Lizzie Kurtz was 12 when she first saw You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. “Another girl was playing Lucy. I remember watching her and thinking, ‘I need to play that part.’” And now, at 38, she will.
Gabi Epstein
Kurtz, a drama teacher and actor who has starred in musicals such as Cats, will depict the fiery, black-haired Peanuts character from June 17 to 26 in Beyond Boundaries’ production of the musical, which follows Charlie Brown and his friends through a typical day.
Kurtz is no stranger to Charlie Brown. She’s watched the cartoons since childhood and has always been drawn to Lucy.
“I get her… I think she has this honesty, she says what everybody thinks but doesn’t say, so I think there’s a private part of myself that wishes I was more like her,” Kurtz said, adding that the key to playing the character is understanding that honesty.
“Lucy really wants… to live authentically, even though she’s so young. She’s so brutally honest… I think children have a lot of depth and insight, and as we get older we tend to cover it up, to mask it,” she said.
“If I can unmask Lucy, I can get closer to the heart of her, so it’s just about finding the honesty.”
Now a drama and vocal teacher at York Memorial Collegiate in Toronto, Kurtz first fell in love with acting as a child, while watching other kids go up on stage at a show.
“I didn’t get picked [to go on stage], and I remember sitting in my seat and all of a sudden it was like I got bitten by the bug and I wanted to get up there so bad,” she said.
“I was only five or six and I came home that night after the show and said to my parents, ‘I want to act.’ I didn’t even know what it was, it was like something bigger than myself.”
Kurtz, whose first musical role was in Annie at Beth Tikvah Synagogue, attended the Claude Watson School for the Arts before going to Sheridan College for musical theatre.
She graduated from Sheridan in 1996 and set herself a goal.
“I wanted to get a mega-musical by 30,” she said.
And she did.
While doing a show called Forever Swing with jazz singer Michael Bublé, she was cast as the lead in a German production of Cats.
“So I went to Germany for a year,” she said.
When she got back to Toronto, Kurtz found it difficult to get any roles, even with her musical experience.
“It was like nobody cared… I came home and… couldn’t even get a chorus job,” she said. “It really affected me deeply, and I decided to go back to school and get a teacher’s degree so I would never feel desperate… It’s a terrible feeling. No job is worth being desperate.”
Now, as a drama teacher, Kurtz can appreciate her role in the musical.
“The kids are real, and in acting, you need to be real,” she said. “I love their honesty.”
Charlie Brown is a partnership between Beyond Boundaries productions and organizations that work with children at risk in the Toronto area, which include Jewish Family and Child of Toronto, the Kids Up Front Foundation and the Toronto District School Board. The production will also include drama workshops to introduce kids at risk, aged seven to 12, to acting.
For Gabi Epstein, who plays Sally in Charlie Brown, the show is a perfect fit for this kind of initiative.
“It’s such a great show. The music is amazing and the characters are so much fun to play… it speaks well to that age group, but it challenges them a little bit,” she said.
Epstein recently finished performing a one-woman musical show called Gabi’s Highschool Trailmix and will release her debut album of cover cabaret songs in the fall. She currently works for a birthday party company, which helped her connect to the character of Sally.
“You forget what kids do. It’s very easy to fall into that sort of realm of playing them [like they’re] stupid. Kids are actually really smart, and they have their own way, their own system of doing everything.”
When developing her role, Epstein, 25 was determined not to go the cutesy route.
“I really sort of wanted to make it seem like she was in her own world. She has this genius mind, but nobody knows it except for her,” Epstein said.
The show runs at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People in Toronto from June 17 to 26. Call 416-862-2222 or visit www.da-capo.ca for more information.
