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MANHATTAN MERCURY Manhattan, KS - January 25, 2010 From K-State to the nightclub circuit
In a place known for its idealization of perfection and the petite, feminine form, Alexander has struck a cord with Tinseltown’s night club audiences through her one woman cabaret show “Big, Blonde and Beautiful,” a music and comedy act that tells her story of a buxom beauty searching for Mr. Right. ”I’m just making fun of my own neurosis,” Alexander explained with a laugh. The show, which features a three piece band of piano, bass and drum, includes a mix of music that ranges from pop to country to jazz. “It’s a lot of fun and I feel at home on the stage, but if you would have told me 10 years ago that I would be doing this as a living, I never would have believed you.” While her jump into the entertainment industry was, by all measures, quick - a mere six months from the time she quit her 12-year job in fashion to opening her own, self-composed show - Alexander admits that it took her years to accept herself for who she was. Growing up in a suburb of Wichita, riding horses and living what she described as a typical country life, Alexander explained that she was always energetic, easy to get along with and excelled in school. Yet, despite her boisterous personality, the Andover native said that she “always felt out of place ” because of her size. Then, after high school, her insecurities heightened even more when she joined a sorority at K-State. “I had body issues all my life,” Alexander, now 38-years-old, explained of her look, “but I remember feeling so undesirable, like men wanted something other than me, that I wasn't OK... I thought that if I looked more like the other girls then I'd be more accepted.” While struggling to cope with a negative self image, Alexander went on to complete a degree in life sciences from K-State, after which she decided to take a job in the fashion industry with Brighton Collectibles. Over the next 12 years, she was transferred to Oklahoma City, Chicago, and finally Los Angeles before realizing she needed a change. Then, during a fortuitous trip to Cancun with a group of friends, she rediscovered her love of singing when her friends encouraged her to jump on stage for an impromptu performance with a local band. When Alexander returned from Mexico, she quit her job with Brighton and set out to follow her dream of performing on stage. Two weeks later, she met a man who directed cabaret shows and within six months she was starring in her own show. While she was finally happy in her career, Alexander soon realized that she also had to change how she perceived herself. “Everything about me is big: my personality, my smile, my hair... But at some point I realized that I had to quit beating myself up over it. I could either stop living my life or I could accept that this is the body I've been given.” Now, Alexander says that sees herself differently and compares her body to the healthy, strong, buxom beauties of old Hollywood sirens like Mae West, Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe. “I don't have to love myself any more or any less depending on my pant size,” she said. Since “Big, Blonde and Beautiful ” opened in 2007, Alexander has received acclaim from some of the industries top performers and critics, including Elliott Zwiebach (a writer for Cabaret Scenes Magazine) and Dana Meller (who recently played Eponine in Broadway ’s rendition of “Les Miserables ”). She has also been cast in several commercials and made numerous T.V. appearances. To date, however, Alexander might best be known for her role on the television reality show “More to Love,” which aired nationally last year. The show was produced by the makers of “The Bachelor ” and featured a 6-foot-3, 330-pound man choosing among women who wore sizes 14 to 22. (Alexander was sent home during the second round of the show, but says that she was fine with it, since she says that she felt no “chemistry ” with the bachelor. She does, however, continue to keep in contact with many of the women she met on the show.) Now, the K-State beauty is working on taking her show to Las Vegas this summer and just received a role in an Indie film, “The Troublemaker,” set to be released next year. Scoopfire.com Andover, KS -January 6,2010 by Jeff Guy Former Andover resident on TV, Hollywood stage Former Andover resident Arriane Alexander has been taking Hollywood nightclub audiences inside her odyssey of love, heartbreak and self-empowerment with a one-woman show that tells the story of a blonde bombshell’s search for Mr. Right. Her cabaret act, “Big Blonde and Beautiful” is a mix of music, comedy and poignant storytelling. A throwback to the buxom Hollywood blondes of earlier generations, the 38-year-old Alexander talks about being nearly 6 foot tall and voluptuous in an entertainment mecca where the gracile, petite figure is prized as the ideal object of feminine beauty. She jokes about looking for love on a reality television show and getting bleeped for saying an expletive on national television. “My show is me,” Alexander said of her cabaret act. “It’s character roles I take on, but basically it’s my story, my journey and my vulnerability.” Alexander’s showbiz journey began in Andover. “It started in Andover actually,” Alexander said, speaking by phone from her home outside Los Angeles. “When I was in third and fourth grade, I used to write plays and me and my friends would perform them.” Britt Messner, of Wichita, recalled becoming friends with Alexander around 30 years ago back when she was still known as Arriane Gump and had not yet taken on the glamorous Alexander name. Messner recalled how the two of them would perform comedy skits into a tape recorder. Alexander’s family had moved into Messner’s Wichita neighborhood. “We lived across from each other and she kept coming to my house, asking if I wanted to play,” Messner said. “I was shy and at first I didn’t, but she was persistent.” Alexander laughed when she recalled how one day her girlfriends stole a script she had written and ripped it up because she was always casting herself as the star of her plays. With “Big Blonde and Beautiful,” Alexander has again written herself into the lead, developing a stage monologue complemented by a mélange of pop, show tunes and obscure novelty songs. Alexander has put her spin on songs made famous by others. She takes Trace Adkins’s country hit, “Marry for Money” and interprets the tune from a female$rsquo;s perspective. The title of her “Big Blonde and Beautiful ”show was taken from a song featured in the musical, “ Hairspray.” Songs like “Something More”by Sugarland and Alanis Morissette’s “Everything ” reveal the essence of her quest for self-acceptance and personal fulfillment. Alexander’s performance brings out a side of her personality that laid dormant for many years, while she pursued higher education and moved up the career ladder. Burnt out on the corporate world, she rediscovered that part of herself that loved to entertain. The girl who years ago sang with the Wichita Southeast High show choir and performed in musicals reclaimed herself. She had always been a good student and people told her she should become a doctor or go into veterinary medicine like her father and grandfather. After graduating from Southeast in 1989, she attended Kansas State University, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1993. “Instead of following my creative instincts, which were to act and sing, I followed what people told me to do and got a life science degree and thought I was going to go to med school,” Alexander said. After graduating from K-State, she lived in Oklahoma City for awhile and later, Chicago. She was a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, then worked in marketing and did motivational speaking for a national modeling company, Brighton Collectibles. In her last two years with Brighton, she worked as a plus-size model. “I thought that would be fulfilling but it wasn't at all,” Alexander said. “I'm an entertainer. It's a different energy. I like to be active and engaged. In modeling I wasn't talking or being very active. It didn't fit my personality.” After 12 years with Brighton, Alexander left the company, not knowing what she would do with the rest of her life. She found the answer, while on vacation in Mexico. She was watching a band performing Barry Manilow songs at the Ritz-Carton lounge and by the end of the night, Alexander was singing with them and bonding with the audience. She wasn't exactly sure what a cabaret singer was, but that night she called a friend back home and told her she was going to be one. “Oh, like Liza Minnelli and Bette Midler?” the friend asked. “Exactly,” Alexander answered. Upon returning home to Santa Monica, Calif., where she had recently moved, and learned all she could about cabaret, watching performers and making contact with musical director Clifford Bell. With more than 30 years experience in the cabaret world, Bell has worked with Broadway artists and such performers as Katey Sagal, known to television viewers as Peg Bundy from “Married With Children.” While Alexander wrote the script for her show, Bell helped her revise and fine tune her act. He helped her select songs and learn dance moves. Alexander opened her cabaret show on the heels of recently appearing on the Fox reality TV show, “More to Love,” in which plus-sized women vied for the hand of a beefy man – an alternative to the perfect bodies audiences are used to seeing on shows like “The Bachelorette.” Barred by contract from discussing what went on behind the scenes, Alexander had plenty of hilarious on camera moments to draw from in her stage show. “On ’More to Love,’ there’s definitely backstabbing,” Alexander said, “because with 20 women, that’s going to happen.” But she came away with a new group of friends who she is still in contact with. Having battled weight and society’s stereotypes, the women – despite any differences they had with each other - shared a sense of respect and empathy that others might not relate to, she said. “When you've been put down your whole life for being fat or made fun of or have felt insecure or haven't had a boyfriend because you thought you were fat or people told you, you were fat or whatever, there’s so much shame and embarrassment and disappointment from being overweight or having eating issues or whatever everybody’s stuff is,” Alexander said. “We’ve dealt with so much in life we didn’t need to put each other down. It was a supportive group. With this group of women, it was so tender.” Alexander didn’t expect to find her future husband on a TV dating show, but she did want to show America that beautiful women come in all shapes and sizes. In one of the most memorable scenes from “More to Love,” she appeared in her bikini. Alexander was nervous about the appearance, but she forced herself to go through with it. Messner said Alexander has “always been extremely confident. Nothing embarrasses her. She’s not afraid to do anything.” Her national exposure this past year coincided with her 20-year high school reunion. It had been around five years since Alexander had been in Kansas and she was astounded by how much her old stomping ground has grown. “I grew up in Andover and I lived on Brookhaven, right across from Shadybrook,” she said. “I remember as a kid, for us to go to Wichita, it was like a trip. We had to pack and everything. It's so much closer to Wichita than it used to be. When I lived there it was tiny. Now it's like a city.” She continues going to auditions, hoping friends and family back home can see her in the national spotlight again. Her ultimate goal is to land a role in a television sitcom. In the meantime, Alexander has plans to perform “Big, Blonde and Beautiful” in Las Vegas this summer. Performing again has brought Alexander back to what she calls “my authenticity.” “Everything I did as a kid is what I do today. I just get paid for it now,” she said. CABARET SCENES - August 15, 2009 by Elliot Zwiebach
Alexander just finished a stint as one of twenty-four bachelorettes on Fox-TV’s More to Love, and that experience provided adequate fodder for her between-songs patter and put each number into a definite autobiographical context: the idea of doing the show despite lifelong body issues she thought she had overcome; the bitchiness of other contestants; and her ultimate rejection by Luke, the bachelor — which wasn’t’ so bad, she acknowledged, because she felt they had little in common. Having attained a height of 5 feet 10 inches at age thirteen, Alexander said she has dealt with body-size issues all her life but opted to participate in the TV show “because you have just one self, and you have to start living your life” — leading into a strong rendition of “Big, Blonde and Beautiful” from Hairspray (Marc Shaiman/Scott Whittman). When she described the moment Luke kicked her off the TV show, she used “Marry for Money” (James Melton/Dave Turnbull) to illustrate one possible alternative, then sang a hilarious parody of Maltby & Shire’s “I Don’t Remember Christmas” — retitlted “I Don’t Remember Purim,” about her almost-romance with an Israeli suitor (sample lyrics: “Was my Chanukah so special?/Did that big menorah burn?/Well, I guess I must have dreamt you/’Cause my dreidel didn’t turn.”) To illustrate the moment she had to reveal herself in a bikini on national television, Alexander sang “If I’m Tarzan, You’re Jane” (Michael Jay/Greg Smith) — starting out coyly, then strutting her stuff and ultimately pounding her chest, ending the song with a primal scream. She sang a pair of clever songs by Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich back-to-back: circling bass player Eric Holden as if he were prey in a sexy, funny (I can’t get enough of your) "Boom Boom,” then describing a woman who wants last night’s lover to leave (“The Morning After”) before the romance gets too serious, until changing her tune when he ultimately decides to go. She also scored on a couple of ballads: “No Man at All” (Lindy Robbins/Gerald Stenbach) and, particularly, Alanis Morisette’s sweet “Everything,” a paean to one’s own self worth. Alexander encored with a hilarous song called “Blow Me” (Richard Kraft/Tom Stern/ David Goldsmith), where each line started with a sexual innuendo that turned out to be not sexual at all once the line was completed (sample lyric: “Blow me … a kiss from across the room/Suck me … in with your charms.”) The show was directed by Clifford Bell, with musical director David Scott Cohen on keyboards, Holden on bass and guitar and Denise (Delish) Fraser on drums. Click here for the full article... EXAMINER.COM LOS ANGELES - August 23, 2009 Dating in an oversized world - 'Big, Blonde, & Beautiful' It was closing night of Arriane Alexander's cabaret show, Big, Blonde, & Beautiful at Catch One nightclub in Los Angeles. On Saturday, August 22, 2009, Arriane, a recent contestant on the FOX television reality show More to Love, where plus-sized women had the opportunity in being chosen by an eligible bachelor, dished out her love stories and woes of being single and oversized in today's dating world. Click here for the full article... EXAMINER.COM LOS ANGELES - August 4, 2009 Big, Blonde, and Beautiful takes over FOX I was a bit intrigued when I initially flipped through Fox last week to see the show More to Love. I am SO sick of watching reality dating shows that have the same "type casted ding -bats." I am sure they have wonderful qualities and all, but after they hit the editing room floor I cringe wondering; are these people really this stupid? The answer is typically: YES! More To Love however, had a lot more to offer. (Yes, pun intended!) Click here for the full article...
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Despite being 5-feet 10-inches tall with a curvaceous figure and even bigger
personality,
Kansas native and K-State alum Arriane Alexander never felt comfortable in her own skin.
Now, however, after rediscovering her love of the stage and taking a chance on a new career,
the self-professed blonde bombshell is singing a different tune — literally
— and Hollywood is beginning to take notice.