(His mother remembers him helping out his Nana, a nursery school teacher, by performing as a clown for the little ones.) Soon, he was cast in his first show, part of an international tour of Dream Girls. He got himself an agent and moved to New York City after college in 2009, with the support of his grandmother and aunt in Brooklyn. He laid into me the idea of being around like-minded people,” Hartwell recalls. “I was blessed to have a mentor, professor George Shirley, the first Black tenor to sing a leading role with the Met Opera, the oldest, wisest man ever. He went to University of Michigan for college, graduating summa cum laude, and getting more dancing, acting, and singing chops through their theater program. “I wasn’t stoked to be away from home, but to me high school felt like college, and college felt like grad school,” he says. There, he says, he learned both arts skills and maturity. Hartwell went to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston Salem for high school. “She picked him up and nurtured him,” says McNeil. Hartwell started training in theater and dance from an early age, taking advantage of the electives at Raleigh Christian Academy, but he says that Raleigh Little Theatre and the North Carolina Dance Institute “raised me artistically.” His first dance teacher, Kirstie (Tice) Spadie, was a particularly strong influence - “She’s my everything!” he says - who started preparing him for a Broadway career in elementary school. “He was very strict, he’d have them crying if they didn’t know their parts,” McNeil laughs, “but the parents would say, Hey, you said you wanted to do this! And people would come to the performances, knowing they would be amazing.” Hartwell in a Raleigh Little Theatre production of Cinderella. He’d organize cousins or neighborhood kids into plays, creating his own costumes and scripts, passing out tickets door-to-door with his little red wagon, and demanding perfection from his cast. She recalls Friday night trips to Blockbuster, where Hartwell would pick out movies starring Fred Astaire and Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. “He’s just got it in his fiber, he was focused.” There was never a backup plan to being a performer,” she says. “There was no maybe or if, it was always when. Hartwell’s mother, Elizabeth McNeil, knew early on that her son was destined for the stage - and that he would do whatever it took to get there. I learned to read a play, to memorize my lines, to recite a monologue. “Local theater became my background, my foundation. “It was amazing what I could do in my own backyard of 919 - few people that I meet have this same affinity for their hometown, and for what their state provides artistically,” says Hartwell. But, he says, all this success is rooted in the cultural opportunities he found in Raleigh. These days, Hartwell is at the peak of a successful Broadway career, having taken the stage in Hello, Dolly!, Memphis, Cinderella, and more, and is also running his own theater education business and working on a reality television show. Robert Hartwell remembers seeing his first musical, The Ice Wolf, at Raleigh Little Theatre in the early ‘90s, when he was 7 years old: “I thought, OMG, my entire life is changing - I want to do exactly what these people are doing.” Actor, dancer, and singer Robert Hartwell has success on and off the stage - and is bringing his talents to NC Theatre.īy Ayn-Monique Klahre Photograph by Danielle Cohen
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