Omar Padilla doesn’t often have the opportunity to perform in his native Spanish language, but now he’s playing Petruchio in a bilingual adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. The role is his first lead in a Shakespeare production. He’s thrilled that his mom, the last of his immediate family to immigrate to the U.S. from Mexico, will be able to follow the story.
“To me, it’s very special,” he says in a Zoom interview.
Padilla is one of the busiest actors in North Texas. Last year alone, he appeared in six stage shows. Since 2014, he has performed with virtually every major local company, from Dallas Theater Center and Theatre Three to Undermain, Kitchen Dog and Second Thought and just about every Shakespeare troupe in town.
His role in Shrew for Shakespeare Dallas will be his second appearance for the company this year. In January, he portrayed Lucio in Measure for Measure.
The comedy has been reset from late 16th-century Padua, Italy, to 1880s San Antonio by Pulitzer Prize-finalist Amy Freed, in modern verse. Padilla says it features references to famed Mexican musicians such as like Pedro Infante, Vicente Fernández and Juan Gabriel, including some songs.
The 40-year-old native of León, Guanajuato, moved to Dallas in 2009. Already in his mid-20s, he dreamed of becoming a film actor despite a lack of formal training. He began taking theater classes and appearing in student films. After he attended a few workshops at Teatro Dallas, artistic director Cora Cardona gave Padilla his first break in 2014, casting him as the antagonist in The Masks of Sor Juana. For two years, he performed exclusively with the company.
Padilla had been exposed to the arts from an early age, attending the annual El Cervantino international festival — named for Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes — in his home state hometown with his family. When he was about 7, his father took him to see the Disney film The Three Musketeers. He became enamored with the process after learning that the characters were played by actors who memorized a script. He started writing stories for his cousins to perform at their grandparents’ house.
“That was my first approach to having an audience,” Padilla recalls. “That’s the moment when I found out that my biggest passion was to entertain. I started entertaining my classmates, and then in my neighborhood I did the same thing. We started doing little plays. It became my hobby.”
In college, Padilla decided to major in communications instead of acting after his brother, who had been a successful university actor and now works as a marketing director, told him, “You’re going to starve.”
But after graduating and coming to Dallas, he decided he still wanted to pursue a film career. After his mother had a dream in which she saw him on stage in a play, he remembered that film stars like John Malkovich, Meryl Streep and Sir Ian McKellen had started in theater. He began auditioning for Latino companies.
With his Spanish accent as a potential obstacle for non-Hispanic roles, Padilla could have stopped there. But in 2017, during the run of a play called Stand-Up Tragedy at the Latino Cultural Center, fellow actor Marcus Stimac invited him to portray the Fool in an upcoming production of King Lear.
“He told me, ‘I have this company called Shakespeare in the Bar, and we rehearse like four or five times, and then we perform in front of an audience in a bar.’ I was fascinated with the whole concept, but I was extremely nervous because I had never done Shakespeare before,” Padilla recalls. “When I moved to Texas, I knew the most basic Shakespeare that someone can know. In Mexico, we learn more about Cervantes. It was not in my plan. I never thought I was going to fall in love with it. But it resonates right now, even if it was written so many years ago.”
Details
Sept. 19-Oct. 19 at Samuell-Grand Amphitheater, 1500 Tenison Parkway. $15-$20. shakespearedallas.org.
Arts Access is an arts journalism collaboration powered by The Dallas Morning News and KERA.
This community-funded journalism initiative is funded by the Better Together Fund, Carol & Don Glendenning, City of Dallas OAC, Communities Foundation of Texas, The University of Texas at Dallas, The Dallas Foundation, Eugene McDermott Foundation, James & Gayle Halperin Foundation, Jennifer & Peter Altabef and The Meadows Foundation. The News and KERA retain full editorial control of Arts Access’ journalism.
