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As a member of the ensemble for Foothill Music Theatre’s production of “The Prom,” Leo Lopez is playing several different characters in the musical. But the Menlo Park resident is accustomed to occupying diverse roles in everyday life, as well: he’s an actor, but offstage, he’s also a pediatric cardiologist and a professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Peninsula audiences can catch Lopez onstage in “The Prom” Feb. 28 through March 16, portraying a high school coach as well as, in a moment of art imitating life, an actor.
For Lopez, medicine is a family profession — his great grandfather, grandfather and father were all doctors. In fact, that was part of the reason why he initially sought a career in a different field before realizing medicine was a good fit after all.
“When I was in college, I wanted to be a physicist, and I realized when I was doing that, that it was an incredibly solitary sort of experience and that just wasn’t the right thing for me. And as I started looking around for where I would have more contact with people and actually feel like I had a more meaningful effect on people’s lives, that’s how medicine sort of came into the picture,” Lopez said in an interview with this publication.
He was drawn to pediatrics as a specialty after working with many gravely ill adult patients while he was in medical school.
“I realized that one of the differences between adult medicine and pediatric medicine is that with adult medicine, you’re frequently trying to prevent nature from taking its course, whereas, for kids, they’re supposed to be well, right? So really, what we try to do in pediatrics is allow nature to take its course. Illnesses aren’t a normal part of what a child’s life should be, and so it felt like a different approach and a much more positive thing for me,” he said.
Theater has been a big part of Lopez’s life since high school. While attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, he did a show every semester — to the point, he said, that he ended up picking up an extra year of medical school.
“A third of my class went and did an extra year because the school encouraged it, so that we could round ourselves out as both physicians and as humans,” he recalled.
Even so, Lopez seems to have been known among his classmates for his dedication to the performing arts.
“A lot of my medical school classmates, when I would run into them early on in my career, kept asking if I was still in medicine because they thought I would end up doing entertainment rather than medical school. I kept doing (theater) all through medical school,” he said.
Lopez did stop doing shows during his residency and fellowship training, though he continued to dance and sing with area groups. He returned to theater about five years after finishing his medical training.
He has always enjoyed dancing, too, but he got into hip-hop dance when he moved to the Peninsula six years ago. He previously lived in New York City and Miami after graduating from medical school.
“I couldn’t really find a lot of dance classes at first,” he recalled of his move to this area. “Then I discovered hip-hop and so that’s been something that I’ve been so, so, so obsessed with. Over the last six years, I’ve danced with a hip-hop dance crew. And the name of our team, our crew, is NTL, which stands for ‘never too late.'”
The diverse crew, Lopez notes, has members who range in age from their 20s to a few members who are in their 60s.
Audiences at Foothill Music Theatre have seen Lopez as Neville Landless in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and the Steward in “Into the Woods” and he was also recently seen in “Kinky Boots” at Redwood City Community Theater, according to his bio. Among his favorite roles he performed while in New York and Miami, he counts Max in “Lend Me A Tenor,” John Smith in “Run for Your Wife,” Benny Southstreet in “Guys & Dolls,” George in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and Curly in “Oklahoma!”
Foothill’s current show, “The Prom,” debuted on Broadway in 2018 and in 2020 was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Keegan-Michael Key and James Corden.
“The Prom” takes loose inspiration from a real-life event with the story of Emma, who hopes to attend her high school prom with her girlfriend, Alyssa. But once word gets out that there will be a same-sex couple attending the dance, the school cancels the prom. Learning of these events from social media, a quartet of colorful Broadway actors trek to Indiana to show their support for Emma — with not entirely selfless motivations.
“These are very eccentric Broadway actors who have sort of comical but significant character flaws. They’re people who are not succeeding in their careers on Broadway who discover this potential cause that they could go and support in an effort to build up their reputations. And so they travel to Indiana. And you can just imagine how crazy it becomes,” Lopez said.
In the show, he plays a homophobic coach — Lopez didn’t want to spoil his character arc — as well as a cast member of a touring production of “Godspell” that the Broadway actors travel with to Indiana.
“I have a small part in this, but it’s such a lovely experience. I feel like it’s such a big celebration,” he said.
There are of course numerous dust-ups and much drama, but during the time the Broadway actors are in town, they come to a better understanding of themselves and how to be truly helpful to Emma.
“There’s a lot of lessons to be learned in it, but I think the biggest lesson in this show is it’s not just about tolerance and diversity, but it’s really a celebration of the acceptance of diversity, a celebration of the fact that there can be very different people, and we should all embrace our diversity, rather than just tolerate it,” Lopez said.
Medicine and the stage might seem miles apart, but Lopez said that his time in the theater has shaped his work as a doctor for the better. For example, before he came to Stanford, Lopez took three weeks off to do an intensive theater course in England, training with teachers who had also worked with well-known British actors like Orlando Bloom.
Lopez recalls the training as “One giant lesson in authenticity and presence and connection. And I think that’s what makes a good doctor: You have to be authentic, and if you’re gonna really connect with your patients, you have to be present, right? I learned how to do that in an intense way during those weeks.
Every time I’m performing, that’s what I strive for, is to be as authentic and be as in the moment as possible. And that’s important in medicine. I really think that my life in theater has made me a much, much better physician,” he said.
Feb. 28-March 16 at Foothill College, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills. Tickets are $22-$44. foothill.edu/theatre/The_Prom.html.
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