A New York theatre director, at the helm of one of the most buzzed about shows of the last few years, has told how the roots of her show business career lie in the amateur dramatic roles she played as a youngster in her native North East.
Billie Aken Tyers starting performing at a tender age and her talent on stage was known in her hometown of Consett in County Durham. She left for the bright lights of the Big Apple when she was just 18 to join a prestigious American drama school.
Now 31, she is the associate director of Titanique, a smash hit musical based on the 1997 film currently playing Off Broadway, that has also just been nominated for a number of Olivier Awards in the UK, after opening in the West End last year. It has been a long and eventful road for the working-class lass who was once a regular with the CBS Musical and Stage Society in Consett.
Billie, who grew up in Castleside and now lives in Brooklyn, said: “We did not have the resources to go to Newcastle to take dance classes or singing lessons so money was a deciding factor in the way I interacted with the arts. Community theatre gave me the ability to participate in an affordable way.
“CBS and the other am dram groups gave me the ability to cut my teeth and understand what the theatre even was.”
Billie studied for a BTEC in Performing Arts at New College Durham and was sponsored to attend the National Youth Theatre, which confirmed her interest in a career in theatre.
(Image: Billie Aken Tyers)
She said: “There are so many things you do not know about. You do not automatically know that directing or lighting design is something you do. It gave me a massive exposure to the classics. In community theatre you do Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Gilbert and Sullivan, and those sort of things, so I did the classics very early on and have a strong appreciation for them.
“You can spend all of this money going to drama school but it is one thing to learn about it and another thing to just do it.”
While her friends were filling in UCAS forms for university, Billie was carving out a different path and won a place at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the alma mater of Sex in the City star Kim Cattrall and movie legend Danny Devito. After graduating Billie began work as professional actor performing in some of America’s best regional theatres before moved into writing and directing.
In 2017 her play, Your Alice, which explores the unsettling relationship between Lewis Carroll and his young muse, opened Off-Broadway and went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where critics described it as ‘a masterpiece of modern theatre.’
For the past three years Billie has been the associate director of Titanique, the award-winning smash hit musical telling the story of Rose and Jack on board the ill-fated liner through the eyes of Celine Dion.
She has taught over 130 tracks to performers and covers five roles in the show having played both Rose and Ruth Dewitt Bukater, as well as Molly Brown, multiple times.
(Image: Billie Aken Tyers)
Billie said: “My role as associate director is to maintain the director’s vision. Once it opens they leave and only come back to check on it every now and then. The associate is the person who interacts with the understudies and the covers and who notes the show and mains the original vision of the show and ensures the principal actors are doing what they need to be doing.
“It is very wacky and zany, it is very gay and very camp. It is all Celine Dion songs and told through her perspective. She weaves her way in and out and sometimes she cannot help but insert herself into the story. It is genuinely fabulous. It is 90 minutes of joy.
“I have probably seen the show upwards of 500 times at this point. I see it all the time. I don’t think I have ever seen it and not laughed. It is just so joyful.”
Billie was last back home in December when she brought her American friends over for the recommitment ceremony to her husband Josiah Ruhland, a contractor from Iowa, who is also 31.
She said it was ‘weird’ looking at the rugged landscape of Northumberland and seeing people she is usually sees against the towering skyscraper filled cityscape of New York. She said: “These people know me so well but there is part of me they don’t fully understand so them being at the wedding helped them understand where I am from a bit. That was really important to me.”
Billie said she would be supportive of anyone thinking of following in her footsteps, but warned it has not been an easy journey. She said: “I remember going to drama school and thinking ‘there is nobody like me here. Most students come from a certain level of affluence so working-class people are massively underrepresented in our industry.
(Image: Evan Zimmerman)
“There are a lot of privileged people who do not know what it is like to go school with people who live on food stamps or live in a council house. They don’t understand the concept. The arts are elitist and to go to drama school or theatre school you are set up for failure if you are from the working classes because you have to have experience in the art form which is expensive and takes time.
“I knew from an early age that I was going up against. My casting type was always going to be poor people, maids or prostitutes, which is why I did not want to go to school in the UK because I would be up against 5ft 7ins gorgeous brunettes from the wealthiest of families.”
She said the move to America was a conscious decision to avoid class bias but said it is still prevalent. Billie said the move from acting to directing give her more agency and allows her to open doors for others. She said: “I know that when I am behind the table that it is a joyful room and everyone is respected. I can give people opportunities that I was not given.”
(Image: Billie Aken Tyers)
As an actress Billie is skilled at speaking in several accents including American, Cockney, RP, Scouse, Welsh and Irish.
But it is her own native tongue she had to work on when she first joined the American drama school.
She said: “It was the first thing they beat out of me. I remember they had a sheet of tongue twisters and the voice teacher would circle in red all of the things that were ‘wrong’.
“My sheet was covered in red because I had a thick accent. When I am home it comes back immediately. There is British guy in the show at the minute and I came back after a month away and he is like: “Oh my God, you sound so Geordie.”
View news Source: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/theatre-news/consett-actress-director-new-york-31136992
