Romantic, rebellious, and somewhat of a ladies’ man.
That may not be how actor Joseph Spitale describes himself, but that is the role he will be playing on stage this summer in New York.
He will, however, be doing it in the form of a candelabra, and he is really excited about it.
Spitale is playing Lumiere in the Woodstock Playhouse production of Beauty and the Beast.
Arguably one of the most important and memorable roles in the show after Belle and the Beast, Lumiere is Spitale’s opportunity to play a lead this season as the company he works for allows its actors to play one major role for the summer and ensemble roles for the rest of the season’s productions.
This is the third summer Spitale has worked with Woodstock Playhouse in what is traditionally referred to as summer stock theatre.
“I love this theatre company because we get to do these really well-known shows,” he says.
Previous summers he has performed in Fiddler on the Roof, Les Miserables, and Biloxi Blues, among others.
“You get to just play dream characters,” says Spitale, who admits that he started his acting career later than most.
Although he looks younger than his age and usually plays characters in their early 20s, Spitale is now 32 and has been acting in New York for about five years.
Growing up in Blueridge, it wasn’t until he took a musical theatre course at what was then Capilano College that he even started to consider a career in musical theatre.
“Taking that one musical theatre course at Cap College literally changed the trajectory of my life,” says Spitale.
Previously, as a student at St. Thomas Aquinas secondary, Spitale was a member of three different choirs. He knew he could sing, and he knew he liked it, but he never thought it was something he could do as a career.
Instead, he later started taking general studies at college until the head of the musical theatre department suggested he take vocal lessons and enrol in the music program. He did just that, and not long after transferred to UBC and completed a bachelor’s degree of music in voice.
Despite his experience, however, Spitale still didn’t think musical theatre was a viable career and after graduating from UBC, he worked for a year as an MC on a cruise ship. When he returned to Vancouver he worked at English language schools and then in event management.
“I did a totally different career for three years,” notes Spitale.
It was going well, though, and he decided to check out a one-year MBA program at Simon Fraser University. During that time he took a trip to New York and toured the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. It was something that had sat in the back of his mind for some time: if he was ever in New York, he wanted to visit the school. There, he rediscovered something he had lost.
“I realized I had abandoned my passion in life, I really did,” he says.
He returned home and took the GMAT (a standardized test often used in admissions for graduate programs, such as MBAs). Just a month later, though, he found out the New York academy was auditioning in Vancouver and he decided to go for it.
Spitale calls the drama school audition the second major decision that changed the trajectory of his life. He was accepted to the program and then wrestled with the idea of moving to New York. But he remembered a mentor he had in university who once told his class: you need to go where you want to end up.
“That really resonated with me,” notes Spitale.
The hardest part of his decision to move was leaving his family, who still live in Deep Cove, although he tries to return for visits at least twice a year. He will be back in town right after his last summer stock production ends this summer.
But before that, Spitale plans to light up the stage as a singing candle.
“I would say that Lumiere is definitely a dream role that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he says. “The story of Lumiere is someone who has become something different, who has become an inanimate object but (who is) trying the entire time to become human again.”
Mounting multiple productions in a short time, which is part of the appeal of summer stock, can be a challenge, but the combination of music and acting is exactly what Spitale loves about theatre.
“It’s a lot like therapy in the sense that you get to explore emotions that you’re feeling or things that you have felt in the past and re-live them on stage sometimes eight times a week,” he explains. “You can really discover things about yourself. And you get to explore sides of yourself that you don’t normally see.”
And while he admits that winning a Tony Award would be nice and performing on Broadway would be “amazing,” those experiences would just be icing on the cake at this point.
“I know very well that getting on Broadway isn’t going to make me happy. I’m already happy, I’m doing what I love,” says Spitale. “I think I’ve sort of given up on the idea of having to get there to be happy. I’m perfectly happy as long as I’m getting paid to do what I love.”
