One Cool Cat

Cara Cooley, 2003 Lewis and Clark High School graduate, headed for New York and the lights of Broadway a few years ago and discovered it’s a hard, cruel life. For several years, she trudged from audition to audition. She lived in a minuscule Manhattan apartment and stayed barely afloat by waitressing at a restaurant named “Alice’s Teacup.”

On one particularly depressing morning, she showed up at the “dance-call” audition for the national tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.” About 500 people were there ahead of her.

“I was like, ‘Oh, great. I can’t do this,’ ” said Cooley. “I just left. I was mad.”

But the next day, she decided to attend the singing-call audition for “Cats.”

“It was a little less daunting, because you’re not in a room with 500 other girls,” she said. “You’re by yourself. So I went and sang and got called back to dance. So I did that and I felt really good about it.”

Still, she wasn’t quite prepared for the message she got at the restaurant a few days later.

Casting had phoned; Cooley had won the part of Bombalurina, the “sexy cat,” who sings “Macavity,” in the national tour of “Cats.”

“I got the message and ran to the bathroom and called my family,” she said. “We were all crying.”

“Her sister and I just hugged each other,” said her mom, Storm Janaszak of Mercer Island. “She (Cara) had auditioned hundreds of times. It’s been grueling. It’s painful to watch someone pursue something that is so very, very difficult.”

The customers at Cooley’s tables had to wait a while for their coffee refills that day. A person can get distracted when her dreams are coming true.

Ever since she was tiny, Cooley never had any doubt about what she wanted to do with her life.

“It sounds really corny, but when I was 3 or 5, going to see shows at the Spokane Opera House, I was just like, ‘That’s all I want to do, ever,’ ” she said.

She took dance and ballet classes beginning at age 3. She performed in children’s theater and community theater in Spokane as soon as she could. She appeared in “Peter Pan” with the Spokane Children’s Theatre. She was in “My Favorite Year” at the Spokane Civic Theatre.

“I feel so lucky to have done that, because if I had grown up in Seattle, I probably wouldn’t have been able to perform as much,” she said.

Her mom and her dad, Gavin Cooley, the city of Spokane’s chief financial officer, had always imbued the kids with a love of musical theater. They even had a “costume room” where the kids could dress up as anything from a princess to a monkey.

“Gavin really made things fun, with all of the music in the house,” said her mom.

Cooley sometimes hung out at the stage door at the Opera House (now the INB Performing Arts Center) and talked to the Broadway touring performers she idolized.

So when she graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, she went straight to New York to attend a two-year program at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

“I basically wanted to go to New York and audition, but I didn’t know how,” she said. “So it was the perfect segue.”

After graduation, she came back home for two straight summers to appear in the Coeur d’Alene Summer Theatre’s productions of “Footloose,” “Guys and Dolls” and “Beauty and the Beast,” among others.

In between, she was in New York, in the never-ending quest for a role.

“It was hard,” said Cooley. “I worked a lot of jobs, like Starbucks. I worked really hard and paid all of my bills.”

On her days off, she went to cattle-call auditions – along with 600 other singer-dancers. She described them as “scary.”

It took her a year to learn the tough reality: She had to work even harder. When she returned to New York after her second CdA Summer Theatre stint, she devoted every bit of free time to taking dance classes and voice classes.

“That’s when I started to do well,” she said.

What was her first big break?

“ ‘Cats,’ ” she said, with a laugh.

It was the job she always dreamed of – but not exactly the show she had always dreamed of. She had never even seen the touring version. Yet after she embarked on one month of intensive rehearsals in New York, she became immersed in all things feline.

“On the first day of rehearsals, we did what they call ‘felinities,’ ” she said. “One of the first things we did was get down on the floor with knee pads and a tail – we had rehearsal tails – and we just crawled around. The director would be in the corner and say, ‘Find your felinity on your hands and knees.’ By the end of it, we were all crawling around on each other. And I didn’t even know anyone’s name yet!”

She didn’t have a cat of her own to study – she’s more of a dog person. Yet when she went home to her little apartment, she began to observe the 20 strays that hung around in the courtyard.

“I made friends with them,” she said.

And when she first wore the full cat costume and makeup, the feline transformation was complete.

“It just magically all came together,” said Cooley. “We felt like we were in a different world onstage.”

Her national tour debut took place in September in Salt Lake City. Her father attended opening night (her mom was ill and had to wait until the tour came to Vancouver). She slinked catlike onto the stage – and was overwhelmed.

“I think I was crying onstage,” she said. “I heard the music and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s happening.’ It still feels like that, every single time.”

The show has already toured Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Then the tour went on hiatus for a few weeks – which is why she was back in Spokane – and resumes in Thunder Bay, Ontario, on Thursday. It is booked into Seattle from April 15 through 19, but will not come through Spokane.

She’s on contract through next summer – and maybe beyond. She says she can see herself doing the tour several more years. After that, she’d still like to be in a musical on Broadway.

“I think I’ll be a better singer, dancer, everything,” she said. “I can audition with more confidence. But I really don’t want to think about that right now.”

Meanwhile, she’s happy creating the kind of magic that mesmerized her when she was an awestruck kid at the Spokane Opera House.

“I know that feeling: When you get home from a show and you can’t sleep you’re so excited,” said Cooley. “If I could do that for one little girl – that’s like the best feeling in the world.”