Linedy Genao was reared on a series of Cinderellas—or, as her Spanish-speaking Dominican-American family calls the iconic rags-to-riches heroine, Cenicienta. A self-professed “fairy tale girl,” Genao watched Disney’s warbling animated angel, Brandy’s 1997 incarnation with Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother, Hilary Duff’s early-aughts A Cinderella Story, and, on a plane to London, the 2021 Camila Cabello vehicle that streamed on Amazon.
Now Genao, 31, is preparing her own addition to the canon, starring in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new Broadway musical, Bad Cinderella, opening on March 23. (The book is by Emerald Fennell, the master of dark femme material.) Genao’s Cinderella is an angsty outcast in a Belleville teeming with Real Housewives bobbleheads and gratuitously shirtless men. “This Cinderella does not bite her tongue. She speaks her truth,” Genao tells Vogue from her dressing room via Zoom, wearing a slick leather moto jacket. “She’s not quiet and polite. She’s real and she’s honest.”
She’s also unapologetically true to Genao: a proud, Brooklyn-accented Dominicana who was encouraged to pour her loudness and her mannerisms into the character. “My Brooklyn is coming out in ways I haven’t heard in a long time,” says Genao, who was born in the New York borough before moving to Hamden, Connecticut at age 10. “I speak a lot with my eyebrows, ’cause that’s just what we do—at least me.”
With her implicit-if-not-explicitly-declared Latina Cinderella, Genao is making history as the first Latina to originate a Lloyd Webber musical, a fact she highlights upfront in her Playbill credit. “I never saw a princess that I could relate to growing up—that looked like me, that sounded like me,” she says. “I just hope and pray that other people can see themselves represented on stage a little bit more now.”
During auditions, Genao instantly related to her character’s outsider status. When she moved to Connecticut, “I was too Latin for my white friends” there, she says, “but then when I went back to Brooklyn to my family, I was too white.”
In 2015, she made her Broadway debut in the ensemble of the Gloria Estefan bio-musical On Your Feet!—a part she earned after her friend’s mom sent her a Facebook message about an open call for Latin performers. The DM popped up while Genao, then working her post-college job at a private Lebanese bank in New York, was on her lunch break. She didn’t have a professional headshot, “so I took a selfie on my iPhone 4 and printed it at Walgreens.” On the merits of her Hamden High School and community theater training, Genao made the cut: “The amount of tears that were shed,” she says, shaking her head at the memory, “you can’t even imagine.” (Last year, she played Estefan herself when On Your Feet! ran at the Broadway-feeding Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.)
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