Photograph by David John Attyah
Contact information: Email - [email protected]
Instagram - @leapinthedark23
FB - https://www.facebook.com/melissa.randel/
YouTube Channel- Leapinthedark Productions: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1SnpzJeacSBmcc9AnLCgw
actor dancer director choreographer theater-maker
MY STORY:
Thanks to my English teacher, Miss Mitchell, my gift for truth surfaced as a nascent playwright in fifth-grade. We were encouraged to write and perform plays in class, so I invented characters who said and did things I was not allowed to express. Women being silenced has been a recurring theme in my work ever since.
Theater-making driven equally by movement, imagery, and text, is my passion. Revelation of the human condition onstage is my goal. I believe that when the exquisite world of the body wrestles with the complexity of the heart, we cannot look away. Paradoxically, what I love most about live theater is the Audience’s freedom to look anywhere.
I was born in Portland, Maine to Rockette dancer, Myrna Randolph and jazz trombonist, Herb Randel. My first nine years were spent assisting my dance teacher mother and earning college money doing commercials for potato chips. When my father took a sales job with Gretsch drums and guitars, the family moved to Memphis, and later, Los Angeles, California. To satisfy my parents, I attended the University of California Irvine and majored in dance. To satisfy myself, I graduated in three years to pursue a performing career.
Highlights of my early career range from being a magician’s assistant in Mexico to playing Judy Turner in Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line on Broadway. I spent five years in the Broadway, International, National, and Bus and Truck companies of A Chorus Line. The tutelage of Michael Bennett, Bob Avian, Marvin Hamlisch, and Joseph Papp left an indelible impression. It was my Julliard.
Inspired by a line of dialogue, “Don’t you want to do more than just dance in the chorus?” I left A Chorus Line and attended The Actor’s Space two-year conservatory program, under Alan Langdon. I subsequently built a reputation for originating roles Off Broadway and in the 99 seat theaters of Los Angeles. Productions include the NYC premiere of Molly Newman’s, Shooting Stars and the Los Angeles premiere of Sheila Callaghan’s, Roadkill Confidential.
Working with at-risk populations in the New York City and Los Angeles public schools and juvenile justice systems led to an academic career at Glendale Community College where I chaired the dance department for two years, and the theater department for more than a decade.
Extensive training with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, an avant garde, movement-based theater company, coincided with my foray into academia. Guided by my Broadway and experimental muses, I mounted wildly inventive productions of classics and musicals at the college, including: Romeo and Juliet, Waiting for Lefty, The Cherry Orchard, Godspell, and original, devised theater: This is not a Tree and We are Stardust.
In 2013, I launched my own production company, Leap in the Dark Productions. The inaugural production, The Hat, was an original, semi-autobiographical play with dance and music. The Hat premiered as a duet with renowned New York City jazz trombonist David Gibson, at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2013. It was re-imagined as a solo project entitled, The Women of The Hat at Alva's Showroom, Hollywood Fringe Festival, Los Angeles Women’s Theater Festival, and at The Rag Factory in London in 2017.
In 2019, an early draft of Sorry. was selected by SITI Company for a SITI Lab residency in New York. Sorry. is currently in pre-production in Los Angeles.
This dance (aka: Persephone's Descent ) was an early study for Sorry.. Composed during the pandemic, it captures the confinement, restlessness, and ennui of 2020, and contrasts it with Persephone's sense of freedom when she's on Earth.
Adam Cohen original composition: Galactic Layers.
Melissa R. Randel - Choreographer, Dancer
Adam Cohen - Composer, Keyboards, Bass, Mix Engineer
David Anderson - Drums, Cinematographer, Video Editor
Filmed on Hollywood Beach in Ventura and Highland Park, CA
It was a joy to collaborate with both of these fine Los Angeles musicians.
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