Kirklander to star in NBC’s live Peter Pan production to air Dec. 4

Published 7:00 am Tuesday, November 25, 2014

If you’re planning on watching NBC’s production “Peter Pan Live!” Dec. 4 keep an eye out for Kirkland native Alanna Saunders, who will play Tiger Lily. It’s her biggest role to date, though by no means is it her first, with her first acting role coming at the age of four in Johnny Appleseed with her four siblings, all of whom are also active in the arts.

A graduate of Juanita High School and a University of Miami alumnus, the role of Tiger Lily is the first role for the 22-year-old since she graduated from college.

Ironically, Peter Pan was the second performance she participated in at the age of 10, playing the twin lost boys along with her real-life twin sister, Claire, in addition to her three brothers, Heath, Trent and Blake.

“It was probably one of the most amazing experiences I’d ever had at that point in my life,” she wrote in an email interview. “Yes, because of my siblings, but also because it was the first emotional attachment I’d ever had to a show, and to an experience.”

Currently, Trent Saunders is on Broadway in Disney’s “Aladdin,” Blake Saunders is the choir teacher at Washington Middle School in Seattle, Heath Saunders made his off-Broadway debut in “Lennon: Through A Glass Onion” and Claire Saunders recently had a feature role in “The Intern” that starred Robert de Niro and Anne Hathaway.

Growing up in a family that she also performed with was an experience like no other.

“Like all families we had our differences,” she wrote, “But growing up all loving music and the arts allowed us to become the close-knit family we are today. We share a very strong passion for the same things, which means we appreciate and understand each other that much better. If you’re an artist, you know how widely your emotions range on a day-to-day basis and how that gets taken out on those closest to you. By understanding each other, everything feels a lot less personal, in a good way. But being from a family of artists, that also means emotions run high on the regular.”

Although she has found success in acting, she wrote she was first attracted to singing.

“I started singing in parts and in a choir when I was four as well,” she said. “It came naturally, being in front of people. I started to dance a little later because of a friend, and theater followed that. Music was my passion first.”

That passion remained with Saunders as she continued performing in roles and training as an actor through Studio East in Kirkland. In addition to performing in a family band, Saunders played the tenor saxophone in the high school jazz and concert band, as well as the bass clarinet. She also sang in the high school choir.

But, she said, acting has had an indescribable allure for her since she was young. After studying abroad for a semester, the experience solidified her desire to pursue acting.

“The thing that bothered me was that I didn’t know why I loved it,” she wrote. “It was what I had always done and what my family had always done. I hadn’t made the choice myself, so I decided to make some sort of choice all on my lonesome.”

Among her most favorite roles prior to college were Cinderella in “Cinderella,” Beth in “Little Women,” and Ti Moune in “Once on this Island.”

“I think that I fall in love with every role that I get to play,” she said. “Being able to live inside another person and understand all their complexities and what makes them beautiful and human, how could you not fall in love?”

While attending the University of Miami, Saunders went on to play Clara in “Night Train to Bolina,” Nellie in “Floyd Collins,” and Diana Morales in “A Chorus Line.”

“Morales was not a character that came naturally to me at first,” she wrote. “I wanted to make her softer and more complacent, she needed the opposite. She helped me to find my harder side and expand my abilities and use my vulnerability in a different way. It also helped that I think she has the best songs in the show.”

Though “Peter Pan Live!” is a live broadcast, it will not be the first time Saunders has been in front of a camera. As a child she acted in PBS’s “Biz Kids,” as one of the subhosts of the show, which she  described as being “like Bill Nye the Science Guy, except instead of teaching kids about science we taught them about money.”

“This was particularly different from stage because a good amount of the time we addressed the camera, ‘our audience’ directly, breaking that fourth wall,” she wrote. “Because it [Peter Pan] is live, it is actually more similar to stage performance than other film projects. Not being able to edit a performance is one of main differences between film and stage, and this concept shortens that gap.”

Despite her success in theater, Saunders said she wanted to be prepared to earn another living if it did not pan out. She took pre-med classes in high school and chose to go to a regular university that had a conservatory so she could continue studying.

“My original goal going into college was to take as many pre-med classes as possible so that way if I ever decided that I wanted to go to med school I would only need to go back to undergrad for another year or two,” she wrote. “In my mind it allowed me have, in the future, a family that I could support financially. That logic was one of the reasons I went with performing. Not because of what medicine isn’t, but because of what the arts are. Acting and singing and performing feed my soul more than anything else. It is what makes me happy. If I could be in a place I would be okay to not perform, then I could absolutely go into medicine.”

“The problem is,” she wrote further, “I don’t think I could survive if I couldn’t sing anymore.”