Mia Zottolo has enjoyed some incredible roles. She played Katherine Howard in “Six.” Eurydice in “Hadestown Teen Edition.” Judas Iscariot in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The Leading Player in “Pippin.” It wasn’t always that way.
“When she was really young, she wasn’t getting the parts that she really wanted,” Paola Zottolo recalled. “Back then, she was always in the ensemble. Like a flower over there or a tree over here. And she wasn’t happy because she wanted to do more.”
Zottolo didn’t complain to the directors at her daughter’s school. She didn’t accuse them of overlooking her clearly talented child.
“I said, OK, if this is really what you want to do, then use that energy to get better instead of dwelling on why you didn’t get that part. And I said I’ll help you if that’s what you want to do. I’ll support you. I’ll find people to help you develop your singing, your acting, your dancing.”
That’s precisely what Zottolo did. Matt Kohler for voice lessons. Kody Jones and Joseph Brauer for acting. Dance at various studios.
Mia was an apt pupil. She got good, really good. The parts got better and better.
“So my guidance was getting her the outside help she needed because prior to that, she didn’t have any real training,” said Zottolo. “I said if you want to do it seriously, then you’re going to have to have training because that’s the only way. All the other people who make it, it’s because they keep training all the time. There’s always something to learn.”
Mia wants to be on Broadway one day. There’s no compromising. Nothing short of that will make her happy.
Zottolo believes she’s got a really good shot at making that dream come true.
“She’s a really hard worker,” Zottolo noted. “She’s respectful. She’s dedicated. She takes it seriously. She does whatever she needs to do. She makes a lot of sacrifices. Those are good qualities to have for that type of profession, because it’s rough.”
It also help immensely that she’s been accepted into the NYU Tisch School of the Arts in the fall.
Mia Zottolo is definitely one to watch.
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Paola Zottolo confessed surprise at her daughter’s obsession with theater.
“She didn’t get that from me,” Zottolo maintained. “There’s nothing artistic in me whatsoever.”
Growing up, Paola Zottolo did sing in the choir at church and in middle and high school. It was free and her dad loved to sing as well.
“In Argentina, there are no bands in school, no extracurricular activities or sports,” said Zottolo. “There’s nothing [like theater or dance]. Besides, I grew up dirt poor, so even if there had been something, I wouldn’t have really been able to do it. We couldn’t afford it.”
Mia had options that weren’t available to her mother. Zottolo made sure of that.
“Mia tried a few things before falling into theater. She did gymnastics. I put her in that when she was 3 or 4 to burn some energy, right? She moved on to horseback riding. That didn’t last too long. And then she started doing dance. She wanted to do competitive dance, and she did that for a couple of years.”
Mia is the second of two children. She has a brother who’s three years older.
“They were both at Oasis,” Zottolo recounted. “He was in fourth grade. He’s not a theater kid, but that year Oasis was doing ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and my son wanted to do it because he wanted to be an Oompa-Loompa with his best friend and fool around in the show. I went to watch it with Mia and Mia was sitting there and she was like, ‘I want to do that.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, but you have to wait a year’ because the school didn’t let them do shows until third grade.”
The summer before Mia entered the third grade, Zottolo enrolled her in summer camp with the same teacher that ran the theater program at school.
“She was happy as a clam. She loved it, and then when she went into third grade, she started to audition for the shows, and she’s never stopped. That’s her calling. There’s nothing else she would rather be doing.”
Not long after, Mia began auditioning for shows at area theaters. At school, the majority of her classmates were doing theater for fun. That’s as it should be. They were 8 and 9-year-olds. But at those community theater venues, she met kids who were more serious, who wanted to perfect their craft, who had aspirations for the future. It opened up a whole new world of possibility. Suddenly, Mia wanted more.
“Actually, it was at Florida Rep. when she realized she wanted to take acting more seriously,” Zottolo recalled. “That’s where she met Kody [Jones], Joseph [Brauer] and Christina, and they gave her the part of Matilda without even knowing her, which I thought was crazy, but they did.”
It marked a turning point in her fledgling career.
“She also saw that most of the people that were really good or wanted to do theater in the future were going to certain schools. She wanted to go to North Fort Myers Academy Middle School. She auditioned for sixth grade, and she got in.”
After three years at North Academy, she auditioned for Janelle Laux’s musical theater program at North Fort Myers High School. She got it, not just via audition, but through the ACE program as well.
As any parent with a child in football, basketball or soccer knows, squiring children between school, the practice field, games and home can be all consuming. Theater is no different in that respect.
“But what’s better for a parent than to see your kid do what makes her happy?” asks Zottolo. “I had the chance to do what I loved to do [designing cars in Detroit], and I wanted to give the same opportunity to my kids. I did the same with my son with soccer. We used to drive him everywhere. We did the same for Mia.”
When Jones left the Rep, Mia and her mother followed him to the Naples Performing Arts Center.
“So we used to drive to Naples for rehearsals.”
But it proved worthwhile.
“That year, he took a group [of students] to the Junior Theatre Festival in Atlanta. They did ‘Moana’ and Mia got the award for Best Individual Performer, which was really cool.”
When Jones moved up the road to Arts Bonita, Zottolo and daughter followed once again.
“Kody runs things very professionally,” Zottolo commented. “He treats all the kids as if they were professionals on Broadway. He runs the same kind of schedules – three- to four-hour rehearsals. First rehearsal, they have to be off book already. Mia likes the structure. She likes to do it professionally. If she goes to a place where people are just doing it for fun and they’re fooling around and not paying attention, she just can’t deal with that. She doesn’t like that because that’s not what she wants to do. Nothing wrong with people who want to do that, but that’s not what she wants.”
Since it didn’t make sense to drop Mia off at Arts Bonita, drive back to the Cape only to have to turn around and drive back a couple of hours later, Zottolo became accustomed to bringing her paperwork along and doing it in the back of the rehearsal space.
Theater requires sacrifice.
Including family outings and vacations.
But it is different from the perspective of family outings and vacations.
“It’s hard on your family life because you have to plan around her shows and her rehearsals,” Zottolo pointed out. “She can’t miss two or three rehearsals in a week because she’s out on vacation, you know. So she has had to make a lot of sacrifices. She has missed a lot of fun stuff. For example, she missed her senior prom this year because of her show.”
However, the commuting, juggling schoolwork and rehearsal schedules, the family time they both had to sacrifice paled in comparison to the snarky, unkind comments Mia was subjected to on occasion as she continued to improve.
“It’s rough because in elementary and middle school and kids become jealous, they can really be mean,” said Zottolo ruefully. “I think a lot of it is that some parents just don’t guide their kids and say look, you don’t need to bring anybody down to do your thing. There’s room for everybody. You do you and they do them. The right opportunity is going to come to everybody. Mia had a really hard time with that. So that was the hardest part for me. For me, it’s like just don’t pay attention to them. Do your thing. Do you. You’re good enough. You don’t need to compete with anybody. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like you. But the hardest guidance was the human relations because we as adults, we see it in a different way. Rub it off. Who cares? But at that age, they’re not that mature for that. It’s devastating.”
In a couple of weeks, Mia’s pre-professional journey winds to a conclusion. Along the way, she’s garnered a number of prestigious individual awards. At last Friday night’s High School Musical Theater Awards, she was runner-up for the Outstanding Performer in a Female-Identifying Role for “Pippin.” She was also finalist for the Broadway Star of the Future Awards in Tampa for her portrayal of the The Leading Player.
Perhaps best of all, Mia is going to NYU in the fall.
"Which is amazing,” Zottolo exclaimed. “We’re excited. We’re scared. She’s a great daughter, so I got lucky. She’s a really hard worker. I know that I’m biased, but she deserves what she gets because she worked so, so hard.”
But as Zottolo observed earlier, there’s always more to learn.
“She still needs to build a little more confidence. The industry is super competitive. Even the most talented people still doubt themselves when they go to an audition because it’s always in the back of their mind that they’re not good enough.”
Mia’s good enough and with her work ethic, she’ll only get better as she progresses through four years at Tisch School of the Arts.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.