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May 13, 2007
Arts and Entertainment

For Oksana Baiul, a Role Close to Life

By KARIN LIPSON

BELLPORT

THERE she was, the Olympic figure-skating champion Oksana Baiul, spinning with one leg extended, leaping into the air, landing and — she nailed it!

The modest rink at the Gateway Playhouse here was a far cry from the Olympic arena in Lillehammer, Norway, where Ms. Baiul, then 16, skated to victory and fame in 1994.

Ms. Baiul, now 29 and living in Cliffside Park, N.J., was “competing” only in her starring role as Maya Propova, one of six fictional skaters jockeying for medals in “Cold as Ice,” a new musical about the sacrifices and rivalries of the sport. With Broadway ambitions, a six-person orchestra and a cast of 43 that includes skaters and nonskating actor-singers (portraying the skaters’ alter egos), “Cold as Ice” premieres Wednesday at the theater.

The show features a roster of characters from the figure-skating world: pushy “skating mothers,” demanding coaches, fatuous sportscasters, eager neophytes and the competitors they become. For those who vividly recall Ms. Baiul as the balletic, pixieish Ukrainian teenager who won the gold — and who soon fell from Olympic glory to alcoholic notoriety — the tale of Maya Propova may have special resonance.

While Maya, a Russian who feels trapped in her life, is a composite character, she closely resembles Ms. Baiul, who choked up recently at the first cast run-through of the script: As Maya learned that her parents had died in an accident, Ms. Baiul’s eyes welled, and she was temporarily unable to go on.

“I’ve lived through it — it’s emotional,” she said later, her accented speech still recalling her girlhood. “It’s good story. I think it’s very true.”

Ms. Baiul has lived through a great deal, both before and after her victory (over the American Nancy Kerrigan) in Lillehammer. Born in 1977 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, she lived with her mother and grandparents after her father left when she was 2 years old. Her grandparents put her on skates at 3, because she was “a pleasantly plump little kid,” she recalled one morning after an early practice session at a Manhattan rink with Philip Deyesso, her love interest in “Cold as Ice.”

By the age of 5, Ms. Baiul said, she was working with a coach; at 7, she won her first competitions. But her life took a tragic turn: Both grandparents died when she was around 10; three years later, her mother, Marina, died of cancer. At 13, Ms. Baiul was effectively an orphan, supported by the government and in the care of coaches with an eye on Olympic victory.

Recalling those years recently at the Manhattan arena, she displayed a mercurial quality, seeming by turns bitter, argumentative, proud, engaging, clownishly funny and bluntly realistic. “I grew up at the ice rink, pretty much,” Ms. Baiul said. “That’s why I come across as very tough.”

Yet perhaps not always tough enough. After her Olympic victory, Ms. Baiul turned professional and moved to the United States, where new pressures and freedoms — fame, money, even a sudden growth spurt that led to skating injuries, hampering her jumping ability — sent her into a mode of partying and drinking. In 1997, she was arrested after crashing her car while intoxicated.

“All of it was too much,” Ms. Baiul said of the forces propelling her meltdown.

After one false start, she underwent an alcohol rehabilitation program and began to restore her skating skills under Natalya Linichuk, a coach at the University of Delaware in Newark. Her attitude was “very serious,” the coach recalled over the phone. Soon after arriving, Ms. Linichuk said, “she begins jump very well.”

She also had fond memories of Ms. Baiul as a “very nice person — very cute person.” And tough? “Not so much.”

At the Gateway Playhouse, Frank D’Agostino, a onetime competitive figure skater who conceived and co-wrote “Cold as Ice” (and is its composer and lyricist), concurred. “I’ve been pleasantly, wildly surprised that she is the most easygoing, down-to-earth skater,” he said.

At rehearsal, Ms. Baiul seemed both star and team player, solicitously making suggestions, waiting with other skaters, sharing jokes. She was happy, she said, for the chance to perform in a scripted theatrical production — especially one that in many ways mirrored her life.

“I don’t hide my pain,” she said. “What is real is real.”

“Cold as Ice” runs Wednesday through June 17 at the Gateway Playhouse, 215 South Country Road, Bellport. For tickets: (631) 286-1133 or visit www.gatewayplayhouse.com.

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Gateway's golden girl

Olympic skating champ Oksana Baiul acts cool as the star of the musical 'Cold as Ice'

BY AILEEN JACOBSON
aileen.jacobson@newsday.com

May 16, 2007

As an actress sings wistfully about finding a "place to call home," skating queen Oksana Baiul glides along an iced-over stage. After a long diagonal swoop crouched almost to one knee, she stops perilously close to the front edge.

Stopping like that is easy, Baiul says during a break in rehearsals last week at Gateway Playhouse in Bellport for "Cold as Ice," a new musical opening tonight that traces the lives and loves of six fictional Olympic contenders. The hard part, she says, has been learning to act in an intimate space.

"This is not ice skating, this is theater," Baiul says in Russian-accented English. "You sort of reach out to an audience, to where they feel they can touch you. These moments are really precious. They're the theater moments that really will make this show.... I always knew that. Now I'm really experiencing it."

A jump onto the stage

Add yet another experience to the event-filled life of the 29-year-old ice star - skating since age 3, losing her mother at age 13, winning an Olympic gold medal for Ukraine at age 16 and living a headline-snaring life in the U.S. since then. Her new jump is onto the modern stage of a 58-year-old barnlike Equity theater situated on seven South Shore acres.

Everyone involved with the show - by all accounts like no other ever presented before - would like to see it move to Broadway. If it does, Baiul would cancel her other commitments around the world, she says. "I find a higher power is always helping me," she says. "I try to listen to it.... That's why I chose this play. My instinct told me it was going to be OK."

Baiul's agreement to star was a crucial step in getting the musical produced, says Frank D'Agostino, 38, who wrote the music and lyrics and co-authored the book.

Beyond lending her well-known name, he says, "I was stunned at what a natural acting talent she has." (Baiul has never acted onstage before) Though she'll be executing many difficult skating moves - as will the production's other world-class skaters - she also has to deliver lines and act with her movements.

Each of the six main characters has a nonskating "alter ego" onstage - a professional actor-singer who portrays their private thoughts, dreams, longings and feelings while the skating part of the character glides and spins. Coaches, commentators, pushy stage moms (who sing a comic "Skatin' Mama Lament") and a platoon of kid skaters also enter the mix.

For D'Agostino, the show is a merging of "the great loves of my life," skating and musical theater. A professional figure skater and coach, he grew up in Albany skating on Lake Placid and has also written and produced several musicals regionally and Off-Broadway.

"The true story of skating"

He'd been working for many years on "Cold as Ice," he says. Though he's enjoyed other depictions - even the recent Will Ferrell movie "Blades of Glory" - D'Agostino says, "This is the first time the true story of skating is being told." He hopes it will do for skaters (whose membership in the U.S. Figure Skating Association has nearly doubled to more than 196,000 people since 1991) what "A Chorus Line" did for dancers - explaining their lives.

He didn't have a practical staging solution for his show until he saw a touring production of Gateway's "Holiday Spectacular on Ice" 2 1/2 years ago in New Jersey, where he lives.

"I was impressed. They had real ice on stage," he says. Other venues, he says, use a plastic surface that is awkward for skaters. He called Gateway producer Paul Allan, long a skating fan, who had purchased a custom-made icing system 10 years ago. Allan says he was intrigued, but insisted on a big-name star. A historic playhouse that usually mounts revivals of recent Broadway musicals, Gateway rarely produces new shows, so this endeavor is financially risky.

About a year and a half ago, D'Agostino says, Nancy Kerrigan (Olympic silver medalist in 1994, the year Baiul won the gold) was interested but declined. Now, though, says Baiul, Kerrigan, Dorothy Hamill (1976 Olympic gold medalist) and other stars have told her they'd join the show if it moves to Broadway.

D'Agostino met Baiul, who lives in Manhattan and in Cliffside Park, N.J., through her manager, Tara Modlin, a 28-year-old skater and professional ice show producer from Great Neck. Everyone clicked immediately, all sides agree, and Modlin is now the show's skating choreographer.

"She adds the skating vocabulary," says the show's director-choreographer, Keith Andrews, 37, who grew up in Massapequa Park. "Skating is not taking the place of dancing. It adds another level of telling the story." Sometimes it shows a skater's public life - "what you'd see on TV" - in contrast to the private persona voiced by the "alter ego," he says. Other times in the multimedia production, the skating tells a private story.

"It's so rare you find a brand-new type of musical," Andrews says, "so it definitely has a future."

Open to learning

And Baiul - who once had a problem with alcohol and in 1997 notoriously smashed up her Mercedes - may have a future in acting. All the skaters and actors have picked up pointers from each other, says Gateway artistic director Robin Joy Allan (producer Paul Allan's sister), with Baiul both unusually generous in teaching and open to learning.

D'Agostino also credits Baiul with coming up with the use of a fluttering blue scarf that she and her alter ego (Stacie Bono) pass back and forth during the song about finding a home.

Baiul - who does appear to be the thoughtful un-diva her co-workers describe - minimizes her contribution: "It's a team effort," she says with a brush-away wave of her hand. Still, during the recent rehearsal, that scarf worked beautifully as metaphor and prop as Baiul skated (in a story she says reflects much of her own life) and actress Bono sang: "I close my eyes/I drift on the sea/I leave behind/Bad memories....To find your own space/A place to call home/ In the land of the free...."

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