San Anselmo Actress Nominated for Broadway World Award

Lexie Papedo is having a good year.

Along with getting engaged and traveling to New York to star in featured at the New York Musical Theater Festival, Papedo is also having a breakout year as an actress.

The 2002 Drake grad was nominated earlier this month for the Person to Watch award for the 2011 Broadway World San Francisco Awards. A number of shows she was involved with were nominated as well, including The Salt Plays with the Shotgun Players in the East Bay and Tales of the City at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

You can vote for her online; she’s currently in fourth place. Winners will be announced in April.

“When it rains, it pours,” said Papedo. “I’m just counting my blessings.”

Papedo’s big year started when a fellow ’s grad Drew Gasperini had his musical, Crazy, Just Like Me, accepted in the New York Musical Theater Festival – a festival focused on getting out new voices. Papedo, who had grown up doing theater with Gasperini, knew a friend of the director from her work on Tales of the City and was encouraged to send a video in for the New York show.

She got the lead and was a hit. The show earned an audience award for Best of the Fest and Papedo was a finalist for the festival’s Next Broadway Sensation award.

“It was the most incredible, heartfelt experience I’ve had so far in theater,” she said.

Of course, with the kind of year she’s having, a breakout starring performance in New York wasn’t the only excitement.

The night before she flew out to the East Coast, her boyfriend, a fifth-grade teacher at , proposed.

“It was the most incredible thing,” she said.

Right now, Papedo is capitalizing on all the success she’s experiencing. She just signed with an agent in San Francisco after her Broadway World nomination. And she’s flying back to New York in January for a reading of a new play of Gasperini’s. She plans to go back and forth between the coasts as she builds up her work and contacts.

There were a lot of years before this exciting one, though.

As a kid, Papedo took tap, jazz, ballet and performed in the musicals at Marilyn Izdebski’s in San Anselmo. She loved musical theater and had “the bug,” she said. In those early classes, she learned the basics and made relationships that still serve her now. Some of those friends, who first tied on their tap shoes with her, will be in her upcoming wedding.

“It was a formative experience,” she said.

At , she studied with drama teacher David G. Smith, who taught her about acting and helped her move into a new realm of theater. It was also a time to think about what she wanted to do with her art and work.

But, it was hard for Papedo to pick just one thing to focus on when she was interested in so many. After starting at UCLA, she wanted to study political science, art, drama, and women’s studies. She ended up in the World Arts and Cultures program, which gave her the opportunity to study art activism and theater at the same time.

It still took her a little while to decide she wanted to focus on acting.

Immediately out of school, she worked for ABC in the casting and production department on a TV show. She then moved back to the Bay Area and worked for a number of different groups and served as the education director for a theater company in the East Bay. All the while, she was dabbling in acting and appearing in shows.

But, that ended this summer when she decided she was going to make a real go at theater – no matter what.

“I didn’t want to play it safe anymore,” she said.

It certainly worked out well.

If the months since she made that decision are any indication, it’s going to be all fun and awards for the San Anselmo native.

“I’m riding the wave,” said Papedo.