When Jason Moore was a kid growing up on Cleveland Street, he didn’t know what a theater or film director actually did.
But, says the Fayetteville native, “some part of me was instinctually doing it.”
“I planned these elaborate haunted houses with costumes, sets, music,” he remembers during a phone call from Los Angeles. “I wanted to make sure the ‘audience’ had a memorable experience.”
Almost three decades later, Moore is still creating those moments for audiences on Broadway and in movie theaters. His production of “Shrek” comes to the Walton Arts Center Tuesday, and his first feature film, “Pitch Perfect,” premiered earlier this month.
“I wasn’t ever sure whether I wanted to do movies or theater, and I’m still not sure at my age now,” Moore says with a chuckle. “I like doing both - and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been good at anything else!”
Before he graduated from Fayetteville High School in 1989, Moore told his father, Rudy - then an attorney, now a district judge - that he was never going to law school.
“He was incredibly supportive,” Moore remembers, “not just through college (he earned a bachelor’s degree in performance studies at Northwestern University in Chicago) but more importantly in those hard times after college.”
Moore moved to Los Angeles and did all the things struggling actors do - waited tables, taught safe-sex programs in high schools and life skills to developmentally disabled adults. It wasn’t just money he sought, he remembers, it was a way to “do things that felt a little more real than sometimes Hollywood can feel.”
At the end of almost five years, Moore was hired as assistant director for the musical “Ragtime,” which was mounting in Los Angeles then going to New York. But by the time he reached the Big Apple, “the producer was arrested for securities fraud, and I was out of a job,” he remembers. “I endedup on a couch on unemployment without ever having worked there. But because it had delivered me to New York, I felt like I should try it.”
Soon, Moore had a job as associate director of “Les Miserables” onBroadway, was directing episodic television - including “Dawson’s Creek,” “Everwood,” “One Tree Hill” and “Brothers and Sisters” - and was about to get the big break of his career: A musical about puppets that didthings Muppets never would.
“‘Avenue Q’ was originally conceived for television, then the producers of ‘Rent’ hired me to work to develop it into a full-length stage piece,” Moore explains. “I had the task of making it feel like an emotional journey that would justify sitting for two hours as opposed to 22 minutes.”
Like “Rent,” “Avenue Q” turned out to be about “a community of people who come together to overcome adversity and find their place in the world,” Moore says - just like “Shrek.”
The challenge of “Shrek,” he says, was “there wasn’t a musical to begin with, so there was no map for that. But it also made it really exciting, frankly.
And a big title like that makes for big expectations.
“But none of us would do this if we didn’t love the experience of putting things in front of an audience, no matter how scary it can be.
“‘Pitch Perfect’ was a great first movie for me because it’s about music performance and comedy through these great weird characters,” Moore says. “I want to do another movie as soon as possible!”
Asked if there was a moment when Moore knew he had arrived in the business, he says he has them all the time, the most recent when he was walking down the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the way to his film’s premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, billed as the most famous theater in the world.
“I had a total 12-year-old geek-out moment,” he says. “It’s a real gift to play in some of the places I get to play.”
Whats Up, Pages 13 on 10/26/2012