Gracie Under Pressure

Stay away from South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage if you don’t want to be exposed to the holiday-season sniffles.

Tiffany Ellen Solano, who is chiefly responsible for spreading them, reports they break out every night during the deeply touching home stretch of South Coast’s Second Stage seasonal staple, “La Posada Magica.”

It is largely up to Solano, a class of 2000 Orange County High School of the Arts graduate who recently turned 18, to earn those tears honestly at the climax of Octavio Solis’ lovely Christmas play about hope and faith lost, then found. The show began its seventh annual run over the weekend.

Solano carries the musical play’s emotional cargo as Gracie, a 14-year-old girl who, as Christmas arrives, remains deep in mourning for the baby brother her prayers and sick-room ministrations could not rescue. A posada, a holiday procession from Mexican and Mexican American tradition, arrives at her house. Its mission: to spread Christmas cheer and collect charitable donations while reenacting Mary and Joseph’s door-to-door search for shelter in Bethlehem on the eve of the Nativity (posada is Spanish for “inn”).

Gracie, consumed by bitterness over her brother’s death, joins the posada, only to vent her outrage at heaven by sabotaging it. By the end of Act 1 she has extinguished all of the procession’s candles, leaving it lost, scattered and dispirited. Act 2 brings about Gracie’s spiritual rekindling as events--and some surrealistic twists--engulf her in the beautiful mysteries of birth and regeneration embodied in the original Christmas story.

“That last scene, every night I’m crying. It’s a beautiful play,” Solano said during a recent pre-rehearsal interview at the theater.

She is back playing Gracie for the second time, and can vouch from her experience last year that she isn’t the only one who ends the show in heart-warmed tears.

“You can hear sniffing go on through the whole house.”

Among those charmed and impressed by Solano’s performance is Marcos Loya. The Los Angeles musician composed the songs for “La Posada Magica,” serves as its musical director and has been onstage as a guitar-playing minstrel in every performance of the show since it premiered at South Coast in 1994.

The challenge of playing Gracie, he said, is to convincingly embody the defiance, anger and adolescent destructiveness of the beginning without concealing the beauty at her core.

“At the end, her character winds up bringing tears to the audience through the sheer, pure quality of a good person, a beautiful young lady. Tiffany is my ace, my point person, my quarterback. It’s strange how the youngest person in the play inevitably has to carry us.”

Loya, a veteran jazz-band leader, recording artist and session musician (his credits include recordings or tours with Madonna and Linda Ronstadt), said he knew as soon as Solano auditioned last year that she had the voice and presence to be a good Gracie. Now, he said, a year’s added maturity has made her voice deeper and richer, better able to resonate on the lower notes as well as deliver the pure high ones.

“Man, she gave me chills [in rehearsal],” he said by phone last week, talking of Solano’s delivery of “Sacred Child,” the climactic number. “I came over and gave her a hug and said, ‘Thanks for giving my song all that love and talent and the respect that make it fly.’ ”

Solano, all smiles, sweetness and enthusiasm, with a touch of self-deprecating humor, makes a charming first impression not unlike that of her most famous fellow alumna of the Orange County High School of the Arts, Susan Egan. Egan, who graduated in 1988, has made her name starring on Broadway as Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” and as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.”

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Solano has a foot planted just outside that world and is waiting for word on when she can take her first step in: For nearly a year she has been on standby in case of a cast opening in the Broadway or touring productions of “Les Miserables.” She auditioned successfully as Eponine, a tragic figure of unrequited love, and will play the role when a slot opens.

Meanwhile, she has been facing the rigors of juggling two full-time careers--one as a student, the other as an actress. Her final week of rehearsals and first week of performances in “La Posada” coincide with her final exams as a freshman at Cerritos College. Whenever a break gets called, Solano is at her books.

According to Tricia Viszneki, mother and manager (“I call her my momager,” Solano said), her daughter has been rising for classes at 6 a.m. and getting home from the theater after midnight. Solano said she can’t be too starry-eyed about an acting career because it is such a tough, competitive field. She wants a fallback and thinks she would make a good teacher.

“You’re still up on a platform getting to perform, and you’re still affecting people’s lives.”

All the same, she has been grooming for a show-biz career for 10 years, ever since she elbowed in on her mother’s voice lessons. Viszneki--who was divorced from Tiffany’s father, Ismael “Junior” Solano, when their only child was 5--was singing in an informal pop band that played at parties. Tiffany wanted singing lessons too, but Viszneki couldn’t afford to pay for the two of them. She stepped aside, on the condition that her daughter, then 8, commit to practicing.

Tiffany soon triumphed in her first public performance, a talent show in Downey in which she won first place singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” a Rodgers and Hammerstein number from “Flower Drum Song.” Solano can still remember the dress and shoes she wore, and she keeps the trophy on her bedroom dresser at home in Whittier.

By 10 or 11, she had done her first television commercial, a McDonald’s spot. At 13, she made her major stage debut in “Nine Armenians” at the Mark Taper Forum. She repeated that role in a production in Denver.

Solano answered the call for Gracie last year after her mother read in a newspaper that Crissy Guerrero had decided to move on after playing the part for five years. Solano has no qualms about playing a younger teen: “I’m not far off from 14. I’m still very young at heart.”

Despite her early entry into the world of professional acting, Solano seems in some significant ways to have bucked the pressures on today’s teens and preteens to claim as much freedom as they can as quickly as they can.

She saw her first pop concert just two months ago, when her boyfriend took her to Staples Center to see the husband-and-wife pop-country team of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. (Now Solano may try her luck as a country singer; Loya, who grew up with Merle Haggard and Hank Williams Sr. along with mariachi and Mexican folk songs, has begun writing pop-country songs for a recording project they hope to do together.)

“I waited until I was mature enough,” she said. “I didn’t want to take on something I wasn’t 100% ready for. Some of my friends got their license right away [at 16], and [riding] with some of them . . . I was scared to death.”

In her most widely visible role, in more ways than one, Solano appeared over the summer on MTV’s steamy “Undressed” drama series, playing a teenager trying to figure out whether she and her boyfriend are ready for their relationship to become sexual. She doesn’t flaunt that credit or even bring it up in an interview--even though it prompted one admirer to start a Web site in her honor.

Instead, she takes a deep, slightly embarrassed breath and smiles.

“It was a risque thing,” she said, though she felt the part was legitimate because her character was “not trashy, but a normal girl, and a lot of girls go through that. . . . But I was in my underwear for some of it, and that’s something I’d never experienced before. It was kind of nerve-racking, but it’s something a lot of actors have to experience eventually. I’m not sure my mom was too thrilled I accepted that role, but she said, ‘The choice is up to you.’ ”

She is happy that the Web comments that her four-episode “Undressed” sequence generated tended to praise her acting along with her looks. “A definite stroke to my ego, but it’s definitely weird to read that.”

Solano said she has no faith-shattering personal experiences to draw upon as she tries to become Gracie each night in “La Posada Magica.” Her acting depends on her ability to imagine, empathize and “become lost in the role.”

Director Diane Rodriguez, moonlighting from her regular post as co-director of the Mark Taper Forum’s Latino Theatre Initiative, gives Solano high marks.

“She can really connect with what’s going on inside. She’s really in touch with her emotions, and we really feel the pain” of Gracie.

It’s in making that pain real that Solano sets up the show’s sniffle-inducing ending as an earned tug at the heart, not a sappy manipulation.

“I think that’s what keeps me going,” she said. “That I can touch an audience with a performance.”

SHOW TIMES

“La Posada Magica,” South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; matinees Saturdays, 3 p.m., and Sundays, 12:30 and 4:30 p.m. Through Dec. 24. $18 to $32; “pay what you will” performance Wednesday. (714) 708-5555.

* HEARTFELT:

SCR’s “Posada” is the real deal says our reviewer. F1