CatLady3 said: "In other other news, this essay by Jonathan about Lea casually dropped an interesting little tidbit.
Lea Micheleand I met 17 years ago, at the audition that led us to playing opposite each other in “Spring Awakening.” I was from the farmlands of Lancaster, Penn., and Lea was this tough kid from the Bronx. She already had three Broadway credits to her name, while I was inexperienced, closeted and scared of her. At 18, she was sharp, funny, frank and saw everything.
Lea told me that before she found success on the stage, she and her family were scraping by. Her mom was a nurse, and her dad worked at the family deli in the Bronx. The morning they got the call that Lea, then 8, would be making her Broadway debut in “Les Misérables,” she spent the day bagging food at the register. This was 1995, and her grandfather, Porky, was still in prison for his ties to the Gambino crime family. Lea would visit him once a month on her days off from the theater. Learning how to deal with that complexity, combined with her success as a child actor, turned Lea into the force that I fell in love with in our early years."
Another thing amusing and ironic about Lea visiting her grandfather in prison is Fanny visited Nicky when he was in SingSing early on in their real-life relationship. More life experience to back up Lea's characterization. How hard that must have been.