Christine Maglione follows her heart to find fulfilling career opportunities and family priorities.

By Mark Rader

Over the course of her nearly 30-year career in show business, Christine Maglione (Beniers) ’86 OR has proven herself to be nothing if not versatile. She’s played spunky girls (Rizzo in Grease, Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady); dreamers (Bebe in A Chorus Line); a prostitute (Aldonza from Man of La Mancha); and most recently, in a Boston-area production of Kiss of the Spider Woman, the fictional movie star Aurora, a character by turns seductive, exuberant, and menacing. Impressive as her resume is, what’s perhaps more impressive are the roles Maglione has played off stage—wife, mother of three young children, civil litigator for a prominent Boston law firm, and, for four years at Cornell University, a student in the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering in the College of Engineering.

 So how did an ORIE student who once spent her nights grinding through statistical analysis problems end up kicking up her heels on Broadway? One night in May, after sending their three kids off to bed, Maglione and her husband, Bob Beniers ’85 EE, sat down in the kitchen of their home in Hingham, Massachusetts, to tell the story.

Her love of music, Maglione says, came early. As a girl, growing up in Cedar Knolls, New Jersey, she was addicted to show tunes. Singing in the Rain, Oklahoma, Cabaret, you name it. At talent shows she performed alongside her sister wearing costumes her mother sewed herself. (“Fishnet stockings and a bowler hat,” she says, laughing. “Oh yes, totally appropriate for fourth grade.”) In fifth grade, her class performed a musical she wrote herself, called The Lost Key, in which the Easter Bunny loses the key to the Easter egg storage bin. At the age of twelve, she got her first paying role, in a dinner theater production of The King and I, for five dollars a show. “Everyone else was at the pool while I was doing twelve shows a week. I loved it!”

Her father, a firechief, and mother, an office administrator, were supportive of her interest in the performing arts and proud of her work ethic. But they were also pragmatic about the chances of making a career out of singing and dancing. “My parents encouraged my interest in theater,” she says, “but they did not want me to struggle. My sister and I were the first in the family to have the opportunity to go to college. So it was ‘get the best education you can, and make sure you can get a job.’” Since Maglione had always excelled in math and had been encouraged by her AP calculus teacher to pursue a career in the sciences, she focused her college search on a school that would let her both perform and prepare for a career in engineering. Cornell fit the bill.

It didn’t take long, however, for Maglione to wonder if she had made the right decision. Her ORIE classes were “very challenging.” She could work on a problem for hours, for days even, and still feel like she was getting nowhere. “I had a feeling early on that it probably wasn’t going to be a match,” she says. Still, she decided to stick it out, and get her degree. She also received support from her adviser, Professor Jack Muckstadt, who helped her choose electives in courses that satisfied her other interests, like acting and history. “He was wonderful,” Maglione says. “I finished the program, but was able to tailor it suit my personality.”

Throughout her time in Ithaca, Maglione kept involved in musical theater productions, on and off campus. Of all the performances she was part of, she says, Sweet Charity holds a special place in her mind, as it was the first show her future husband, Bob Beniers, an electrical engineering student a year ahead of her, saw her perform in.

“Bobby was a trooper,” she says, laughing. “He was very supportive. He sat through all of my shows and often dragged along his friends and fraternity brothers.”

Like Christine, who felt torn between her major and her love of the theater, Bob was going through his own educational identity crisis—should he stick with engineering or move into a less time-consuming major such as those  many of his fellow football players had chosen? Juggling practices and games and an engineer’s course load was proving to be nearly impossible. Like Christine, Bob decided to stick to his guns and finish what he’d started. “I thought it was more important to have your education,” he says. “I knew I needed to get a job, so I focused on school.” And after graduation, Bob did get a job as a representative for an industrial manufacturing company. In 1992, he and three colleagues at the company quit and started their own company, dBm Technical Sales, which is thriving.

Christine’s career trajectory has been—to say the least—a bit more unconventional. After graduating in 1986, she was offered a job in information consulting with Arthur Andersen; as she was considering the offer, she was auditioning for various summer stock theater jobs in New York. “I’d have my suit on and my leotard in my bag and I’d change and go tap,” she says. When, at the last second, a theater job came through, Christine felt she couldn’t pass it up. Like Professor Muckstadt, she says, the man who had wanted to hire her at Arthur Andersen couldn’t have been more supportive. “He said, ‘Good for you. And, by the way, send me two tickets to your first Broadway show.’ And I did, when I started with A Chorus Line.”

For the year following that summer, Christine did perform in A Chorus Line, though not on Broadway. As part of a “bus and truck” production, she toured the country, performing the show in small town venues. It was, she says, “perfect fun, the kind of thing you should do when you’re twenty-two.” Throughout the tour, she and Bob, who had moved to Boston, continued to date long-distance. Occasionally, he would fly out to meet her on the road; once, he flew in just long enough to ride the bus with her and the rest of the cast to her next venue. “It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous way to date each other,” she says, laughing.

After a brief gig performing the musical with an international company in Paris, Maglione got her break on Broadway, as a vacation replacement—a position that soon turned into a full-time position playing Bebe—a starry-eyed dancer. Eighteen months later, the long-running musical closed (“We took to calling the play ‘The Finish Line,’” she says), which led her and Bob to another crossroads. When she was offered a chance at playing the understudy to Maria and Anita in an international production of West Side Story, Maglione declined. “We needed to make decisions to get closer together,” she says. “And this would bring us further apart.” They decided it was time, after more than seven years of dating, to get married, and live together full-time, in Boston, where Bob was working. Before moving, however, Maglione applied to the law school at Boston College. If she wouldn’t be able to perform full-time, it was time, she thought, for a new challenge.

In the months before entering law school, Maglione performed in Grease and Man of La Mancha at the now-defunct Nickerson Theatre located just outside of Boston; in fact, the day after she closed out Man of La Mancha she began her classes at Boston College. Compared with the intensive engineering curriculum at Cornell, Maglione says, law school was “quite manageable.” She also found that the ability to patiently work through a complex problem—a skill she’d honed as an ORIE student—was invaluable to her in her law classes. While at BC law, she interned at the Norfolk County district attorney’s office, clerked at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and, after graduation, joined the law firm Hale and Dorr (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr). Not surprisingly, it was the performance aspect of being a lawyer that Maglione enjoyed the most. The same techniques she’d used onstage she found she could use to her advantage in a courtroom—projecting her voice, being focused on the moment, taking care not to mumble her words. There was also the similar challenge of connecting on an emotional level with your audience. “You’re like the script writer and the actor at the same time,” she says. “You’re telling someone’s story, just like an actor. And you have to find the truth in it and make it make sense to people. It was very exciting.”

The demands of her job—all-nighters were not uncommon—made it nearly impossible for Maglione to also be involved in theater; for nearly seven years she didn’t perform. “I did miss it,” she says, “but I wasn’t crying about it.” But after the birth of her second child, Bobby, while she was on maternity leave, a friend from her early days in Boston theater called to ask her to audition for a local professional production of The World Goes Round. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. After the show closed, she decided that she would not return to her job. “I wanted to spend as much time as I could with my family and the law firm wanted me to spend as much time as I could on their work, which I totally understood.”

While taking care of her kids full-time—her and Bob’s third child, Matthew, was born in 2002—Maglione satisfied her appetite for singing and dancing by managing the choir at her church, singing at benefits and weddings, and taking ballet classes. When, last winter, her daughter, Gianna, got involved in a local community theater production of Annie, she even considered giving up her hard-won Equity card so she would be able to perform with her daughter in non-professional productions.

But then, in May, the theater came knocking again. A fellow actor and friend, Sarah DeLima, called to tell Maglione that Speakeasy Stage Company—a professional company in Boston—was looking for someone to play the part of Aurora/Spider Woman, in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and that she might be a good fit. After talking it over with Bob, she auditioned and got the part. “We needed someone who was a triple threat, who could sing, dance, and act,” says Paul Daignealt, the theater’s artistic director. “And after meeting her, we realized she was the right person. The play didn’t come easy to any of us, but she made it look easy.”

“It was so much fun to do,” Maglione says. “I had wonderful dance numbers, exquisite costumes, and a great score to sing. And Speakeasy was one of the most professional theaters for which I’d ever worked.” Maglione so impressed critics that last winter she was nominated for best actress in a musical by the Independent Reviewers of New England.

As was the case when she performed in The World Goes Round, Maglione says she couldn’t have done it without the help of her husband, Bob, and her family. “It wouldn’t have been possible,” she says. Rehearsals were six days a week for four weeks, and the musical ran for one month, six or seven shows a week. When she left for rehearsal at 5:30, Bob would take over, shuttling the kids to their after-school activities, and getting them into bed. During tech week, which required Christine to be at the theater twelve hours a day, her mother even flew up from New Jersey to help out. Now that she’s gotten back into the musical theater scene in Boston, Maglione says she will try to limit her involvement to one show a year and try to find other creative outlets she can immerse herself in year-round. “I’d like to do things involving theater. Teaching voice, directing or choreographing musicals—that really makes me happy.”

That’s her advice to students as well. “Follow your heart and make a life out of your passion. Maybe you won’t make a million dollars, but you’ll be doing something that you care about. It has to start from that.”

Regardless of what she ends up deciding to do next, Maglione says her top priority these days are her husband and her children—Gianna, 9, Bobby, 7, and Matthew, 3. Matthew, the ham of the family, keeps everyone on their toes, and, Christine says, has been known to sing to himself at his desk at Montessori school. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Gianna is taking figure skating, ballet, and piano lessons and, since playing an orphan in Annie, has “been through three karaoke machines.” Bobby, Christine says, has great pitch, is also learning the piano, and has recently shown an interest in helping out Bob on projects around the house; just recently he helped repair a faucet and construct a landing area for the jungle gym in the family’s backyard.

Maglione says that having kids has forced her to be more organized than she used to be. “I’ve always been the type of person who manages better the more I have to do.” Asked if any of what she learned in her ORIE courses about creating efficient systems has helped her run her household and her career as a performer, Maglione laughs. “I need Jack Muckstadt to give me a simulated model!”