Words at Intermission: Erica Spyres

Set in the picturesque mountain range for which it’s named, the Netflix series Ozark features a sordid cast of characters: boat thieves, money launderers, heroin manufacturers, and more. Notably missing from this sinister assortment, however, is the musical theatre actor. A missed opportunity, to be sure, considering that from the mountains of southern Missouri emerged one of New York’s finest: Erica Spyres.

Originally from Mansfield, a small town near the city of Springfield, Spyres grew up in a musical family. Her parents started a community theatre in the 70s that’s still running to this day, and they encouraged their children to pursue artistic endeavors from the very beginning—like, the very, very beginning.

“My parents were both music teachers,” she says. “My mom was always singing to me while I was in the womb—she’s like, ‘that’s why you’re so good at matching pitch!’”

That she’s good at matching pitch is an understatement; the actor/singer/fiddler has won multiple awards for her effortless soprano and powerfully vulnerable stage presence. She’s graced stages all across America, performed on Broadway at the Imperial Theater, and even sung at the illustrious Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

But to me, she’s just Spyres: a friend I met while performing in Boston regional theatre. I’m speaking to her via FaceTime as she sits in the Inwood apartment she shares with Drew—her endlessly supportive and equally brilliant husband—and their cat Bastian. Drew hangs out for a minute to catch up before moving elsewhere to enjoy his newly acquired PS5 in peace. Bastian, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen. Spyres continues.

“My two elder brothers and I were all raised to be performers from day one,” she tells me. “To us, it’s never been something that’s unique—it was unique within our town, but within our family it wasn’t odd to be the musician or the theatre kid.

“However, my parents really valued education outside of the arts as well. Even though they pushed us in music, we had to have good grades. And like, some kids would get money for their A’s? No, we did not get that. It was just expected that we would do well. And, because I was a people pleaser, I did very well.”

Her status as a recovering people pleaser seems to be a source of both embarrassment and pride.

“I guess there’s kind of a theme to my life, which is: ‘Oh, you guys like me? Great—I’ll keep doing it!’ It took years before I was like, ‘do I want to do that? Or am I just doing it to make somebody else happy?’ Now I teach kids who are like ‘I want to do this!’ and they seem to know exactly what they want by 15 or 16, and I didn’t know at all—even in college I didn’t know what I really wanted to be.”

The college she’s referring to is Drury University in Springfield, where she earned a music degree and met Drew; in addition to PS5, he also plays cello. She corrects her previous statement. “I knew I really wanted to be an actor, but we didn’t have the kind of program that was teaching me a ton for theatre. So I got a B.A. in voice—I could have gotten a B.M. but I went for the B.A. because I didn’t have to take as many voice lessons, so I could dabble as a violinist and do some classical singing, as well as the theatre stuff.”

It was through Drury University that she met her mentor, Robert Westenberg—a musical theatre veteran who had been in the original Broadway casts of Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and many more. Westenberg was a new professor at Drury when he went to see the school’s production of Working and discovered a protégé.

“He came to see the show, and afterwards he was like, ‘I’m teaching a class this spring and you need to be in it.’ And I had no idea how amazing an instructor he was. Sometimes, you know, you get somebody who’s definitely a performer, but they don’t necessarily know how to translate that to other people. But he was able to teach me so much in the matter of a semester.” The two remain close friends, and he’s been her go-to for advice throughout her career.

Spyres graduated that year, along with Drew, and the two moved to Boston shortly thereafter. Drew attended grad school and worked part-time at a bookstore while Spyres juggled a few part-time jobs of her own. It wasn’t an easy transition.

“In Missouri,” she says, “we had a nice two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath townhouse, brand new, for $650 a month. And we both had jobs and we could afford that. Then we both had jobs in Boston and we were going into debt, like, fast. Just to try to live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment.”

All the while, she was trying to find acting jobs—without quite knowing where to look.

“I remember looking on Craigslist all the time, and one time I found this gig and was like, ‘oh, this pays a lot of money and they’re looking for young actors!’ and I sent something in and they sent it back and were like, ‘glad to know you’re available—would you be comfortable being topless?’ and I was like, ‘why do I look on Craigslist for jobs?! This is clearly not the kind of job I intended to find!’” she laughs. “I had a lot of terrible experiences trying to find work in Boston.”

She eventually met local actors and they directed her to StageSource, an arts services organization that lists Boston area auditions, offers free tickets, and provides opportunities to connect with the community. It was through StageSource that Spyres found out about SpeakEasy Stage Company—and their upcoming auditions for a production of The Light in the Piazza.

“I didn’t know much about it, but I knew that it was a classical, lyrical soprano kind of role. And I wasn’t auditioning for Clara—I just thought, ‘I’ll go in and I hope I’m in the chorus, because I can’t expect to just walk into a place and be considered for a lead.’ And because I wasn’t expecting anything, I sang really well—and [artistic director] Paul Daigneault looks at me after I finish and he goes, ‘where did you come from?’ and I was like ‘…Missouri?’”

And like that, Erica Spyres became one of Boston’s leading ladies. She spent the next several years performing at theatre companies all over the city and found that the best way to move forward in a tight-knit theatre community was to become a part of that community. That meant supporting her fellow artists, even if they were in shows she didn’t get into.

“I think that’s actually what made my career in Boston work. If you only go to the shows that you’re in, people learn really quickly what you’re in there for. But if you’re there to make a community and to actually try to make some change somewhere—even if it’s small change: being in somebody’s life, being kind—that’s a big part of Boston theatre. Show up for your friends and they’ll show up for you.”

And people tend to show up for her. Audiences and critics love watching her; colleagues love working with her. She mentions the names of people she’s met through theatre—not name-dropping industry giants but remarking on the friendships she’s made through the years. Some of those friends have pointed her toward next steps along the way.

“Brittney Morello, who I owe so much to for teaching me all about what the business is, wrote me and said, ‘you’ve gotta go in for this.’” She’s referring to the national tour of Once, the singer-songwriter musical based on the film of the same name. (Side note: Brittney was in my graduating class—I may be biased but I also think she’s great, and she’s helped me immensely as well.)

“So I went to the audition,” Spyres says, “and it was a super easy audition for me, it was totally up my alley—I had to do an Irish accent and play the fiddle, are you kidding me? It was fine. Sing a folk song. Great! And about six months later they called me up, and about three weeks after that I had to uproot the whole life and go on tour for fifteen months.

“It was a life changer. I couldn’t have asked for a better community of people to work with. And I didn’t realize how much being in the band created far more of a sense of community and belonging than just being colleagues who were actors. And we were on tour—we had all this time, everybody had instruments, so we would jam.”

These jam sessions would eventually lead to Spyres forming a folk band named The Typsy Spyres, with castmates Stuart Ward and Cassidy Stirtz. They played together for a few years and even booked a weekly spot at a bar on the Upper West Side before Ward and Stirtz each moved to the West Coast for a change of scenery, but hopefully we’ll hear more from the trio in the future.

“I don’t think it’s over,” she tells me. “Of course, there are no plans right now, but I’m always looking for the opportunity to play with them again.”

While the band members went their separate ways, Spyres continued forward in her theatrical career. I tell her that I consider Once to be “big break number one” for her; she agrees. And while her first big break took her across the country, her second took her out of it.

She was still on tour when she got an email from her brother’s agent.

Oh yeah, remember her elder brothers? Her brother Sean traveled the globe performing before returning to Missouri to run an opera company—and her other brother is Michael Spyres, the world-renowned opera singer.

“He’s famous within opera circles,” she says proudly.

It was Michael’s agent who asked her if she’d be interested in auditioning for the role of Clara in Stephen Sondheim’s Passion at the Théâtre du Châtelet. She said yes and flew to Paris for the audition.

“On my own penny,” she says. “…Well, way more than a penny. But luckily, because I was on tour, I could afford it. Flew there, auditioned, I heard about a month or two later that I got it. I should also mention that, when all this was going on, [my mentor] Robert Westenberg was writing Sondheim to be like, ‘hey, Erica’s great by the way,’ and it never hurts to have somebody throwing your name out there.

“And once it was announced that I got it, a couple of friends on the tour said, ‘you’re gonna meet my friend Andy—he’s the best.” Andy ended up being Andy Einhorn, the music director of the production—and seasoned Broadway conductor.

“Little did I know,” she tells me, “Andy would basically be my agent. We became really good friends during Passion, and he said, ‘you guys should really move to New York—why aren’t you in New York?’ and I was like, ‘well, we have a good thing going in Boston; we’re happy there,’ and he said, ‘why don’t you move to New York? I’ll get you on Broadway one day.’ And then he did.”

Spyres made her Broadway debut in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, of which Einhorn was the musical director. She looks back on rehearsals with amazement.

“I was trying to take everything in,” she says, “I knew enough to know that when something special comes along, you try to hold onto it as long as you can. We had these incredible dancers who were super well known, incredible singers like Renée Fleming—world famous, right? Tony Award-winning actors. We had film and TV stars. All inhabiting the same rehearsal room—and yet, every single person was deferential to somebody who was better than them at something else, so it never felt like: ‘what are you doing here?’”

Impostor syndrome is a common issue for performers—we often feel that we don’t belong, that we’re defrauding somebody and are waiting to be found out. Spyres has experienced that a lot in her life, but she’s had support to snap her out of it.

“It’s my cycle when I audition and then get a part: I’m sure I’m going to get fired and I wonder why they hired me. And Drew will say, ‘you always do this, but haven’t you learned by now that your experience shows that you don’t fail? Like, what more do you need?’ and so that started to sink in after years and years of hearing it. Yes, I could fail—that possibility is always there, and in certain ways I will fail. But as far as huge failure goes…I haven’t done it yet.

“Now I try to tell my students that. Because I’ve learned so much about how to reframe doubt. To turn it into something that hopefully takes me back to reality and reminds me:  Okay, you fail. Then what? You’re embarrassed for a second? Our world moves so fast, everybody gets embarrassed, everybody fails. People forget it.”

I ask her about her teaching—in addition to performing, she’s spent the last several years coaching for My College Audition, an organization that helps high school students apply to theatre schools.

“I coach kids on acting for the song. I do a little vocal technique if they need it, but what I really focus on is making sure that what they are doing musically matches up with the story they’re telling—that whatever’s coming from their gut is also coming out in their voice, and that they don’t look like they’re in their heads just thinking about what they sound like. If they look like that, I haven’t done my job.

“But half of my sessions end up being an emotional support system for kids who are going through something very stressful. And I try to boil it down to: why do you want to do this, what makes you unique, and how do we apply that to a character? If we’re telling a story correctly, hopefully we can let the nerves go because we’ve done the homework to immerse ourselves in the need—you know, the Big Want—and we can navigate that without thinking about all of the technical things.

“But I also remind them, if they’re ready to hear this, that at the end of the day, what we do is not really about us. If we’re gonna stick with it, and stick with this job, then what we do is greater than who we are individually.

“People say that we stand on the shoulders of giants—it’s kind of like that. Theatre’s been around for ages. Storytelling, longer—some sort of telling stories. And ultimately we’re part of an art form that is so much bigger than one story or one character telling a story—we’re part of something that’s striving toward a greater good. So then we have to remember that it’s clearly not about how good we are. It’s about how somebody makes you feel. It’s about how you make others feel and how you make yourself feel.”

Luckily for Spyres—and for her students—she’s still able to teach remotely. While worried about the COVID-19 pandemic, she and Drew have been able to make ends meet; he’s still working full-time (albeit with reduced pay and an increased workload), and she’s still got her ongoing coaching job. She also managed to find part-time marketing work for Acceptd, My College Audition’s parent company. And it’s a good thing, considering she only qualified for a little over $80/week of unemployment.

Her employment-based health insurance will run out at the end of the year, and while she’s fortunate to be able to get onto Drew’s insurance plan, many Americans are not so lucky. At a time when so many people are unemployed and uninsured, she recognizes how lucky she is to have Drew, even though she’s found it hard to fall back on him in the past.

“The difficulty has been: Yes, he will help me out a lot so that I can be an actor, and have these moments where I make a lot and then make nothing, but I freak out all the time. I grew up as my father’s daughter who was raised to be very independent. And I want to at least be able to take care of myself and not take from a man. I want to be as financially responsible as he is. That’s what I want. I want a true fifty-fifty and I realize that’s not bound to happen with most couples so it’s been a hard pill for me to swallow, because I feel oftentimes that I can’t ever be there for him in the same way that he’s there for me.”

As for how or when the industry will recover, Spyres hasn’t a clue—but she sees a silver lining.

“The logical part of me knows that there is a time post-COVID, but I try to live in the present. For me, it’s more about: what can I do now? And some days I don’t feel like doing anything. But other days I get very creative.

“My husband and I have been playing music together for the first time in years—it’s been years since we’ve played together, for fun. Music for me had become something so technical and worrisome that I wanted to dive into acting because there was room for error; in fact, error was welcome. Now music has become the same thing for me, and it’s renewed itself as a way of expression. And had I had a job to go to, and another job, and another job, and another rehearsal, and another audition? You don’t get to experience that because you’re constantly looking for the next goalpost.

“We’re stopped right now, and it sucks, and I don’t want to tell everybody, ‘yeah, you’re gonna get your jobs back and everything’s gonna be fine’—obviously, I hope that. But what I hope is that more of us have been able to sustain ourselves than we realized. Maybe that means going back to family and relying on their kindness; to even know that exists, that is a form of love. My aunt told me years ago, she said, ‘your parents don’t have money, but they support you more than anybody emotionally—and that is its own form of wealth.’”

While the future is unclear and her career indefinitely on hold, when it comes to the support of family and friends, Spyres has all the wealth she could ask for.  ↓