"Cecelia's life is comfortable, if not a bit regimented, but she's also privy to the Duke's grave concerns," says Diaz. "On the other hand, she would normally take it for granted that the Duke's artist would paint her, but she actually finds herself developing a very real connection with this extraordinary genius, Leonardo, who is struggling with a whole different set of problems. It was a very interesting part to play--and I loved it."

Natascia Diaz comes by her performing talent naturally: her Puerto Rican father, Justino Diaz, is an opera singer, and her Italian mother, Anna Aragno, was a ballerina before becoming a psychoanalyst. A first-generation American, she lovingly recalls "going backstage with my dad and touring with my mom," and at age three started taking ballet lessons herself. "I always wanted to dance," she says of her years studying at the School of American Ballet, the typical route to the New York City Ballet, "but it took me longer to realize that I also wanted to sing and act, and that maybe I'd be better expressing myself in ways other than just ballet." A key learning experience for Diaz had been Bel Voir Terrace, a Massachussets summer camp for the arts she began attending at age nine: "It was like college for young people: I did ballet, jazz, theatre, musicals, piano lessons." After high school, she entered the acting program at Carnegie-Mellon University, where a showcase production caught the eye of a casting agent for the daytime soap Another World. Roles on-stage in A My Name is Alice and The Country Wife soon followed, as did the shortlived Fox-TV series House of Buggin', starring John Lequizamo. "It was hyper-ridiculous stuff, but it was fun," she says. For the most part, though, she spent the early 1990s based in hit musicals like Carousel in New York, or touring in the likes of Man of La Mancha, Sweeney Todd and 42nd Street.

Cast as Anita in the North American tour of West Side Story, she happened to play Toronto, where producer David Devine caught her performance and invited her to audition for the role of Cecelia in Leonardo: A Dream of Flight. "I felt privileged to be asked," she said--and delighted when she won the role, traveled to Italy and took direction from Allan King. "I'm so lucky. This was the biggest break I've ever had. There aren't a lot of opportunities to play in quality work like this. People see me as Anita, so this was my chance to prove to myself--and David Devine, who took a gamble on me--that I am indeed an actress. I was in awe watching Brenda Bazinet, working with Brent Carver and Cedric Smith, so in a way I felt lucky that I could hide, sometimes, in the demureness of Cecelia."

After wrapping her role in Italy, Diaz rejoined the West Side Story tour with renewed energy, with the intention of accompanying the show as far as Broadway. Though she has spent much of her career thus far on the road, she likes to call New York home.