A Broadway Performer's Entire Routine, from Waking Up to Rehearsal | Allure

hi my name is shireen pimentel i'm a broadway actress and this is how i work it i'm going to take you through 24 hours of my beauty and wellness routine i am practicing social distancing um in teaneck new jersey with my family i recorded my work at interview the week that we shut down broadway i was maria on broadway before all this happened and i am still maria on broadway i made my broadway debut in the lion king when i was nine years old even though i made my debut at that time it feels like i'm doing it all over again at 21 to star as maria in west side story is that maria is that maria tonight tonight give it to me things have definitely changed now but that will be the routine i get back to probably right when we start back up from being cast all the way to previews and opening it was a six-month process we started previews december 10th and we opened february 20th we rehearsed for two months six days a week for eight hours and then we went into tech rehearsals tech rehearsals were three weeks six days a week for up to 12 hours we perform eight times a week and the show is an hour and 45 minutes without an intermission on top of playing maria and west side story i am also a full-time student at juilliard [Music] [Applause] [Music] i will be a college graduate when we get back i really love my job i think the best part is having people come and it's their first broadway show ever and they really take to the show and end up wanting to see more broadway shows that's really exciting i think that there was this like hope that we could stay open that's what it always kept feeling like was that we were gonna stay open as long as we possibly could and maybe weather the storm of what was happening i'd say three days before we ended up like going dark just slowly the progression took hold of like no one could come backstage at first but we still had the stage door then no stage door no one backstage and then it was we're shutting down rules will go into effect five o'clock on friday except for the broadway theaters in manhattan where it will go into effect five o'clock today i definitely remember like what what was happening that entire week and like how everything was going it's like so vivid because of how it like stopped yeah it's definitely something that i'll think about and remember for a really long time a very large amount of like shock i think i went through like the seven stages of grief you go through them you have a long time to go through them we were going into such an exciting time for theater of like the award season and spring and it's nice outside and i feel like we were just really revving up and getting into like the big part of the season i am so thankful to be named as one of the outer critic circle honorees for this season i know that it got cut short but i am just so honored to be among some amazing women and artists i normally wake up around 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning my body naturally wakes up at that time waking up around 10 to 1 anywhere within that range of time the shower is the biggest thing for me to wake up to the steam in the shower is really great for my voice i do have a shower in my dressing room i don't have breakfast at home i am not much of a cook and then i make breakfast no matter what time i woke up even if it's one o'clock it's breakfast which is two hard-boiled eggs and four slices of toast i have learned the perfect way to make your toast you must butter the toast directly as it's hot or use the other hot pieces of toast to let the butter melt into the bread it's my favorite part of my day it's my breakfast now and then i sit and i watch friends or the office depending on what time it is that's my morning that's how i start off my day now i like to use skinceutical as my face wash and it's great to like do it in the shower i've been paying attention to like my skin care and like making sure i wash my face at least you know once a day i normally have one class per day i take french vocal literature german vocal literature they're performance-based courses my theory elective is centered around sondheim's music studying the way that he wrote i'm finishing up my semester over zoom as many people are school stayed the same it's still 11 to 12 45. the two times that i kind of like stopped during everything that's happening was when we um shut down broadway and then when they told me that like we weren't actually gonna have a ceremony i think those two have been kind of hard to deal with for me the highlight of 2020 was like doing a broadway show and and graduating from college i think it's at some point gonna like teach me some great things when we like get out of it and and somehow possibly i will have evolved but right now it was definitely like really upsetting and i just had to like take the day for myself and process through what that felt like i'm also excited to graduate and be done with school yeah i wanted to like see what was happening inside shereen how was she feeling when we go so fast like we let go of our ourselves and like self-care and what's going on with me um so i really wanted to tap into like how are you feeling today i've kind of like become a lot more content with with uh not moving a million miles a minute i have a lot of my meals at the theater and just grab them and and head there i have a futon so i'll open that out i'll lay down and like eat my lunch there i'll also eat dinner there a few hours later and that gives me enough time to get my hair and makeup done and kind of relax and warm up and get ready for the whole thing the product i like to use the most for my hair is olaplex their three to six regimen is really awesome and i put the three on right before we start the show when i'm prepping my hair so that once the show's over i can take a shower and then wash with the four and the five and then put the six on as as a leave-in conditioner great self-hairdresser getting my bangs cutting them i uh watched a few videos and then i was like okay i got this whoo and i went to my bathroom and i cut them because at first i was like yeah there we go and then i looked at myself and i was like oh no what did you just do and that's when i got scared but i already cut them so there was no turning back um and then yeah i just kind of kept following the video and made them shorter and shorter um and yeah now i have bangs i love them here they are i like to just lip trill honestly through everything because of the confined space for me being too loud before i start a show i don't know why it kind of bothers me so i lip trill through scales and arpeggios and kind of do that for about 15 minutes and then i start with the first phrase of the tonight balcony scene because that's the first thing i say something i learned in school is that tea doesn't actually help your voice in any way all it does because it's hot it helps with blood flow the only thing that actually touches your vocal cords is steam i definitely sing every day but i don't sing any like theater i only sing the things that i can accompany myself on on guitar and on piano trying to get better at the two instruments and i also bought myself a ukulele i do theater because i i hope but i think i'm good at that i think i'm good at doing west side story and playing maria and stuff but i wanted to start creating things that felt like vulnerable and like unique to like feeling and just whatever that was and so accompanying myself i like 99 of the time make mistakes every time there's something so interesting to find inside of that the biggest self-care for me is leaking i love to like listen to music and and bake at the same time we took a pause on the jam only because i don't know how long i'll be inside and my whole family can't eat all the jam in the world i'm knitting a blanket since i have so much time like a big project why not i've been painting on the back of this denim jacket there's like a painting i don't like this one as much as my other one which is a harry potter themed one i dyed my hair pink so there's like light streaks of pink i used overtone rose gold for brown hair and that was really fun because i've always wanted to have pink hair semi-permanent it washes out i'm really enjoying it i do my own makeup and i do my own wig prep someone puts on my wig and pins it all in maria is a really strong-willed young girl i was really interested in creating not just a character but instead something that you could naturally see on a new york city street before i start the show get my alexa on board with the music and i just listen to music the whole time just to get into whatever mood honestly i'm feeling that day a really big thing in creating each character was finding out how to keep them as realistic as possible anytime you got to a place where you were like oh i can't tell that they're wearing a wig or oh i can't tell that they're wearing makeup that was the thing we ended up going forward with i have done my hair and makeup in 30 minutes that's just i'm rushing a lot when i do that so i like to give the hours so that i'm really calm when i'm getting ready everything's provided they buy us our makeup and our makeup brushes i love this primer ren clean skincare it helps with many things on the stage i sweat a lot from doing the show no matter what i still have makeup on every single time when i walk off stage so i really think that it helps to keep everything in place and there's like almost no makeup ever going on my face every so often there's like someone who asked me to record something and i kid you not i throw on like a good enough amount of foundation and like some mascara and that's it and i i call it a day nothing else nothing else is going on my face really i'm a big full coverage foundation person since i was young i did the thing that people should not do which is pick your skin so i do have a few scars my foundation is bobbi brown i do warm honey or honey it looks like i did paint by numbers on my face because we are on camera on the stage there's a certain kind of lighting color so we have to kind of combat that with the foundation make sure that everything matches and mixes together the cameras are like flies on the wall it's a very big video wall it projects really big on the screen which i think is exciting my mother has seen the show about five times and she has seen it from the last row in the theater and she said you can still get such a great experience from there because the wall is so big i'm just putting a translucent powder just to kind of like set the foundation i get really oily and it's as i said i get sweaty this is my little secret i dab this sweat off and the person who does my wig when he comes to check on the wig during the show he will dab for me as well so we really check on the sweat so people don't have to see it anyway um that's my secret about it i picked this really bright pink blush because well it's theater from mac i don't know the name but i love it it's so bright there's a lot of i think myself in this iteration of maria i am half puerto rican have jamaican and it's really nice to be able to play this role of woman who is puerto rican and there are so many people who are mixed ethnically to be able to show that like there isn't one look to being puerto rican or a specific look to being hispanic being able to represent that is really special this is still my blush when i use it on my eyes i go a lot heavier there's a lot of like pink and purple for this maria there are three colors in here that i use this top eyeshadow i do it's got like a pink and gold in it i belt and do musical theater but i also can sing classical music i don't know my full range i have a feeling it's somewhere around three octaves um on the piano yes some people might know what that is some don't honestly i didn't know until like a year ago but that's what i think my range is i love working with my tony we found out and that we had really good chemistry from the first time we met when we do the show and there are times that he makes me laugh or i'll make him laugh and and it's real we will laugh throughout the songs and throughout the scenes and so i definitely hope that people um feel the the love that we do feel because because it's really great to fall in love with him we've all been staying connected in different ways we definitely have a bunch of like group chats we did have a full cast zoom which was a lot because zoom does this interesting thing where it doesn't mute anybody like they all talk all at the same time so that can be difficult i just fill in my eyebrows a little bit i do like the shape of my eyebrows so i think that's why i don't get them done right now when i first learned to put on eyelashes it used to take me 45 minutes per eye it still sometimes can take me a hot second to put them on but i definitely have gotten a lot faster this is the transformation part that i like the most it's really a signature of maria's look and is that waterproof mascara it is not there are days that it does run during the rain sometimes it doesn't it's pretty good covergirl exhibitionist there's eyelash one i have had an eyelash hanging on by a thread by the end of the show and i did not know until i got off stage so i like did my full bow and like it was like all the way it was like hanging in the middle like in the corner of my eye i'm quite a sweater so i use clinical strength secret it works like a charm that's it the lipstick is last i would say it's basically the color of my bottom lip maybelline color jolt we tested it out one day with like camera testing and stuff and they really like the color so we kept it there's maria's color this is my completed maria makeup and so this is what i'll do before i start the show then i will wig prep my hair put on my wig cap my microphone and my wig alright folks it is saturday on broadway um so this is your places call places for the top of the show the call is places say it one more time have a wonderful last show of this week i don't have stage fright now i did when i was younger when i first did the lion king and they said to think of your stage fright as like excitement and energy and use it to be able to do the show and i have carried that through everything i've done and so that makes it a lot easier with stage free i had these on for about four shows we get our tattoos at the beginning of the week and then we get them again on thursday we apply them ourselves unless you have a back tattoo and it's basically like a temporary tattoo that you remember from when you were a kid nowadays i i don't feel like doing my makeup or doing my hair is a hassle because i only do it when i i want to do it for myself like oh i want to go take some pictures of myself like i'm going to go get all done up and that's it just for me there's been a lot of like i'm going to do that for myself it is definitely a great sense of accomplishment when we bow and when we finish a show and the audience receives it in such a such an amazing way it's also a really exhausting one for maria specifically just because of that final monologue and the way that the show ends so it's a mixture of a lot of emotions because me as shireen is very happy that the show went well um but the character maria just kind of went through so much so it's yeah it's mixing both once the show is over we head off stage and they have towels for us right away so we can dry off and i take my wig off first and then i have a hot towel to be able to take off the eyelashes are basically coming off so they come off easily and then you use the hot towel to take off all the makeup before i get into my shower and wash my face again and do all that kind of stuff after i take my shower i pack up for the day and i'll head out the stage door and sign autographs and then head home it depends on the day sometimes i'll take the subway sometimes i'll take an uber it just depends on how i'm feeling and what i want to do if it's really cold outside stuff like that and then i'll head home sometimes i will stop at chipotle before i even go home sometimes i'll just eat a box of cereal it just depends on how i'm feeling that day and what i'm craving after the show but i definitely eat after the show i'm always hungry i go to bed around midnight each night i try to make it 11 o'clock but i get hungry and i end up watching some tv i'm definitely going to bed a little later watching netflix has been keeping me up honestly somewhere between midnight and 3 a.m i'm definitely excited to get back to like performing but i think i'm also really excited to get back to seeing theater and and seeing what everyone wants to create and and what else we have on broadway the arts are so special and so i'm definitely excited for us to get back to creating and watching each other create i'm definitely interested to see what'll happen when we get back into rehearsal i think just like as people you things will change and especially with something like this where your lives change so drastically and you feel so much there has to be something that i think maybe will change something yeah i have done a dog so this is thor and he is three months old he's not looking at the camera at all he doesn't he's tired i think hi but yeah this is thor and he has definitely been a bright spot of this quarantine

Channel: Allure

Views: 256,028

Rating: 4.9665351 out of 5

Keywords: broadway performer, work it, work it allure, day with broadway actress, broadway actor routine, broadway performer routine, broadway performer interview, west side story broadway, west side story broadway 2020, shereen pimentel, shereen pimentel interview, shereen pimentel allure, shereen pimentel maria west side story, west side story broadway cast, west side story maria shereen, broadway actress, black broadway actress west side story, shereen pimentel maria, allure

Id: hmBBZEFfSbE

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020