By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
Mariah Perry of Greene will tour with “Care Bears Live” this fall through the Midwest.

GREENE – After a lifetime on stage, Mariah Perry finally earned a spot in a touring company. Yet, no one who sees her in her first professional role will ever see her face or hear her voice.

The petite 22-year-old from Greene will be wearing a fuzzy, purple costume that hides her entire body. And when her character sings, it will be to someone else’s recorded voice.

Not that she minds.

“To the kids who come see the show, I’ll be a rock star,” said Perry. “I’ll be Harmony Bear.”

The show is “Care Bears Live.”

For the next 10 months, Perry will play the 1980s cartoon character known for her magically calming disposition and the flower on her belly.

It’s a job. Now, she’s a professional.

“Someone is paying me to dance,” Perry said, smiling broadly as she talks of rehearsals and tour dates.

Since she was a little girl memorizing tunes from “The Music Man,” it’s the life she wanted. She was preparing to go to New York, to begin the ego-bruising task of auditions, when she received a call from the show’s producers.

“Would you be a bear?” they asked her.

Perry had met people from VEE Productions months earlier when she was part of a New Englandwide audition, a kind of one-stop-shop for talent throughout the region.

Before more than 100 people, all representing different shows and companies, Perry sang pieces of two songs, “Shy” from “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Till there was You,” from the “Music Man.”

“You have two minutes to show off,” she said. And when it’s over, there’s only silence from the audience.

“They’re not allowed to clap because it’s wasting time,” she said.

She was lucky. Among the audience, several people wanted another glimpse or two. They watched her dance. Someone from VEE Productions told her she was up for a role in one of their other productions, “Sesame Street Live.” She would be Elmo.

Then, no one called.

“You wait and you wait and you wait and you wait,” Perry said.

A senior at Dean College in Franklin, Mass., she graduated in May, got a job at Subway in Lewiston and went back to the Community Little Theatre, where she’d been in so many productions as a girl.

“I didn’t think I’d get anything because it had been so long,” she said. The call came, though.

A few days later, she signed a 10-month contract. She was scheduled to leave on Sunday for Minneapolis, where the production company is based.

The show’s first performance is scheduled for Sept. 21 at the Qwest Center in Omaha. In the coming weeks, they will move on to Topeka, Kan., Milwaukee, Wis., and Kalamazoo, Mich.

She knows the performance routine. Nobody told her that rehearsals would begin hours after her arrival in Minnesota. They didn’t need to. That’s simply how it’s done.

The same goes for being a bear. She’s never been a bear before, either, but she can learn the dance steps and she can find the right mindset.

“You only have to be willing to think like a little kid,” she said.

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