Exclusive! Tony Winner Karen Olivo Opens Up About Her Broken Foot and Tearful Goodbye to West Side Story

By all accounts, 2009 was a year of triumph for Karen Olivo, who took Broadway by surprise by growing from a sassy supporting performance in In the Heights to the revered role of Anita in the revival of West Side Story. Along the way, she earned rave reviews, conquered her fear of dance, caught the eye of pop star Prince and, oh yeah, won a Tony Award for her efforts. But 2010? Not so great. 

Olivo’s troubles started at the Palace Theatre on the afternoon of Saturday, May 8, during the matinee performance of West Side Story. Having just finished her final scene in the show, in which (spoiler!) Anita is the subject of an attempted rape by the Jet boys at Doc’s store, Olivo spat her final words of hate at her attackers and flew out the onstage doorway, as she had every night for the prior year of performances. But this day, the door closed too fast.

“It clipped me on the shoulder as I was in full stride,” Olivo told Broadway.com. “Then I put my foot down, but it folded under me and I went down on the ground. I got up and fell again. Then I just crawled offstage, in full view of the audience.”

And that’s how Olivo finished her Tony-winning run in the show: crawling into the wing on her hands and knees dragging a broken foot behind her as her co-stars stood frozen in fear. “That was it,” she shrugs. “My last show.”

But it wasn’t supposed to end that way. Instead, Olivo spent two and a half months trying to get herself up to speed to rejoin West Side Story, while holed up in the New Jersey home she shares with her husband, actor Matt Caplan, focusing her pent-up energies on a kitchen remodeling (“There was a lot of figuring out—how come the plumber didn’t come? Why is there a leak there? Those are not the tiles we ordered!”) while nursing her injury.

Luckily, Olivo had the same doctor who helped Christina Applegate and her broken foot get back onstage after a month following her 2005 injury in Sweet Charity, Louis Galli. The podiatrist initially thought Olivo’s foot would take six weeks to heal, before an MRI revealed ripped ligaments that would slow down the recovery further.

“Six weeks turned to eight,” she remembers. “And every time I’d go see him, he’d put me through trials. He’d say, ‘Stand on one foot,” and I wouldn’t be able to do it. Nothing in my foot was working. I couldn’t curl my toes. On top of that, my foot started to atrophy in places because I wasn’t using any of the muscles. Muscles in my foot that were fine started to fuse together. Everything became one big block.”

Finally, Olivo was told in early August that the bone was healed and plans were made for her to rejoin the show after Labor Day. West Side Story associate choreographer Lori Werner met with her in a rehearsal room to start putting her through the motions. “Unfortunately, we learned pretty early on that I couldn’t really do anything,” Olivo says. “I couldn’t do any jumping, I couldn’t stand on one leg…”

Instead of sending Olivo back home to Jersey, the decision was made to alter the show’s iconic Jerome Robbins choreography to fit her limited abilities. “The entire company came in for a week of rehearsals with me,” she reveals. “They all worked overtime. Everyone was so supportive because they knew how bad I wanted to come back.”

But pushing to get herself back up to the level of her co-stars proved to be detrimental for Olivo, when a post-rehearsal visit to Dr. Galli revealed that her foot was now in worse shape than ever. “You’re not progressing,” he told her. “You’re getting worse.” “I’d been working to heal so I could pull off certain moves in the show,” she concludes. “But I hadn’t been working to heal my foot for life.”

That devastating prognosis, combined with news that the show’s producers were preparing to announce a January 2011 closing date, left Olivo with no option but to say goodbye to the role for good.

“I cried like a baby,” she admits. “I was really close to getting back onstage. I was getting new shoes. I was in for fittings and then…” Olivo was also “mortified” that the West Side Story company had put in the extra rehearsals for her: “Everyone worked so hard that one week. I have a wonderful cast.”

Olivo now admits that the run of the show, in which several cast members were replaced, was not an easy one. “The process wasn’t optimum, and it could have been,” she says. “There were a lot of casualties along the way and it embittered a lot of people.” Or maybe, she admits, it’s just the show itself: “It’s kind of hard to hate people every single night at 8 o’clock. To fight people, call them nasty things and eventually kill them. That’s kind of hard!”

Then there was the flurry of missed performances following her win at the 2009 Tonys. “My body just shut down on me,” she reveals. “They’d worked me and Josefina [Scaglione, who plays Maria] so hard. I’d performed ‘America’ on TV at least seven times before opening night. Then I was nominated for a Tony, did all the press events, all the luncheons. It was awesome, but it was also hard because I also had the pressure of doing the show every single night. We just never had a chance to rest.”

Message board attacks and news reports flared up over her post-Tonys absences. “They didn't know what they were talking about,” Olivo says. “Unless you’ve actually done an eight-show-week or you’ve been in a rehearsal room doing the same number for an entire day, you can’t understand the toll on your mind, your body. People say hurtful things and I’m a very sensitive person, but at the end of the day, I have to be logical. How could they know what we go through, or why I was out for two weeks? It’s a better story to say that I won a Tony and then said, ‘Screw you, guys! I already won the Tony!’ But instead, picture me at home with my Tony, saying, ‘I can’t believe I got this and now I can’t be onstage.’ I couldn’t defend my title.”

While continuing to work on her first CD (“I’m still finding my sound”), Olivo has kept busy with projects that don’t require her to dance up a storm, such as a multi-show arc on TV's The Good Wife as the younger love interest of Josh Charles. In late September, she filmed a small part on the Lower East Side in the Keanu Reeves film Generation Um. Olivo says Reeves was “dark and brooding and handsome, like exactly what you would think.” Celebrity crush? “He’s not my type. He’s too cool for me. The ones who got beat up after school? Those are the ones I like!”

Another recent highlight was a “wicked, wicked reading” of Lynn Nottage’s 1930s Hollywood-set play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which is set to run at off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theatre in April 2011. “I played two different characters and did four different dialects,” she excitedly reveals. “I did so much homework! It felt like I was studying for the SATs.”

“It was one of the coolest experiences of my life,” she concludes. OK, so maybe 2010 wasn’t so bad after all.


Karen Olivo as Anita in West Side Story