Living out her dream at Goodman

Not many people get to live out their dreams.

Lina Kernan, about to make her Goodman Theatre debut in director Chuck Smith's revival of "Ain't Misbehavin'," counts herself among the lucky few who do.

"Goodman is the place a lot of actors want to get to," said the twentysomething Hoffman Estates native. "That's definitely how I felt."

"Being able to work here is leaving me speechless," she said. "Everything is new and exciting. It's like the first day of school."

Kernan has been schooled in the arts since the age of 3, when she started taking dance lessons at Dorothy's Dancing Academy in Schaumburg.

For years, dance was her first love. But in seventh grade, the Addison resident shifted her affections to theater after she joined a young people's choir called Peace Vision, one of the Chicago-area groups that performed in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" during its two-year Chicago run in the mid-1990s.

"That first entrance from the back of the house, when I saw the beautiful lights and stage, that was it," said Kernan. "I was hooked."

As a teenager, she performed in musicals first at Hoffman Estates High School and later at Conant High School in Hoffman Estates. She went on to major in musical theater at Roosevelt University. After graduating, she got cast in several Porchlight Music Theatre productions, including last year's splendid "Ragtime," where her supporting role came with a knockout solo. She took time off during that show's extended run to do "Smokey Joe's Café" at Timber Lake Playhouse in Mount Carroll, where she met Goodman resident director Smith. Smith cast her in Goodman's "Ain't Misbehavin,'" a salute to Thomas "Fats" Waller, the masterful stride pianist of the 1920s and 1930s responsible for gems like "Honeysuckle Rose" and "This Joint is Jumpin'" as well as the titular tune.

"Chuck Smith has a new vision for the show that's a little bit different from other productions," she said referring to how Smith shifted the setting from a nightclub to a concert hall and added what a Goodman press release describes as "eye-popping" visuals.

The veteran cast also includes E. Faye Butler (who was so brilliant as Ella Fitzgerald in Northlight Theatre's "Ella"), Parrish Collier, John Steven Crowley and Alexis J. Rogers. All save Kernan have done the show. And while she knew little of Waller's music before, she says doing it has made her a fan.

It has also made her more than a little nervous about opening night, when the audience will include a Kernan contingent.

"I've already made preparations to be alone that day to center myself," she said. "My adrenaline is going to be through the roof."

"It's going to be truly amazing."

Like a dream come true.