For Lorna Courtney of ‘& Juliet’, New York has always been her stage

To pursue her dreams of fame, Lorna Courtney didn’t have to move far from home. But she did have a long daily commute. In her teens, she took a bus and two trains (or three, “depending on how long I wanted to walk”) from her home in South Ozone Park, Queens, to the prestigious LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

“That’s not even a bad thing, because there were people commuting from Staten Island,” says Courtney, the young Tony Award-nominated star of the new Broadway musical “& Juliet.”

However, the real distances were not measured in miles. At LaGuardia, Courtney was thrown into a new world. “I realized I was with people who had free lunches and people whose parents had yachts,” she said recently at a cafe near Union Square.

She made the most of her years by studying voice at LaGuardia, performing in student productions, and taking on the roles of Nina in “In the Heights” and Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” (in which her fellow Tony nominee Micaela Diamond Mrs. Potts.)

Fast-forward eight years, and Courtney, 24, portrays another strong-willed ingénue, Juliet, on Broadway. That would be Shakespeare’s Juliet, except that in this musical fantasy the protagonist isn’t a 14-year-old who commits suicide for love, but a young woman eager to experience the world and find out who she is. Oh, and this Juliet sings hits written by pop mastermind Max Martin, including “Stronger,” “Since U Been Gone,” and “Roar.”

It’s a “stunning performance,” as New York Times critic Jesse Green put it in his review. Courtney said she was shocked to hear her name was listed among the other Tony nominees for Leading Actress in a Musical, and was allowed to “eat cake at 9am as a celebration”.

Courtney was born in New Jersey in 1998, the same year Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time”, the first song she performed on the show, was released. She grew up in an ethnically and religiously mixed family; a DNA test told her the highest percentage in her ancestry was “18 percent for Nigeria, followed by Ireland, Jewish Eastern Europe, and then it was Mali, and I mixed Mexican there as well,” she said.

Little destined her for business. Her parents weren’t particularly interested in music, but when her mother saw a clip on “60 Minutes” about Vy Higgensen’s Gospel for Teens program, she encouraged her daughter to join. At age 15, Courtney performed in Higgensen’s long-running musical, “Mama, I Want to Sing!” with the choir in Japan.

“It was then that I decided I could see myself doing musical theater instead of opera, which is what I studied in high school,” said Courtney. She was on her way to the races and proved to be not only gifted, but also enterprising.

“Throughout my life, when I had an idea and had a strong feeling for it, I always worked to achieve that goal,” she said. “I didn’t have a lot of resources that were readily available and easily accessible, but I would use what I had.”

While many of her colleagues at the University of Michigan were enjoying spring break during what she called her “junior-slash-senior year” (she graduated early), Courtney traveled to New York for non-equity auditions. While waiting to meet with a regional theater for a summer performance, she saw a call for a “Dreamgirls” revival and managed to pass on her photo and resume, even though she had no agent. She earned a callback, but was not cast. (The production didn’t happen in the end, either.)

By the time of graduation, Courtney was back in New York, auditioning for “Dear Evan Hansen” and the Ivo van Hove revival of “West Side Story.” She landed both, starting as a standby in “Hansen” before moving on to “West Side Story” as an ensemble member and Maria’s understudy.

This was an invigorating time for Courtney, who said she enjoyed working with van Hove and avant-garde choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker on their boldly staged revival, even as they pushed her comfort zone. “That particular process was only challenging because dancing in the ensemble isn’t my forte,” Courtney said. “Anne Teresa’s style in particular is very specific, and I had no idea how to move that way.”

The pandemic shutdown — a time when Courtney, like most actors, felt in limbo — definitively ended that experience: “West Side Story” wasn’t one of the Broadway shows that reopened. When things came back to life, she sent out an estimated 100 video auditions. (And she landed a role in the pilot of the Queen Latifah series “The Equalizer”.)

Then “& Juliet” came out.

The show premiered in Britain in 2019 to lukewarm reviews, but received nine Olivier Award nominations the following year. By the time the director, Luke Sheppard, auditioned for a pre-Broadway run in Toronto, he was well acquainted with the role of Juliet. And yet Courtney surprised him.

“She was able to find a version that was clearly her version,” he said in a video interview. “It was fun and eccentric, wonderfully naive but also incredibly intelligent – this special intelligence that just saw the best of the world around her.”

It didn’t hurt that she could sing too.

Betsy Wolfe, who plays Anne Hathaway on the show (and who’s also nominated for a Tony), recalls that she and Courtney had back-to-back dates for their callbacks. “Before I saw Lorna or heard her speak, I heard her singing through a thick wall in a studio rehearsal room,” Wolfe said in a telephone interview. “I will never forget hearing her incredibly beautiful, powerful pipes. When I met her a few minutes later, I thought, “Well, this is their Juliet.” It is very, very difficult for me to even separate the two at this point.”

Courtney got the good news in December 2021. At the time, she was working behind the desk at an Equinox in Hudson Yards. “I get a call from my agent manager and they say, ‘You have the role of Juliet,'” she recalled. “Because so many people who work there were also actors, singers and dancers, they were all so excited for me and we were jumping up and down, screaming.”

Between runs in Toronto and on Broadway, Courtney spent about a year on the musical. She said it helps her “grow as a person” and appreciates its message. “It’s about staying true to yourself, finding your own voice and not being afraid to speak up,” she said. “It’s also about love — cross-generational love, love of friends, love of people who may not be your biological family, and relationships.”

And while her family has been an invaluable “support system,” she’s finally ready to move into her own home after staying with relatives in South Ozone Park or Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town.

By mid-May, her application for an apartment had been approved, and she anticipated the move—because it was in Harlem, a neighborhood she knew from her days in the gospel choir, but also because this savvy New Yorker knew her commute. to the theater district in Times Square would be a cinch.

“The 2 and 3 is one block away, and then the B and C is another one,” Courtney said with obvious pleasure. “It’s a bull’s-eye.”