CAMOUFLAGE

Leana Rae Concepcion on character, agency, and finding the person underneath the performance

By Ricky Anderson

KAM-uh-flahj

It can be used as a noun or a verb.

Definition: A method of hiding or disguising people, animals, or objects by making them blend into their surroundings.

In theatre, camouflage can be an art form, a technique deployed as an actor disappears into a character. The voice changes. The body changes. The posture shifts. The performer finds the rhythm, language, physicality, and psychology of someone who exists somewhere beyond themselves. The audience watches the transformation and, if the work is successful, stops seeing the actor entirely.

The camouflage works.

But sometimes, the most interesting thing about creating a character is not what the actor hides, but what the character allows them to reveal. For Leana Rae Concepcion, the distance between actor and character can feel particularly small.

Onstage as Marcy Park in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Concepcion plays a young woman who appears to have everything figured out. She is disciplined, competitive, accomplished, and veritably unflappable. She speaks with the confidence of someone who has already mapped out exactly who she is supposed to become. But beneath that precision is something far more complicated.

A moment of introspection reveals that she is a young person who is bored, who wants something else, and who, perhaps for the first time, realizes that being good at something does not necessarily mean that that thing is what you want.

It is a deceptively simple idea, and one that sits at the heart of both Spelling Bee and Concepcion’s own story. Because before she was playing Marcy Park, Concepcion was a young woman with a very different plan. “I thought I was gonna attend West Point, graduate as a military officer, and hopefully go into intelligence.”

Somewhere between military school and a production of A Chorus Line, that changed the plan.

“I remember the stillness in the theater before everyone started to applaud,” she recalls. “And I just had a moment of like, oh, I don’t know if I want to go the rest of my life without feeling this again.”

Concepcion grew up in San Bernardino, California, where her introduction to theatre was hardly some grand declaration of artistic destiny. It was summer and a way to make friends. It was an opportunity to sing a Pussycat Dolls song and get cast as a genie in a youth production of Aladdin.

She did not understand that theatre could be a career. She simply knew that she liked doing it.

Concepcion grew up first-generation Filipino, surrounded by music in a culture where singing was less an extraordinary talent than it was an expectation. Karaoke was part of the landscape, and Dancing Queen was her go-to. Then, in middle school, came her first decision about the direction she wanted to take her life in. “I started a military program called the California Cadet Corps, and I did that up until I graduated from high school.”

For six years, discipline became part of her identity. The military program offered structure, routine, precision, and a clear path forward. Concepcion assumed that path would eventually lead her to becoming a military officer.

Then, as if written from a movie, came dance. A friend suggested she join a new dance conservatory, and Concepcion’s first thought was not, “This will make my West Point application more interesting!”

But, as Gloria Estefan once canonically put it: The rhythm is going to get you.

By her junior year, she was commuting to Palm Springs for musical theatre training. She was cast as Penny Pingleton in Hairspray and Deena Morales in A Chorus Line. She was working alongside Broadway performers who had been brought in to play the adult roles and teach the students. Suddenly, the people she had spent her childhood imagining as impossibly distant began standing in the same rehearsal room.

That experience gave Concepcion something perhaps even more valuable than technical training. It offered invaluable perspective.

“These are just people,” she says. “They were me at one point. I will hopefully be them at some point in my life and my career.”

It is an idea that has stayed with her.

Every Broadway performer was once the kid sitting in the audience. The professional was once the student watching and learning from someone else. And with that, the person being admired today may be the person standing beside you tomorrow, still filling you with awe that you can now wear the mantle of “colleagues.”

This idea offered a lesson about character, too. Character is often the collection of assumptions we make about ourselves before we have had the opportunity to become anything else.

Marcy Park is an archetype. She is also, intentionally, a stereotype. A distinction that matters.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee premiered on Broadway in 2005, introducing audiences to a collection of heightened personalities that felt simultaneously ridiculous and recognizable. The characters are broad because the world of the musical is broad, but beneath the comedy are very real human anxieties: embarrassment, abandonment, longing, desire, competitiveness, vulnerability.

Twenty years later, a revival presents a new question: What happens when the people playing those archetypes are different?

“We’re also different human beings,” Concepcion says, citing the actors and cultural landscape of 20 years ago. “We’re in the year 2026. So things will change naturally.”

For Marcy, that change became the central challenge.

Concepcion had previously played the role at the Kennedy Center, but she admits that she and director Danny Mefford initially struggled to understand her. They had the archetype, but they did not yet have the person. During the time between the Kennedy Center production and the revival, Concepcion kept thinking about Marcy. Who was she? What did she mean? And, perhaps most importantly, what existed underneath the version of her audiences already knew?

When rehearsals began again, Concepcion and Mefford looked at one another and realized they had gotten something wrong.

So they started over. They talked, molded, shifted, and pivoted. The goal was not to rewrite Marcy; it was to give her agency.

That distinction became especially important to Concepcion because she recognized something of herself in the character.

“These are archetypes and they are stereotypes,” she says. “I want to make sure that I’m not perpetuating a stereotype. That she does have agency.”

Agency, in this case, means allowing Marcy to be more than the things she is good at. She can be bored, uncertain, and have interests that have nothing to do with achievement. She can look at the life that has been laid out for her and think, Actually, maybe I don’t want this.

“Maybe I’m (Marcy) just here because this was on my calendar,” Concepcion says. “But really what I want to be doing is playing my video games at home and hanging out and having a good time.”

It is a funny observation that is also profoundly human. How often do we confuse achievement with fulfillment? How often do we assume that because someone is good at something, they must want to continue doing it? How often do we mistake discipline for desire?

Concepcion knows something about that distinction.

She spent years preparing for a future she believed belonged to her. Military school taught her discipline, tactfulness, time management, and how to stay on a path. Those skills did not disappear when she left that path. Instead, they followed her into the theatre. What once seemed like preparation for one life became preparation for another. Even the discipline that initially seemed unrelated to acting became part of her craft.

The actor’s body is an instrument. The work requires repetition, stamina, attention, routine, and an almost athletic commitment to showing up prepared. Concepcion’s military background may have pointed her West, but it also quietly prepared her for Broadway.

Sometimes the life we leave behind is still teaching us how to live the life we choose. That may be why Marcy feels so personal.

Concepcion describes herself as naturally regimented and no-nonsense, an energy that can sometimes be misread before people know where it comes from. But she also describes another side of herself: bubbly, goofy, free-spirited.

Both exist. Both are real.

And Marcy contains both, too.

“No one really ever allows her to show that side of her,” Concepcion says. “She shows herself in a very specific way.”

Until she gets to make a choice. And once a person is given the freedom to make a choice, Concepcion believes, you never know what you are going to get. “That’s why I love her so much.”

There is something almost radical about that idea. A character does not have to remain trapped inside the first impression we have of them. Neither does a person.

Perhaps that is the real work of a revival, its inherent beauty. Not simply bringing an old story back to life, but allowing the people telling it now to interrogate what the story means to them.

The original Spelling Bee characters were created for a particular cultural moment. The performers inhabiting them now exist in another.

The world, actors, and audiences have all changed. So why not have the characters, inevitably, change with them? This does not mean abandoning what came before. It means listening to it and understanding the present.

Concepcion understands that responsibility deeply. She speaks with genuine reverence for the original company and the contribution they made to musical theatre. But reverence does not mean imitation. An actor cannot simply put on someone else’s performance like a costume. It is dishonest to themselves and to the form. At some point, they have to find their own way into the character. That is where camouflage becomes something else entirely. The actor disappears, yes, but not because they have erased themselves. But because they have found a way to make the character and themselves coexist.

Concepcion’s journey to Broadway was itself an exercise in that kind of discovery.

When she arrived at PACE, she was terrified. She had an intense case of imposter syndrome and felt surrounded by people who had been preparing for this career far longer than she had. So she did what she knew how to do.

She worked, asked questions, watched, and learned. For four years, she rushed shows across New York City, seeing everything she could from Off-Off-Broadway to Broadway. She studied performers. She developed opinions. She paid attention to what moved her and what did not. She became a student of the craft by becoming a student of the city.

Then came her Broadway debut in Merrily We Roll Along.

Not simply a Broadway debut, but a debut in one of the most celebrated revivals of Stephen Sondheim’s work in recent Broadway history, alongside Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez. For Concepcion, it was the kind of opportunity that can feel impossible to imagine until it is suddenly happening.

She got the cast album. She performed at the Tony Awards. The production won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. She worked alongside performers she had once watched from underneath the covers of her childhood bedroom, consuming Broadway videos and “slime tutorials” and trying to understand the world she hoped to enter.

Then she found herself in that world, working beside the people she once watched. Lindsay Mendez, whom she had first met as a teenager during a concert production of Lucky Stiff, was now her colleague. The distance between idol and peer had disappeared. The camouflage had changed. The kid watching the stage had become the person standing on it.

Which brings us back to Marcy Park. A character who appears to know exactly who she is. A girl defined by achievement, discipline, and expectation. A person whose identity seems so carefully constructed that there is almost no room left for surprise. Until she surprises herself.

That is the part Concepcion understands, because her own life is full of moments when the person she thought she was supposed to become gave way to the person she actually wanted to be.

West Point became PACE. Military intelligence became musical theatre. The disciplined cadet became an actor who describes herself as bubbly and goofy. And the performer who once worried she was behind everyone else became a Broadway actress. None of those earlier versions of Leana disappeared. They simply became part of the person standing onstage now.

Maybe that is what great character work ultimately asks of an actor. Not to camouflage themselves completely, but to adapt to the shifting terrain of life as we grow and change, like the shows, audiences, and actors do around us.

Not to disappear.

But to find the places where the character and the actor unexpectedly recognize one another.

The audience may come to see Marcy Park. But somewhere inside that performance is Leana Rae Concepcion, carrying the discipline, uncertainty, ambition, humor, curiosity, and freedom that brought her there.

And maybe that is why character matters so much.

Because the best characters do not simply show us someone else; they show us ourselves. The parts we perform, the expectations we inherit, the paths we follow because we think we are supposed to, and, eventually, the courage it takes to choose something different.

Sometimes, beneath the character, we find the person we were becoming all along.

For more information, follow @leanaraeconcepcion and @spellingbee. Written by @RickyPresents for @StageLightMag