with two kids, living in New Jersey, you can’t get down here to do it …..’ And she said ‘Wellllll … let’s see what we can do.’”

Prather made it happen. And she personally called Erica Sutherlin at 620 to see if a solo concert could get squeezed into the schedule. (She knew musical arranger Raabe from old-days shows at the Largo Cultural Center.)

Monday’s cabaret, Prather explained, will include “musical theater songs, jazz standards and covers of various favorite pop songs that will be intertwined with stories I’ll share about growing up here, moving to New York and what it means to be back home.”

Find information and tickets for all shows at The Studio@620 at this link.