Although Bronx born Lea Michele Sarfati wasn’t well known before portraying Rachel Berry on Glee, there is no concealing her now! She lights up the television screen with her raven-haired beauty and expansive performances, and her vocal range amazed me, when she sang Rihanna’s heart-wrenching “Take a Bow.”
Lea Michele’s career began as an after thought. She went to an audition as moral support for a friend, and ended up auditioning. That stroke of good fortune led to her role as an understudy for Les Miserables‘ Cosette, on Broadway, at the age of eight. After she got her feet wet in theater, she conquered performances in Ragtime, Fiddler on the Roof, The Diary of Anne Frank and Spring Awakening. In fact, her vocals, as Wendla in Spring Awakening, earned her a Grammy Award nomination.
Lea’s character, Rachel Berry, is a perfectionist and quirky outcast, who was born, through a surrogate mother, as the child of two gay guys. Her dads chose the surrogate based on her looks and brains, and then as Rachel so innocently puts it, “they mixed their sperm together and used a turkey baster. To this day we don’t know which one is my real dad.” Ok, maybe she divulged a bit too much information, but her candor is appealing. As an only child, and extremely talented, Rachel grew up thinking she was “all that and then some.” She clearly states her goal is to become a Broadway star, and tries to further her non-existent career by creating videos of herself singing. She posts them daily on MySpace, hoping to be noticed, but what she doesn’t know is that her classmates watch the videos and mock her. I adore her naivety (or is she just oblivious to her social standing?) when she says “You might think that all the boys in school would totally want to tap this, but my MySpace schedule keeps me way too busy to date.”
My prediction, for Lea Michele, is a soaring career in comedy, drama and musicals. There is no stopping her now. What is your opinion of her role as Rachel?
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