![]() ![]() I believe it will look different for every person, but it should. “I truly do believe anyone can do this show. His boss, meanwhile, is more Gordon Ramsey than Anthony Bourdain, a puckered asshole whose lone joy seems to be yelling at his underlings. (One particularly acidic customer asks Sam why the restaurant doesn’t use the app OpenTable “like everywhere else.”) And, Sam doesn’t ask anyone’s vaccination status when slotting tables, of course. The script comes off a touch too vintage at points, touting a menu of now-outré molecular gastronomy and hinging on do-or-die phone calls confirming reservations: Something unfathomable in today’s text-preferring app economy. And that changes how you move through the world,” he replies, nodding.įully Committed was a Y2K-era off-Broadway smash, which later became an on-Broadway work starring Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson (presumably riding the 2010s wave of restaurant-obsessed foodie culture that crested with the musical Waitress and the back-waiter novel SweetBitter-a job Lalama also worked). And we are only able to be what we know we can be, to a certain extent,” he says.ĭoes opening the season at Neptune as a non-cisgender person feel like a landmark, I ask them? “If we are the stories we tell ourselves-and I think we are the stories we tell ourselves-then if you see someone like me, or any other body that is not the norm on stage or in a film, then you just added a different telling to your own story. “That's why you do it, because the media that we consume as people hugely influences our subconscious idea of what is possible. A casting call for a non-binary role in Pleasureville made him take the trip to Halifax from Ontario, and they’ve been here ever since. “I had agents who told me that I wouldn't work if I did what I wanted to be called,” Lalama says, eyes clouding. “I work so hard so that it becomes easy, so I can have fun with you on stage.” Lalama plays 41 characters in Fully Committed. ![]() Since then, his resume has amassed roles across stage and screen, including a supporting role in the FIN-selected film Dawn, Her Dad and The Tractor and Pleasureville at Neptune in 2019, where Lalama was the first trans person in a specified non-binary role (now, though, they identify as transmasc as well as non-binary). ![]() “I remember getting that email in my dorm room, and thinking: If I don't get this, like I don't really know how I'm going to survive-it felt like that,” they recall with a laugh. Lalama (who uses he/him and they/them pronouns) saw his acting career grow new legs while he was living in Toronto, skipping university class one day to try out for a part in a touring rendition of the classic hippie musical Hair. Now, playing an overworked reservations manager at a nameless NYC hot spot over the course of one particularly hellish shift, they’re done with the dress rehearsal: They’re delivering a one-actor show for Halifax audiences to devour. He mightn’t have known it when he was sweeping crumbs off five-star restaurant tables or ferrying $300 cheese plates to customers, but these “Joe Jobs” (as Lalama calls them) were an early brush with the theatrics of dinner. And there's something to be said for being on a stage, in a theatre, as a professional actor, playing what you did to get there.” “I worked in service for like nine years. “Sam is just me,” Lalama says, sitting in the last rays of summer’s fading sun one recent afternoon. It was before the theatre announced what its returning slate would look like, and even before the first casting call was drafted. Running until October 10 at Neptune Theatreīreton Lalama began preparing for his latest role-a starring turn in Neptune’s season-opening, once-actor play Fully Committed, on until October 10-long before reopening plans meant live performance was back. ![]()
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