Vicki Whooper ’11: ‘Whatever your dream is, keep chasing it’

This article appeared in the November 2022 issue of the Dominican Magazine

It was during her sophomore year at Dominican University that Vicki Whooper ’11 found her calling as a stage manager.

“Krista Hansen, the current chair of the department, approached me and said, ‘I think you’d make a great stage manager,’” Whooper recalled. “I didn’t even know what that was! But once I learned about it, I thought, ‘This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my career.’”

Her prediction is coming true. Whooper is now riding a wave of professional success, serving as an assistant stage manager of Broadway’s A Strange Loop, which took home the Tony Award this year for Best Musical.

“I am hoping this show opens people’s eyes and minds to the fact that the Black experience is not a monolith,” Whooper said. “We need to hear the vastness of the ways in which Black people, people of color and queer people move through this world.”

While a student at Dominican, Whooper worked on productions like Into the Woods, the Wiz, Macbeth, and Noises Off, among others.

“Whatever your dream is, keep chasing it — you’ll get there,” Whooper recommends. “It was a very circuitous route to Broadway, but I never questioned it. I knew I wanted to work on a Broadway show at some  point, so I trusted that whatever path I had to get there was going to  get me there.”