Almost Famous, Beautiful, Xanadu

Anika grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts with nine brothers and sisters from different races and countries.  She made her performance debut singing with her siblings at her parents’ annual Christmas parties (her mother thought they were the multi-cultural Von Trapp family).  Anika thought her brothers and sisters were holding her back. Or she might just have been a bossy little brat. You make the call: check out the video to the left.

Anika spent the rest of her childhood wishing she could sound like what would happen if Little Orphan Annie and Whitney Houston had a baby.  (Real talk, she still secretly wishes that.) She did drama in high school, majored in theater and sang in an a cappella singing group called Shades at Yale University, and then moved to NYC to try her luck.

After a stretch of temping, nannying and unpaid theater gigs, Anika’s first professional acting job was Rent. After her contract ended, she was wicked psyched to see who would hire her next, now that she was a big Broadway actor.  She didn’t work again in theater for two years, a painful but invaluable lesson.  Eventually things picked up, and since then Anika has performed in national tours, regional productions, Off-Broadway, and she has appeared on Broadway in Almost Famous, Avenue Q, All Shook Up and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award. Perhaps most exciting, Anika has the unique distinction of being able to say she was in the original casts of both Xanadu and Zanna, Don’t!.

In 2007, with director April Nickell, Anika co-founded Jaradoa Theater, a company whose mission was to promote mercy, beauty and truth through performance and service. For four years they produced theater that strove to resonate, inspire and reach audiences that didn’t usually have access to theater, and they used theater to serve the community, volunteering in public middle schools, at-risk youth centers, teen alternative-to-incarceration programs, nursing homes, and homeless senior centers.

Anika joined the board of NYC Children’s Theater because the extraordinary outreach they do in public schools, community centers and homeless shelters was so in line with Jaradoa’s mission. She has taken over hosting their “Meet the Parent” live-streamed discussion series, where she talks to artists about how life in the theater affects their parenting, and how parenting affects their life in the theater.

Apparently while Anika was doing Beautiful she complained a lot backstage about the state of her love life, because one day during a quick change her dresser Lisa asked her if she wanted to be set up on a blind date with a trumpet player named Freddie. Best blind date of her (and his) life, and six months later they were living together with the first of two babies on the way, sons they call their “Beautiful Boys” since they wouldn’t exist without Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.

Freddie Maxwell is a brilliant jazz musician, and together he and Anika have formed The Larsen/Maxwell Quintet. They gig around the greater NYC area—catch them (or book them) sometime!

While on maternity leave, Anika was an adjunct professor in the theater department at SUNY New Paltz and realized how much she loves teaching. She zoom-taught musical theater to young people in China through the Stella Adler Studio, and to try to be of help to arts educators during the Covid shutdown, she did free zoom Q&As with over 75 schools all over the country and the world.

Anika also used the time off during the pandemic to try her hand at directing, helming live-streamed play readings and a run of Orlando Bishop’s one-man show Unstuck as F*ck at The Studios of Key West. It’s something she’d like to do more of in the future.

After reading yet another dire report about the climate crisis, Anika decided she had to be able to tell her children she really tried to help fight for their planet. She did the Climate Reality Project’s Leadership Training, joined the board of the Broadway Green Alliance and has become such a passionate ambassador for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (aka the Global Goals) that she created “The Broadway Vlog to Save the Planet” for the Broadway Podcast Network. Anika overcame her fear of social media to join Instagram as @GreenMomAF, where she posts backstage, behind-the-scenes shenanigans and interviews chock full of Broadway sustainability to inspire folks to climate action. Anika is awed by the tireless, brilliant people powering the climate revolution, which has helped her go from feeling helpless and hopeless to helpful and hopeful.

Anika is wicked psyched about her current project, a play called The Pocket Park Kids that she is co-writing with her old friend Orlando Bishop and directing for NYC Children’s Theater. The play aspires to create a family-sized niche in the climate movement by educating, inspiring and activating kids and their grownups to do what they can locally to help achieve the Global Goals that matter most to them. Small people can get big things done!