How Melody Butiu Found Her Path

The inspiration to pursue art as a vocation can come from anywhere. Anytime. This was the epiphany Melody Butiu experienced one afternoon at Duke University.

Butiu was a UC San Diego drama student moonlighting in hereandnow, a traveling company comprised of Asian actors from colleges all over Southern California who would get together on weekends to work on productions they’d subsequently take on the road to college campuses all over the country.

She was years away from portraying Mrs. Cratchit in SCR’s annual production of A Christmas Carol—when she met a young man at Duke who told her in a heartfelt way this is where she was supposed to be.

Butiu and her fellow actors were at Duke in Durham, N.C. for the East Coast Asian American Student Conference. One of the seminars involved telling personal stories and Butiu opened up about her mother battling brain cancer when she was a child.

The following day, Butiu was doing an improv workshop with students when one young man approached her

“He said, ‘I just wanted to tell you my mom passed away two weeks ago and I wasn’t going to come to this conference, but I decided to come and I wanted to thank you for sharing your story. I felt like you were speaking to me and I’m glad I came because I felt like I wasn’t alone.”

To Butiu, this was that “a-ha moment,” the moment where an artist realizes their calling.

“It helped me to see how powerful art can be to help people feel connected, help them be seen and to touch someone in such a meaningful way when they weren’t expecting it at all,” she said. “That was just one of those times when he told me that and all I could think was ‘This is what I should be doing.’ I’ve been doing it ever since.

“I’ve had my ups and downs and times where I haven’t worked and times where I’ve worked a lot and I’m still going. I had people discourage me. I remember when I first started working professionally. I had people tell me ‘You might want to change your name, because people don’t know where the Philippines are. Don’t expect to play your own ethnicity.’ A lot of things where people were trying to protect me from how difficult the journey’s been. It’s not been easy, but I’ve also made strides and been able to accomplish things I never thought I’d be able to do. And I’m really grateful for that.”

After a year off from A Christmas Carol in 2023, due to a role in the Broadway show Here Lies Love, Butiu is grateful to be back at SCR for her fifth A Christmas Carol production, but her first at Mrs. Cratchit. Her first two years (2018 and 2019), she played Sally, the Toy Lady and one of the Scavengers. In 2021 and 2022, she played Mrs. Fezziwig and one of the Solicitors, where she always drew laughs for her distinctive and entertaining “Harumph” after Ebenezer Scrooge kicks her out of his office.

That Butiu played Mrs. Fezziwig never ceases to amuse her. It takes her back to the first of her 11 SCR productions—the 2003 production of The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. Butiu was just out of grad school when she was cast in the Rolin Jones world premiere alongside the late Linda Gehringer and William Francis McGuire.

“We joke around that he played my dad in that show and the last two times I was in A Christmas Carol, he played my husband,” Butiu said.

Due to her adaptable talent playing different characters, Butiu has been a casting go-to, appearing in such SCR productions as M. Butterfly, Sheepdog, Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, along with The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. She’s also appeared in Theatre for Young Audiences and Families productions of Junie B. in Jingle Bells, Batman Smells, Ivy & Bean: The Musical and Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed.

Butiu grew up in a musical household. Her grandfather was a big-band leader in the Philippines and she was named Melody because of his love of music. She sang from an early age and wanted to be a singer from the moment she watched a production of Sweeney Todd in high school.

Butiu could always sing. The acting part? That took some time and comes with another winding path on the journey. It began with its own version of stage fright.

“When I was in elementary school, I tried out for school plays and I would stumble over my words and have a hard time saying the lines,” she said. “They told me, ‘We’ll have you do the singing part. We won’t have you speak, because you’re not good at that.’ I grew up thinking I was a terrible speaker and it never occurred to me to think about being an actor.”

The “terrible speaker” eventually became a voiceover artist who parlayed her success in the stage role into providing some of the voices for the HBO Max animated feature Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed. The actor who was “not good at speaking will return to Broadway next year for Queen of Versailles, a play based on the Lauren Greenfield documentary about former beauty queen Jackie Siegel, (who married timeshare billionaire David Siegel) and her lavish home.

And the actor who once stumbled across her words as a child can’t wait to share her inspiration with the SCR Youth Conservatory students she shares scenes with.

“SCR has always been an artistic home for me and I’m glad to be back,” she said. “I’m excited for the challenge and looking forward to the opportunity to have in-depth scenes with our younger players.”