From the time she was 4 years old, Holly-Anne Ruggiero spent 11 summers at the Girl Scout’s “Camp Virginia” where she got her first exposure to theatre. She wrote her own songs, did Noah’s Ark puppet shows, played Cinderella wearing a tin foil dress and seized every chance to perform at “all camp” gatherings. From the first time she got on stage in front of 150 other campers, she knew that she wanted to be an actress.Holly-Anne grew up in Stow where she performed in many musicals through out elementary and middle school. She learned to play drums and piano and was a singer in a band called “Lost Cause” in Middle School. She rocked the town in the “Stow Lip Sync” performing as Joey McIntire to a song by New Kids on the Block. Her first “fabulous role” was Grace Farrell in Annie in Middle School and she landed lead roles in every local production for the next 2 years. When she got to Nashoba Regional High School Holly-Anne found stiffer competition and began to broaden her horizons by getting involved in the regional theatre scene playing anything from a Nun in Sound of Music at Worcester Forum Theatre to the sexy, Vibrata, in Theatre at the Mount’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 2000.
Upon high school graduation in 2000, she enrolled as a performance major at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, New York. For the past year and a half
she has been working
professionallyas a director
both on and off Broadway. As a first semester freshman she excelled in her acting classes and landed a role in Oedipus Rex (which made her feel very “artsy” and “New York.). Second semester she discovered something that would change her life – directing. She took a serious and candid look at her acting ability and determined that while she was a very good actress, a career on stage was probably not in the cards. She focused her attention on directing and got an internship at Second Stage Theatre in New York working with well known directors like David Mamet, Athol Fugard, Mary Zimmerman and Evan Yionoulis.
After attending college for only 3 years, Holly-Anne graduated from Fordham in 2003 with a double major in Directing and Acting, receiving an Honors Award for artistic achievement in the theatre department. Within weeks of “Your reputation as an artist
is important, but your
reputation as someone who
can collaborate with others is vital.”graduation she and fellow classmate Marco Formosa formed the imPULSE Theatre Company, a small Off-Broadway company in Manhattan. Together they produced the first theatre festival at the HERE Arts Center, an Avant-Garde Mecca for Off-Off Broadway Theatre and have mounted 4 successful professional productions.
For the past year and a half she has been working professionally as a director both on and off Broadway. Last summer she was the Assistant Director to Des McAnuff on Dracula, the musical that had its Broadway premiere in August and she is currently assisting Mr. McAnuff on the world premier of Jersey Boys, a musical based on Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons which is premiering at La Jolla Playhouse in California. She returned to New York in October, once again as McAnuff’s assistant on Billy Crystal’s one-man show 700 Sundays that is slated to open on Broadway in December.
Holly-Anne says that she never imagined she would be working on Broadway – but she knows how she got there. She has 3 pieces of advice for those interested in a professional theatre career. First, try everything that you can possibly get your hands into in the theatre, at least once; second, treat each and every person you ever meet with the utmost respect; and third, observe and learn from the seasoned artists you work with and apply their methods to your craft. She also suggests that sometimes the trivial jobs like scraping paint off of a set or being a go-fer for the director, are the ones that result in the “big break” for an artist. “Your reputation as an artist is important, but your reputation as someone who can collaborate with others is vital.”