Karen Leslie Moscato performing as Juliet in the American Repertory Ballet’s October 2013 production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the State Theatre in New Brunswick. Photo by Leighton Chen.
Karen Leslie Moscato, who became a professional ballet dancer with the American Repertory Ballet of Princeton at the age of 16, performs in an October 2013 production of “Romeo and Juliet.” ARB will give another performance of the show April 16 at McCarter Theater Center in Princeton. Photo by Leighton Chen.
Lots of kindergarteners think they know what they want to be when they grow up, but Karen Leslie Moscato is one of the few who got it right.
And when she takes the stage at McCarter Theatre on April 16 for the American Repertory Ballet’s latest production of Romeo and Juliet, she will do so knowing she is the only dancer that company artistic director Douglas Martin has envisioned in the role of Juliet since he started working on the choreography for the production back in 2012.
Such is the talent that Moscato, who grew up in Pennington, has shown since starting lessons at Princeton Ballet School at the age of 4—talent, and determination. She has allowed nothing to keep her from realizing her dancing dream, going so far as to quit high school and earn a GED so she could sign a professional contract with ARB at 16 free of other obligations.
“It was a lot to do with my parents encouraging me,” she said of the decision to make dance her career. “I didn’t really think of it as an option to do this so young.”
The 21-year-old is more than holding her own, however, taking regular star turns in a business known for the physical and mental toll it takes on its practitioners.
Romeo and Juliet is based on Shakespeare’s tragic love story, set to a score by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. Martin’s version of the ballet features a company of 30 dancers, sets by scenic designer Kevin Lee Allen, and costumes designed by Michelle Ferranti.
After its October 2013 premiere at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, Star-Ledger dance critic Robert Johnson called Martin’s Romeo and Juliet “a watershed in the company’s history,” moving “seamlessly from one episode to the next, hitting all the passionate high-notes in Prokofiev’s score.”
Moscato performed the role of Juliet in 2013 alongside Mattia Pallozzi as Romeo. Both will reprise the roles at McCarter in April.
Martin said he’s excited to see Moscato return to the Juliet role with a lot of time between shows. “This is her second chance to develop the role, attack it a whole year after doing other repertory,” he said.
But Martin was able to start developing an ARB version of Romeo and Juliet because of the talent he saw in Moscato way back in 2012. He said there are two main ways in which a dancer must prove herself ready to take on a role like Juliet.
“First, they have to be able to handle the physical element, take on the role in such a way that you know it won’t put too much physical strain on their body,” he said. “She was already easily handling a lot of the advanced technical roles at the company.”
The greater challenge, Martin said, was getting her ready to express herself fully as Juliet on stage.
“As I watched her, and pushed her, and trained her, and created the role, the challenge was not how this young dancer could do the part physically, but how could she express the part,” he said. “The ability of an artist is to express the emotion so the audience can understand it. She did an amazingly good job at a young age. I expect over her entire career she will be able to express that role more and more.”
Moscato said it had been a dream of hers since a young age to portray Juliet, and said she’s spent a lot of time working on the part with resident choreographer Mary Barton, who is known from her time as a dancer for her own interpretation of the role.
“She’s very influential on how I portray it,” she said. “But she’s also very relaxed about when I want to change something if I don’t feel I would react the same way as she would when she was Juliet.”
Martin said working well with dancers depends on getting to know their qualities and their idiosyncrasies—helping them to portray characters in their own unique way.
“Instead of Karen Leslie portraying Douglas Martin’s Juliet, she needs to portray Karen Leslie’s Juliet. I need to bring those qualities of that Juliet out of her. She has to go about working to fulfill that in herself, bring those qualities,” he said. “If I say Juliet’s fragile here, if I say she’s passionately in love with Romeo in the balcony and it’s a fragile new love, we have to talk about those qualities, and we have to see Karen Leslie do it. The process is like acting on film or stage. You’re copying to some extent, but (in rehearsal) you’re also exploring it, day in and day out.”
Moscato said the relationship she has with Pallozzi is essential to bringing out the best in her performance. Pallozzi, a native of Rome, received his early training at the School of Teatro Dell’Opera, then at the Accademia Nazionale Di Danza. He began performing with ARB full time in 2012, after spending time in the Princeton Ballet School Summer Intensive program and later, its trainee program.
“We have this incredible connection as friends, so we have that connection on stage,” she said. “We support each other full heartedly. There’s so much to do, and it’s so difficult and so long, so it’s helpful when you don’t put pressure on each other, don’t feel you’re being judged by each other.”
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Moscato said she hears all the time how much of a struggle it is to be a dancer, how draining it is and how much competition there is. But she remembers her years of training being “mainly very fun.”
“I wasn’t self conscious a lot of the time like a lot of dancers feel,” she said. “[Princeton Ballet School] was a good environment, a family environment, so I never felt a lot of stress as a child, which I know a lot of dancers do feel.”
From a young age, she watched as her classmates began weeding themselves out. Some realized they weren’t that into it and quit, while others showed their lack of dedication by failing to give their full attention to their lessons.
“I remember feeling that the others were all messing around a bit and I was there to learn,” she said. “They were goofing around and I’m doing my first arabesque. I’ve always been extremely focused.”
Moscato attended Princeton Friends School through eighth grade. She recalls the day one of the middle schoolers at PFS gave a performance for her class.
“I remember going home that day and saying, ‘Mom, I want to do this. I need to do this,” Moscato said. “And it turns out the girl was the daughter of the woman who ran the [Princeton] Ballet School—Mary Pat Robertson. So my parents went to her and said, ‘Your daughter danced at my daughter’s school, she wants to take lessons,’ and it went on from there.”
As high school approached, she and her parents searched for a place that would be flexible enough to allow her to commit fully to both classwork and dance, but none of them suited her needs. So she opted for an online program with the University of Nebraska., which allowed her to set her own schedule.
She took classes in the morning and lessons with Barton in the afternoons. Technically, she was a homeschooler. She did that for two years before taking and passing the GED exam.
Moscato said her parents told her she could always go to back to school if she wanted. “They knew this was something I really wanted to do with my life, and it’s a young career, so they were really encouraging me to take any opportunities that came to me.”
She describes mother Michelle Goffe as an avid supporter of the arts. “She loves ballet, loves opera, she’s always been an involved audience member,” Moscato said. “It makes her extremely happy to see me do something she loves.”
Her other mother, Robin Moscato, who is director of financial aid at Princeton University, did not have any natural affinity for dance, but is just as supportive. “She doesn’t know anything about ballet,” Moscato said. “But she’s taken a big interest recently and loves seeing me dance from the audience.”
Martin was a full-time member of the faculty at Princeton Ballet School before he became artistic director of ARB in 2010, and worked with her on a weekly or daily basis for years.
“She was one of the star pupils—my wife (Barton) and I gave her private lessons as well … we knew she was a really promising student,” Martin said.
Around the time Martin became artistic director, Moscato progressed from the school program to the trainee program. Trainees are an important part of the company, providing supplementary support for productions that need extra performers. They come from all over the world with the aim of proving themselves and earning full-time gigs with professional companies. Pallozzi also spent time as in the ARB trainee program.
Martin said Moscato was only in the trainee program for 5 months when he could see she was “completely developed and ready for the physical rigors of professional dance.”
As a trainee, Moscato landed the part of the Dewdrop Fairy in ARB’s production of The Nutcracker. Because of the quality of her performance in that role, she portrayed the sought-after role of the Sugarplum Fairy the next year.
Moscato, who now lives in Princeton, said that, perhaps not surprisingly, the rigors of professional dancing are leagues beyond what she experienced when she was younger. She’s dealt with tendonitis since the age of 12, and icing her legs after every day’s sessions is a ritual she’s become used to.
“It’s extremely difficult to handle the physical demands, just because we’re dancing from 9 to 5 every day. There’s not as much downtime as you would like to have,” she said.
But when she teaches her students at the Princeton Ballet School, she stands before them as an example of what hard work can lead to for those who are willing to do it.
Tickets for Romeo and Juliet at McCarter Theatre Center for Thursday, April 16 at 7:30 p.m. are available online at mccarter.org. More information is online at arballet.org/Romeo.
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