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Maui’s Ha’i Superstar Amy Hanaiali’i Gilliom stars as Eva Peron in Evita

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Amy Hanaiali’i Gilliom’s name is synonymous with being one of Hawaii’s most successful contemporary Hawaiian recording artists. She’s recorded 16 albums, and is famously known for her immaculate Hawaiian falsetto style known as ha’i. She has 22 Na Hoku Hanohano Awards and five Grammy nominations.

But many of her fans don’t know that Gilliom is also a great theatrical actor. In fact, when she started recording with Willie K back in the 1990s, she was fresh off of the Hollywood audition circuit, and had done studio work with Jamie Foxx, her college classmate.

“Before that album in 1995 with Willie that started it all, I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Theatre from music school in San Diego,” she says. “I grew up through Maui Youth Theatre and the Baldwin Theatre Guild. I was auditioning in L.A. a lot. Jamie Foxx was my classmate so (back when he was Eric Bishop) we would go up to L.A. and do studio work all the time and do a lot of fun background vocals. Then I auditioned for Les Miserables and my number in line was 7,392 so I kind of thought, ‘hmmmm this is not really it.’ I looked across the way and saw a billboard for Natalie Cole playing at the Hollywood Bowl, and thought that is what I want to do!”

Gilliom says she knew she wanted to go into show business from a young age. She started as a self-proclaimed theatre geek at Baldwin High. Her grandmother, Jennie Napua Hanaiali’i Woodd, was an entertainer and mentor to her. After college, Gilliom started producing shows herself with her brother Eric on Maui.

“I was still doing a lot of back and forth to San Diego and L.A.,” Gilliom recalls. “Jamie [Foxx] was in In Living Color then and I was still flying up to do some work with him. I just wasn’t feeling it after a while and I came home. My brother and I started producing our own shows. We did them at Iao Theatre–the Maui Arts and Cultural Center wasn’t built yet. I did Evita, we did Godspell. These were our own productions at Iao Theatre.”

This Friday, Aug. 21, Gilliom hits the stage in Castle Theatre as Eva Peron again in the Maui Academy of Performing Arts (MAPA) production of Evita. It’s 25 years after her first Evita performance, and this time the show is under the direction of David Johnston, with Andre Morissette handling choreography.

“Evita is kicking my bootie!” she says. “Touring is one thing. It’s a lot of late hours and funky eating, you are on planes all the time, always moving. I try to keep a workout schedule, and I have Maddy–my daughter–and my mom lives with me. There are a lot of dynamics right now.”

Gilliom is a full time entertainer, with a rigorous touring schedule. Why did she come back to the stage?
“I kind of want to do something for myself right now,” Gilliom says. “I want to get more disciplined. Get back into voice lessons. You know, tune up my car. Andre, the choreographer, is kicking my bootie. I’m posting things up on my Facebook page and my fellow entertainers and friends are like, ‘Amy what are you doing? Is that tango dancing?'”
The role of Eva Peron has both inspired and challenged Gilliom. I recently met her in the studio room downstairs at the MAPA building with her daughter Maddy to talk about becoming Evita. She says she was ready to sink her teeth into the script and choreography, no matter how demanding. During the show, Gilliom will wear 16 couture costumes designed for her by Kenneth Peter Lee, including one just for the curtain call. She jokes that the saltines and water in her purse are her dinner tonight, but her dedication to the character is evident.
“I have to be honest, when I first started Evita I was telling David I have played myself onstage for 20 years,” she says. “It feels weird playing somebody. I love Eva Peron. I just love her, who she was. She was a powerful woman. She gave back to the people, gave back to the poor. She was active in women’s rights. A lot of the things I do right now. I had to sit by myself, just sit and try and figure out, what am I doing here? My mindset now is a lot different than when I played her 25 years ago. I was a lot younger then. I’m a lot more worldly now. I believe in a lot of the same morals and values that Eva does, but it’s still very hard. The role is very vocally demanding. I like that.”
Twenty years ago, when Amy and Willie K began performing together onstage, Amy was having the opposite issue: how to craft with her stage persona. She was no longer playing a character in a play or musical, and she had to come up with her own stories to tell on stage.
“When I first started entertaining with Willie, I had come from musical theatre school,” says Gilliom. “I played Mikado. I did full productions. I had the fourth wall up! I was like, ‘what do you mean, talk to the audience?’ You don’t do that! Suddenly I had to change, and break that. I had to entertain this new way. I had to come up with my stories. I had to come up with the story of me. It was very very different.”
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Yes, playing Eva Peron is a lot of work for Gilliom, but it’s not her whole professional life. On opening night at the MACC, she will also be launching her new Hanaiali’i Chardonnay, and debuting her newest musical album, also called Chardonnay. Both will be available at the MACC during the duration of Evita.
“I’m a Gemini–I get bored really fast,” Gilliom says. “The wine is a challenge for me. I love that the wine is bringing music back into the stores which is really important, especially for Hawaiian music. People are just slowly starting to do the downloads for Hawaiian music now and I keep very close tracking on that. I’m doing more product placement with my music. Coming out with wines, producing my own food wine and food festivals. It’s doing stuff like that where I can be in complete control of the whole atmosphere happening in that evening.”
Back in the 1990s, all musicians seemingly had to do was sell CDs at stores like Tower Records.
“You know what was crazy?” Gilliom asks. “That the style of music, the falsetto called ha’i that I sing, you know Aunty Genoa Keawe was doing that. Aunty Leina’ala Haili, all the greats were still doing it, but they weren’t doing it at the Waikiki Shell or touring. They were just under the radar. So when I started coming out, the Brothers Cazimeros was my first big concert in 1994, but it was already at the tail end of that era. Willie and I did my song ‘Haleiwa Hula’ and this other song I wrote in Hawaiian and literally the next day we sold 14,000 albums. People rushed the stores. But because the music scene has changed so much, things like that don’t really happen anymore. That’s like the last of that era.”
Today, catching Hawaiian music up to digital downloads has been a tremendous effort. Gilliom (like all contemporary musicians) has to work smart. That means branding herself, then attaching that brand to merchandise, all in hopes of continually growing her fan base. Her new wine is a big part of that strategy. From producing her own concerts to creating her own wine, Gilliom has a non-stop schedule, but for her attention to detail and to her brand is key.
“The wine has been crazy,” says Gilliom. “I’m leaving for Napa tomorrow night. I have a barrel sampling of my second vintage. I was doing a theater concert in Napa, and we did a kanikapila action afterwards at the house at the vineyards. The people who are my wine partners now approached me and said, ‘Hey, would you ever consider doing a wine?’ I thought of course–I mean, who wouldn’t want to do a wine? A lot of people drink in Hawaii and I love merlot. But I said the only way I would do it, like my music, is to my taste. I would want the wine to be like how I would drink the wine. Then I would totally be cool with that.”
Her first vintage was a bold merlot that was released early this year. Selling the wine was a new chapter for her as well.
“If I don’t understand how to do something, I will just be so grassroots,” says Gilliom. “I will just start making calls. How do I get this wine out? I get in the trenches of things. I called Mayor [Alan] Arakawa and I said, ‘Why don’t we have wine tasting here on Maui? Why can’t we taste it at Tamuras?’ He was like, well, okay, let’s change that. We have wine tastings now. I have been at wine tastings at Pahoa on the Big Island. I have been to every Times Supermarket, every Safeway. I have met every single general manager at every box store in Hawaii. I walk in and they are like, ‘What are you doing here?’ and I say, ‘I want to sell my wine in here, you want to taste it?’ I have no problem doing that at all.”
The story of her wine, from the flavor profile to the bottles, has all been a very personal part of Gilliom. The wine, called Hanaiali’i, bears not only her name, but the design on the bottle is a tattoo she wears on her left arm.
“The tattoo is an interesting part of my life,” she says. “I have a different one on that goes down the front of me I did in Tahiti a long long time ago after my grandmother passed. This one, the one that is on my bottles, I did after my father passed. This is a growth tattoo, and you don’t normally put a growth tattoo on the left side of your body, mostly you put them on the right side. But I wanted it to look like jewelry piece. This is the pika design, the octopus design, and the hapuu fern in here (my daughter is half Maori, her dad is from New Zealand). It’s all significant, my father is here. It signifies growth, like the octopus going into different areas with the tentacles, like me with my music.”
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Family is at the heart of everything Gilliom does. It’s what drives her and sustains her. Gilliom’s great great grandmother Hanaiali’i was a pure Hawaiian, born in a remote valley on the north shore of Molokai. Her grandmother Jennie Napua Hanaiali’i Woodd was one of the original dancers at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and went on to New York’s Hawaiian Room at the Lexington Hotel to perform and choreograph Ray Kinney’s famous Hawaiian revue that sold out shows for 60 years. Woodd also performed on Broadway in Hellzapoppin, where she met Gilliom’s grandfather and later worked in Hollywood on TV and movies. Woodd eventually went to Las Vegas, where she choreographed and revamped Hawaiian shows at the Tropicana and other famous Vegas venues. She also taught hula to over 30,000 people in California.
Now Gilliom is raising the next generation with her daughter Madeline Austin, who performs hula at Gilliom’s shows, tours with her and debuted her first stage performance in Oliver, a MAPA keiki production this summer. Gilliom says her family was very supportive of what she wanted to do, but they didn’t blow smoke when it came down to it.
“My parents were always very direct and very honest with me,” she says. “If I did a junk performance they told me, ‘That performance wasn’t very good maybe you should practice harder.’ I think that is super important growing up in the entertainment business.”
Gilliom says the Maui Youth Theatre, and later the Maui Academy of Performing Arts, have been beacons of guidance for both her and her daughter. Gilliom and Maddy have had the same dance teachers, and have performed in Summer Camp productions. She says her mom sees and points out parallels in their personalities. Gilliom believes these arts programs help Maui keiki to find themselves and become “articulate young beings.”
“Maddy’s performance in Oliver was very special for my family,” says Gilliom. “Watching her on stage was very special. She did great at blocking and direction and I was looking at more of those technical kinds of things. I’m a mom but I’m an entertainment mom. Of course I think she is absolutely fabulous. But I was looking out to make sure that she was paying attention to those kind of things. Maybe she doesn’t want to go into entertainment in the future. On her father’s side, they are all mega-superstar athletes in New Zealand. She’s an incredible runner. I’m guiding her the best way I know how–the way I was guided in my life.”
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Images of Amy Hanaiali’i Gilliom as Evita were taken by Monique Feil Photography, Courtesy of the Maui Academy of Performing Arts
Evita 
Aug. 21-30, 2015
Maui Arts and Cultural Center
Castle Theatre
808-242-SHOW
Director: David Johnston
Choreographer: Andre Morissette
Set Designer: Dan Hayes
Cast:

Eva Perón – Amy Hānaialiʻi Gilliom

Juan Perón – Francis Tau’a

Che – Kepa Cabanilla-Aricayos

Perón’s Mistress – Danielle Delaunay

Agustin Magaldi – Joey Schumacher

Ensemble – Jay Agasid, Ashlyn-Jade Aniban, Heather Bartlemus, Craig Bode, Shane Borge, Alfred Cantorna, Emily Cantorna, Dr. Virgie Cantorna, Alice Carter, Maile Castro, Jordyn Clarke, Haylie Daunhauer, Haley DeForest, Gina Duncan, Christie Ellison, Molli Fleming, Marion Haller, Halia Haynes, Casey Hearl, Tasiana Igondjo, Aeris Joseph, Brock Kahoohanohano-Ambrose, Julie Kawamura, Kevin Lawrence, Carlyn Leal, Jayse Leong, Nomi Macadangdang, Betty Miller, Orion Milligan, Danann Mitchell, Kaimana Neil, Tully O’Reilly, Jim Oxborrow, Sara Patton, David Pisoni, Isaac Rauch, David Rooks, Karli Rose, Kela Rothstein, Molly Schad, Cole Schafer, Emma Smith, Scott Smith, Theresa Supera, Joylene Nina Tabon, Marc Tolliver, Preston Watanabe, Eliza Wright, Nolan Yee

Tango Dancers – Vicky Ayers, Rose Baiot, Marcia Barnett, Peter Black, Sagundah Ferro Black, Hawkeye Lannis, Doug Miller, Nadama, Rita Okeane, Tom Weierhauser

Children’s Chorus – Ian Aguinaldo, Avery Ardoin, Madeline Austin, Ashton Chargualaf, Nealon Guzman, Kaylee Herman, Sofia Kafami, Randi Lonzaga, Haley Mahoe, Luna Graham Milligan, Jena Mukai, Elly Smith, Erin Smith, Dutch Tanaka Akana, Jillian Vince-Cruz

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For Amy’s wine and album releases:

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