hi I'm Michael Hsu Rosen and I'm currently playing Alan in Torch Song on Broadway
and this is Playbill's From Ballet to Broadway
Michael Hsu Rosen studied at the School of American Ballet for 10 years before
making his Broadway debut in the 2009 revival of West Side Story directed by Arthur Laurents
it was a very exciting time but I was sort of having a little bit of an identity crisis
because I realized I had spent all this time
specializing in this one area of performance and there was still a part
of me that was interested in other types of performing art like acting and singing
and so as busy and as happy as I was to be first cast for a workshop
I was also dreaming of this other thing and I heard on the street literally
through a friend who's not in the business, a family friend, that they were auditioning for West Side Story
so I went home and I googled how to audition for a Broadway show, truly
and I landed on a website called playbill.com
I saw this open, non-equity, like a non-union chorus call for, it was the last one and
it happened to be on my day off from rehearsal, I had one day off a week from School of American Ballet
six months later I got the job and I had to do it
all in secret, because at the time I wasn't allowed to audition or to train even in other styles
so it was this sort of strange moment of defiance and aspiration
that secret aspiration
and then I was actually studying at the Miami City Ballet over the summer when they called me back for
the final callback for West Side Story on Broadway
and I had to fly up from Miami and I booked it
after West Side Story, Michael was part of the cast of the 2014 revival of On the Town
and has returned to Broadway in the revival of Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song
well I think the biggest challenge has been establishing an identity for myself in this industry
that's not just dancer, I'd say everything else has been a total gift
I really appreciated that I was able to take all this very technical
training and apply it to a different style of movement, that wasn't a challenge, that was exciting
I think what I what I found most difficult was maintaining my technique
but that's been the hardest challenge, shaking people's idea of who I am based on my training
the ballet world teaches you incredible discipline
the Broadway world is where I found that kind of the empowerment
to be my own individual creative force, so even if you're in the ensemble
of a Broadway show, you're your own person
that was, I think, this the most significant difference between the ballet and the Broadway world
in some of the projects that I've worked on in the theater, on Broadway and off-broadway here in New York
I've gotten to really use my my ballet training, not just to dance, but also to understand a world
for instance, I did a great play by Richard Nelson called Nikolai and the Others that
David Cromer directed at Lincoln Center Theatre and I got to dance the role of Orpheus
and play the real life person Nicholas Megalis, who was the one of the
first principles of the New York City Ballet
and I got coaching from Peter Martins and Rosemary Dunleavy for that project and
it was just an incredible moment of sort of closure for me having left the the
ballet world behind, something I had trained so hard for, and been so singularly
focused on achieving, all of a sudden, I was doing it in this other context
and had sort of fast-tracked to being in a studio alone actually at the
New York City Ballet studios with Rosemary and Peter coaching me
it was an incredible, incredible moment of sort of return