five-day residency at Bass Performance Hall<\/a> tonight, is a what-if story \u2014 what if Juliet Capulet from Shakespeare\u2019s renowned \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d didn\u2019t kill herself at the end of the play? (Apologies for the spoiler if you were strangely unaware of that ending.) But the plot is cheekily told through a very meta lens, as this plot twist is all the scheming of Shakespeare\u2019s wife, Anne Hathaway, who\u2019s negotiated the different ending and written herself into the play. The story of Juliet unfolds as a battle of the wills between the spouses rages on.<\/p>\nAccompanying this wild story are the songs of famed Swedish songwriter Max Martin. If you\u2019ve never heard the name, we\u2019re still positive you\u2019ve heard the songs \u2014 Backstreet Boys\u2019 \u201cI Want It That Way,\u201d Kelly Clarkson\u2019s \u201cSince U Been Gone,\u201d Katy Perry\u2019s \u201cI Kissed a Girl,\u201d and Bon Jovi\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s My Life,\u201d just to give a small sample. Few have the ability to write a chorus as glossy, soaring, and radio-ready as Martin.<\/p>\n
The musical had its debut on London\u2019s West End in 2020, when it took home three Laurence Olivier Awards, including a Best Actress win for Miriam-Teak Lee as Juliet. The musical would then debut on Broadway in 2023 and receive nine Tony Award nominations.<\/p>\n
So, yeah, it\u2019s safe to say taking the lead of such a lauded musical that\u2019s hitting cities across the U.S. for the first time will require some heavy lifting on the part of Quijada. And it\u2019s lifting Quijada feels well-prepared to tackle thanks to a major influence in her life: former Broadway actress Megan Magill, who heads the Magill Musical Theatre Studio in Tyler, Texas.<\/p>\n
Tyler, a small city of just over 100,000, might not be the first place that springs to mind when one thinks of hubs for the performing arts. And, according to Quijada, that\u2019s precisely why her East Texas upbringing was so important to her success.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The arts] aren\u2019t the main focus there,\u201d Quijada admits, \u201cbut that only means that all of the artists are fighting for a way to be seen in Tyler.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quijada thanks organizations like the Magill Musical Theatre Studio, where she studied and performed for six years. \u201c[The theater] changed my life,\u201d she says. \u201cIt changed the way that I saw musical theater and that I saw myself as a person.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Magill] really pushes us to be the best version of ourselves that we can be, and that’s really what I attribute all my growth to. I think there are a lot of students that go through that program in Tyler who really see themselves bloom there. I definitely saw that within myself. And there are so many musicians and actors who come from Tyler. I think it’s a little secret hole of wonders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly after graduating from Tyler Legacy High School in May, Quijada attended the Jimmy Awards in New York City, where she received the main prize after three prior Jimmy Award nominations. \u201cI just fought a little bit harder this year,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Riding high on the win and thinking she\u2019d be attending Texas State University come August, she received a call in July to audition in New York for the lead in \u201c& Juliet.\u201d A week after her audition, she was offered the part. \u201cI was in shock,\u201d Quijada says. \u201cAnd it was a very, very quick turnaround.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raised in a household that stressed education \u2014 her mother is an engineer and college professor who immigrated to the United States \u2014 it wasn\u2019t any easy decision to forego college, at least for the time being.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then this opportunity came knocking to be in \u201c& Juliet,\u201d and I was like, \u2018The Lord is really pushing me in a direction that I just cannot ignore.\u2019 And, so, I said, \u2018Lord, I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m just going to roll with it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019d kick off her performance as Juliet on Sept. 24 in Sacramento. And, seven weeks in, the musical\u2019s Fort Worth stint is giving her family and friends an opportunity to witness her name atop the Playbill.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery show is going to be packed with someone I know,\u201d Quijada says. \u201cAll my family’s coming on Saturday, and my high school is bringing about 90 kids from their theater program for the Thursday matinee. So that’s going to be a wild performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, will Quijada be going back to college once her full year of touring is over?<\/p>\n
\u201cI could not tell you,\u201d she says. \u201cI’ve got so many alternatives in my head. I could go back to college, maybe not necessarily musical theater, but I could go study something else that I’m really, really drawn to. I could move to New York and search for a job on Broadway or I could work for something else maybe, I don’t know.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just graduated high school. So it’s been\u00a0a lot of learning at once. But I feel like a year is going to be enough for me to learn and grow to a position where I can know what’s next.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can catch Quijada in “& Juliet” at Bass Performance Hall through Nov. 16. Click here <\/a>to purchase tickets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The past year has included quite the rush of incredible, life-changing turns for Fabiola Caraballo Quijada. Hot on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":374822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5138],"tags":[5229,18602,49822,29751,7371,7372,44449,7762,358,1148,21179,7453,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-374821","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-bass-hall","10":"tag-bass-performance-hall","11":"tag-brian-kendall","12":"tag-fort-worth","13":"tag-fortworth","14":"tag-musical","15":"tag-musicals","16":"tag-texas","17":"tag-theater","18":"tag-theatre","19":"tag-top-story","20":"tag-tx","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-united-states-of-america","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115539786123731376","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}