Brittany Sparkles gave up nicotine, caffeine, dairy and wheat for her dream role as Mimi in Rent.
"For some reason -- and I know this is really insane of me -- when rehearsal started I said, 'I'm going to quit everything that's bad for me,'" she says. She wanted to be at her peak mentally and physically.
Yes, the 28-year-old really goes by Sparkles -- where it matters, anyway: film credits, playbills and on Facebook. She likes that her full name is a sentence with an action verb.
Sparkles (real last name Rorie) also glitters. She smears glitter on her eyelids every day, usually in varying shades of gold, whether she's on the stage, cleaning houses around Little Rock or waiting tables at The Purple Cow.
She loved glitter as a child; she wore it in productions at the Arkansas Arts Center Children's Theatre and at Parkview Arts and Science Magnet School, where she transferred in her junior year of high school. She devoured every vocal, theater and dance role she could find.
"It [acting] makes me happy," Sparkles says. "When I'm not doing it, I get depressed and sad. [I think] What am I doing with myself?"
Glitter became her daily uniform. She started buying it in every color imaginable around the time she graduated from high school and began theater-hopping for local shows at Murry's Dinner Playhouse and The Weekend Theater. She wore it when she quit performing to live with her grandmother in Hawaii, then later at the now-closed Starlight House, where she threw a whirlwind of costume parties and house shows.
Her eyelids glittered when she returned to community theater in 2010 for a role she says changed her life: a chorus part in The Weekend Theater's Hair. The rock musical inspired by 1960s hippie counterculture was the first time Sparkles experienced a cast bonding so naturally.
To play Mimi in Rent, which ran July 10-27 at the Studio Theatre in Little Rock, Sparkles chose silver-based rainbow glitter. Like her character, Sparkles was homeless during most of preproduction; other cast members let her crash on their couches.
"It's not the most glamorous lifestyle, I know, but it's the only one I've been able to find that keeps me able to do what I love to do," she says. "I know that this experience as a whole is going to make me a better person ... so yeah, if a show means something to me, like Rent does, I'll do it for free.
"Maybe this is just me, wishful thinking, but if I really pour my heart and soul out on stage and give the show the energy it deserves, the audience has no choice but to feel it," Sparkles says.
Style on 08/17/2014