North Bay Woman

18 NORTH BAY WOMAN | S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 Stephanie St. James, as Squeak in a the juke joint scene, (with left to right, Michelle Williams, Felicia P. Field and St. James), from the first Broadway national tour of "The Color Purple". –Photo by Joan Marcus She trained at the San Francisco and Marin Ballets, took private ballet lessons in Santa Rosa, attended Santa Rosa High School (specifically for Dan Earl's choir and John Craven's drama program) and graduated early by taking summer school each year. "I started singing right about the time I could talk because of my dad, who played the guitar and sang calypso music," St. James says. "But I'm a dancer at heart." Her mother, she reveals, "was the key person behind me pursuing my dreams and allowing me to flourish in my art and be who I was. It was a great thing." By age 20, St. James was on her own and in New York, attending the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, an institution that turned out such notable alumni as Paul Sorvino, Gretchen Mol and Tyne Daly. St. James hadn't finished her final semester there before she booked her first job – a European tour of "Fame." "It was a big achievement to get to New York and, after I got that first gig, all these things started to unfold," she says. For the next 20 years, she worked her dream, performing for audiences throughout America, Europe, Australia, Asia and Denmark in productions of "Godspell", "Footloose", "Garry Marshall's Happy Days, The Musical", "Oprah Winfrey Present's The Color Purple", "Jesus Christ Superstar", "Little Shop of Horrors", and "Grease", among others. She picked up several awards along the way. What audiences didn't see, though, and what her fellow troupers didn't know, was that every month she would suffer excruciating pelvic pain. The journey of endometriosis "I got my period when I was 11, and I can remember being in third period dance class and in incredible pain," St. James confides. "I thought the pain was normal then, but it got really bad in 1998, when I touring in the first Broadway national tour of "Footloose." In the ensuing years, no one in the medical profession had answers for her, she says, "They thought I was being overdramatic and gave me St. James, as Mabel in "Fame", in the European tour of original cast and recording. – Photo by Wolfgang Bocksch Productions

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