10 Questions
Take Ten: Julie-Ann Elliott
Julie-Ann Elliott is presently playing Lana Sherwood (as Violet, Zuzu, & others) in It's A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Washington Stage Guild, where she also appeared in In Praise of Love and Old Times. A native Marylander, and MFA graduate of The Catholic University of America, she has been working in the DC/Baltimore area for twenty years. She is an Artistic Associate at Olney Theatre, and has performed in over two dozen shows there, including: The Tempest, Angel Street, Dinner with Friends, The Millionairess, The Constant Wife, Hedda Gabler, Tartuffe, and with Potomac Theatre Project: The Best Man, Crave, and Arcadia. Elsewhere in the DC/Baltimore region she has worked at Studio Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Center Stage, Theater J, Rep Stage, Round House, Folger Theatre, Everyman Theatre, Metro Stage, The Kennedy Center, and Arena Stage. Her tv and film credits include Veep and Jamesy Boy. She narrates audiobooks at Potomac Talking Book Services, Inc. for the Library of Congress and also teaches Acting for Howard Community College. She is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and mother to 14 year old twins, Nicholas and Cameron Sikora.
1) What was the first show you ever saw, and what impact did it have?
The first professional play I saw was a high school field trip to Arena Stage: Home by Sam-Art Williams. After that, working in regional theatre became my goal, especially Arena Stage. Still is!
2) What was your first involvement in a theatrical production?
We had a 5th grade drama club; I played the female lead, a fairy godmother, in a Christmas play with a title I cannot remember. My strongest memory of it is that I wore the director’s wife’s wedding dress!
3) What’s your favorite play or musical, and why do you like it so much?
That’s like asking which your favorite child is! Plays I’ve actually done often become favorites, Angel Street was like that for me. Dinner with Friends I’d seen in NYC and loved and always wanted to do. Both were emotionally and psychologically challenging to play. And I loved God’s Ear and Crave because of those same challenges, on top of the unusual, stylized use of language.
4) What’s the worst day job you ever took?
Telemarketing theatre subscriptions for two weeks. I just couldn’t.
5) What is your most embarrassing moment in the theatre?
I have fallen on my face a couple of times, but there’s no time to be embarrassed during a performance, you just get up and go on! Truly, the most embarrassing theatre-related moment was when I went to an Equity Principal Audition at a theatre where I’d worked a few times, but the casting person was new…I got distracted by what I could hear outside the audition room, my brain froze, and I had to restart. I still have not recovered from that.
6) What are you enjoying most about working on It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play?
It’s such fun to do all the various characters, but I love working the wind machine!
7) Other than your significant other, who’s your dream date (living or dead) and why?
Tom Hiddleston. Have you heard Shakespeare roll off of his tongue?
8) What is your dream role/job?
Again, hard to pick one role. I have been lucky enough to check a couple roles off that list with Hedda and Karen in Dinner with Friends. I would still like to play Shakespeare’s Lady M, Gertrude, and Titania.
9) If you could travel back in time, what famous production or performance would you choose to see?
Eleanora Duse in anything, or maybe just as far back as Cate Blanchette in A Streetcar Named Desire.
10) What advice would you give to an 8 year-old smitten by theatre / for a graduating MFA student?
To the 8 year-old: see plays, read, watch people, listen, don’t judge, have fun, say yes, do it. To the graduating MFA student: Do what you love and share what you do. It is valuable. And remember, it’s also a business.
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