Broadway Breakout Tatianna Cordoba Is Just Getting Started

Broadway newcomer Tatianna Cordoba is relaxing in her dressing room between rehearsal and this evening’s performance. On the agenda: finishing lunch, hydrating like crazy, and catching up on some TV—after this interview, of course. We’re here to talk about her Broadway debut in the musical Real Women Have Curves, which opened to acclaim, earned two Tony nominations, and has been known to cause mid-performance standing ovations during a certain underwear scene—but we’ll get to that later.

Real Women Have Curves: The Musical is based on the play by Josefina Lopez, which inspired the 2002 film starring a little-known actress at the time named America Ferrera. Set in 1987, Curves follows Ana, the spunky teenage daughter of Mexican immigrants, who begrudgingly works at her family’s dress factory in East Los Angeles but has big dreams of her own. Cordoba plays Ana on the stage, and themes of freedom, empowerment, body image, and feminism abound, all with an underlying thread of the immigrant experience. “I watched the movie with my parents after I got cast, and it was such a weird experience, because America Ferrera’s career exploded with Real Women Have Curves. It felt very reflective of what I was about to go through,” Cordoba says. The San Francisco native, who calls herself a Bay Area baby, knew from a young age that she wanted to pursue musical theater and even enrolled in the prestigious Boston Conservatory to study musical theater in college.

Cordoba, now 25, was cast as Ana after a nationwide search, but it took nearly three years of auditioning before she got the part. Her first few times around, she was so nervous, she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. But the last time, “I’ve never felt more calm in an audition, and just so ready and at peace with whatever the outcome would be,” she says. She has learned to tap into that sense of calm regularly, when she strips down to her underwear night after night, singing and dancing with the rest of her castmates to the titular “Real Women Have Curves” song. During the number, Ana is so fed up with the excruciating heat and abysmal conditions at the dress factory that she takes off her clothes and continues to work, inspiring the other women to follow suit. The musical number is perhaps one of the most feminist scenes on Broadway today, embracing body positivity among women of all ages and sizes. “It was hard to really feel the power of that scene until I saw what it does to people,” she says.

Here, Cordoba opens up to Glamour about her audition process, intermission snack breaks, and singing and dancing on stage in her undies, even while on her period.

Glamour: Before being cast in Real Women Have Curves on Broadway, what was your relationship to the 2002 film?

Tatianna Cordoba: Growing up, it was taught as this revolutionary piece, especially for its time, given its elements of body positivity and the immigrant story. So I was always aware of it, but I hadn’t seen it for a really long time. As soon as I heard whispers of it being made into a musical, I knew I wanted to be a part of it, but I superstitiously didn’t rewatch it until after I had been cast. Once I finally rewatched it, it was really cool to understand all that it stood for at the time, and see that it is still so relevant today.