For most of her adult life, Paige Davis has been acting, singing and dancing in roles as varied as playing the feather duster in “Beauty and the Beast” to the fame-obsessed Roxie Hart in Broadway’s long-running “Chicago.”
But most would recognize her by a different kind of fancy footwork: as the upbeat host in TLC’s hit series “Trading Spaces.” On that popular DIY show she oversaw friends, relatives and neighbors who, in an act of blind trust and crossed fingers, redo parts of each other’s homes. In the big reveal at the end of each episode, Davis was the friendly shoulder to cry on in emotional bursts of happiness — or shock. She also hosted a series for the Hallmark Channel, “Home and Family” and is the host of “Home Made Simple” on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
Now the actress has remodeled her career again, originating a role in a straight play at Hartford’s TheaterWorks: “Dancing Lessons” by Mark St. Germain (“Becoming Dr. Ruth,” “Freud’s Last Session”).
The two-person play had its world premiere last summer with Davis at the Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. The show has its second outing, again with Julianne Boyd directing and with a new co-star Andrew Benator, a frequent actor at TheaterWorks (“Lobby Hero,” “Santaland Diaries,” “The Understudy,” “Proof,” “American Buffalo”).
Over a luncheon interview at nearby Bin 228, Davis is as naturally buoyant as her TV persona. She also has a good perspective on how her unexpected exposure on TV in a field she had little connection with boosts her theater projects and is adept at guiding conversations back to the play at hand.
Still, it is too tempting to talk makeovers for a bit and she happily obliges.
Wet Paint
A friend told Davis in 2001 that she would be perfect for a TV show that was looking for a new host. Davis responded, “I never hosted, I had never done TV and I didn’t have a background in interior design so how am I perfect for this job?” Her friend said, “‘I just know it.'”
She managed to get an audition and her background in actor improvisation and her perky personality was the right fit for the unscripted show that dealt with designer egos, homeowner angst and tight deadlines.
Davis says her role in “Trading Spaces” was to act as “the person you trust who comes in to your home with a team of experts and who holds your hand as you go through change. I’m also the conduit for the people watching at home so I tried to ask the questions that the viewing audience would be asking.”
Some of the homeowners’ renovations — urged on by each team’s professional designers such as Vern Yip, Ty Pennington — were famously over-the-top. “But none of the designers did anything they didn’t believe in. Even Hildi Santo-Tomas’ designs, well it’s not that she didn’t do it for TV but because it was TV. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about the homeowners but she cared more about using the medium to inspire others to think outside the box. She just wanted people to stop thinking that all you had to do was just paint.
“I on the other hand was genuinely afraid they wouldn’t make the time limit. It’s astonishing to me how a room can look 30 minutes before time is up when it’s all a mess and the furniture is still wet.”
Has she developed a design knack from her proximity to experts over the years?
“If you’re an artist you have creativity and you see things differently, so yes, I have taste and that’s half the deaI,” she says. “And I also understand color and the vocabulary but my mother who is an interior designer sees things in ways I just don’t. And I can’t take any credit for my home in New York because it was done for a show by [designer] Nate Berkus.”
Dancing Life
But “Trading Spaces” and the other design shows is just one facet of her long career, which includes a stint in the mid ’90s as one of the bikini-wearing dancers in Beach Boys concerts (“We were part of the party”), to working with her husband actor Patrick Page in the musical “I Do I Do!” (They met 20 years ago touring in “Beauty and the Beast”) to a Broadway stint in the hit sex farce “Boeing Boeing.”
But “Dancing Lessons” doesn’t call for her to sing, be sexy and kick up her heels. Here she’s playing it for real in a role that strikes close to home.
In the show, Davis, 45, plays a Broadway dancer sidelined with severe knee ligament tears, who is asked by a high-functioning professor with Asperger’s syndrome to teach him to dance.
“She is in a place where she is sad, bitter and lonely and she is in denial of her injury,” says Davis. “There’s a part of her who knows how bad it is but another that refuses to accept that it’s true, that she knows she is not going to dance again. And in comes a man who is incapable of saying nothing but the truth.
Davis says over her career she’s had numerous ankle, back and knee injuries, some involving surgeries. “You name it, I’ve had it. I had a torn hamstring years ago and that takes wear and tear on a dancer’s body and you never quite heal. It hurts your spirit, too, because you’re unable to do what you really want to do and you feel that you’re losing yourself. You feel, ‘I’m not all of me. There’s so much more I want to say but I can’t because my leg won’t do that anymore or my speed or flexibility isn’t up there anymore.’ And it’s how you communicate so when you lose your ability to communicate you feel silenced.”
Davis, who grew up in Wisconsin and Kentucky, says she was always connected to her body. “When I was little I thought I’d be a gymnast in the Olympics — and I was a competitive gymnast until I was 13.” But then she heard her mother playing the record to “West Side Story” and she was hooked.
“DANCING LESSONS” begins previews on Friday, Jan. 23, and opens Jan. 30, continuing through March 1. Performances are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m.; and weekend matinees at 2:30 p.m. There is a special matinee Feb. 12 at 11 a.m. Information: 860-527-7838 and www.theaterworkshartford.org.
