Samantha Marie Ware is earning rave reviews for her role as Nabulungi in the touring company of the hit musical The Book of Mormon, now playing in Los Angeles.
Ware joined the production after performing the role for six weeks on Broadway this past spring and she said that she was happy to be able to workshop the role with the show’s creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
“I was really playing Nabulungi as too grown up,” Ware told The Los Angeles Times. “Matt really helped me to find my inner innocence.”
Ware’s character sings one of the show’s most touching songs, “Sal Tlay Ka Siti,” towards the end of the first act and she old the paper that she is “on stage by myself and I’m very vulnerable. It’s just me and the audience and it can feel like they are judging me. So it took me a while to feel comfortable enough with myself to just tell the story to them because that’s what they are there for.”
Although the musical can seem disrespectful of religion, Ware noted, “I’m a religious person. I believe that there is a God and all that jazz, but when I’m on stage I’m playing a character. It’s easy to take my work and place it at a different level than who I really am.”
