This morning on “Arts News” we got to meet one of the professional Equity actors appearing during this 56 th season of Missouri State University Tent Theatre. Tracy Bidleman has already been seen as Mrs. Vernon-Williams in “Cry Baby the Musical,” and she’ll play the title role in the musical romp “The Drowsy Chaperone” starting July 11. Originally from Seattle, Washington, Bidleman is a former opera singer, who studied both opera and musical theater performance at University of Colorado-Boulder. She spent 20-plus years on the regional opera circuit both here and in the UK and Scotland, “running around the country, living out of a suitcase,” she says. “When I first started I was doing kind of ‘ingenue’ (roles)—but my look was never an ‘ingenue.’ And I used to get reviews of, ‘Oh, she’s great... but she looks a little older than she should be!’” One day Bidleman was sitting in a hotel room in Harrisburg, PA while performing with the Harrisburg Symphony, and suddenly realized, “I wasn’t
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