Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 1 (35 page)

After her humiliation, Andrea saw a young woman get onstage who wore pigtails and skipped around the stage singing "Zip A Dee Doo Dah." She was so adorable that everyone in the theater gave her a standing ovataion. Andrea left the theater devastated, feeling that if she couldn't get 
Godspell
, she had no hope of ever getting a show. She started a daily depressive regimen of eating large quantities of donuts and then going to the gym to work it off and sit in the steam room. One day, while literally in the steam room, she got paged for a phone call. It was Eugene Levy, who had recently starred opposite her in the film
Cannibal Girls
(seriously… directed by Ivan Reitman). He said that the woman that was cast to sing "Day By Day" was being let go and that there was going to be a big party that night. He told Andrea to show up and be as funny as she could be. She did… and got the gig. And listen to who else was in that cast: Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Paul Shaffer as music director and Victor Garber as Jesus. And, of course, that girl with the pigtails turned out to be Gilda Radner! Can you imagine all that brilliance in one cast?

Andrea then joined Toronto Second City after a lot of the first cast left to start
Saturday Night Live
. Second City then decided to create a Canadian version of
SNL
and thus began
SCTV
. I grew up watching that show every Friday night. I, of course, asked her about the origin of some of her characters. She said that Edith Prickley was developed at the Second City improv show. Cast members would bring in old clothes to be used to create on-the-spot characters. Andrea was told by the audience to be a mother of a delinquent. She put on Catherine O'Hara's mother's leopard coat and hat, walked in and said, "Hello, Dear! I'm…" Catherine said, "Mrs. Prickley?" And Andrea said, "That's right, dear. Edith Prickley."

Andrea based Libby Wolfson on a real talk-show host in Canada who was always discussing women's issues. I'm obsessed with the episode where Libby stars in the feminist musical 
I'm Getting My Own Head, Screwing It on Right, and No Guy's Gonna Tell Me That It Ain't!
 Libby is completely insecure and always smelling her armpits asking, "Is there a cat in here? I'm smelling some male cat urination." Then, she'll smell her hands and say, "No. You know what, it's Tabouli. Serves me right for eating with my fingers."

Andrea didn't get to Broadway until the early ‘90s with 
My Favorite Year
 and remembers giving an 
awful
 audition initially and asking to come back a second time and getting the part. She said the same thing happened with the
Hedwig
movie. She really wanted to play Hedwig's agent, Phyllis Stein. She read with John Cameron Mitchell (who wrote and directed it) and told him in the middle of the audition that she knew she wasn't nailing it. She asked him if she could go back to L.A, work with her acting coach and fly back on her own dime to try one more time in a week. He said yes, and she got it! She wants actors out there to do that if they feel they're not performing at their best. Take control of the situation. But she also wanted to caution that she's asked casting people if she can come back and then been equally terrible, so it doesn't always work out!

My Favorite Year
 closed in the winter and, months later when she was in L.A., Andrea found out she was nominated for a Tony! She didn't really know anything about the Tony Awards and hadn't been thinking about it. Now, of course, she says she does non-stop obsessing about the word counts in her bios to make sure she can get every one of her awards listed.

Many people don’t realize that she was the original Cat in the Hat during the workshops of 
Seussical
. When it came time to take it to Broadway, she was incredibly torn because she had to choose between starring in a new musical or missing her son’s High School senior year in California. Of course, she wanted to be the actual star of a show (instead of a sidekick) and make some delicious money, but she also knew there would only be one senior year he’d ever have and she’d miss all of his sports games, jazz ensemble concert, prom etc. She was torn until she spoke to her agent Richie Jackson who asked her, "Would you rather be remembered as a good Cat in the Hat or a good mother?" Brava! Even though she loved that show, and especially its score, she turned down the role and told us she never regretted the decision. Brava motherhood and peace out ‘til next week!

Lane and Len

March 3, 2008

February 28
th
was my birthday so
I decided to have a little get-together on Saturday night. Friday night at 11 PM, my buzzer sounded. Juli had gone to bed two hours before so I tiptoed through the dark living room to the intercom. "Hello?" I whispered. "Seth Rudetsky!" I heard from downstairs. "It's Norm Lewis! Happy Birthday!" I buzzed him and confronted him on the staircase, me in my pajamas, him covered in snow. "Uh… the party is tomorrow." Norm claimed his email said it was tonight which doesn’t make much sense since I sent out the exact same one to everyone. I could have told him that he was right and invited him in to sit with me in a depressing, dark living room and talk nonsense… but I already saw Pinter’s
The Homecoming
and had no intention of re-creating it in my own apartment. After Norm left, I quickly checked my email and only had one; it was from Cheyenne Jackson saying, "Sorry I missed your party last night." What is it with Broadway stars and the calendar!?

Anyhoo, the next night wound up being a great little soiree, and I felt so highfalutin' because I ordered a big plate of sushi. Around 11, James asked if I would order a pizza. He's from Texas and did not ever grow into enjoying the big city taste of sushi. I rolled my eyes and asked what I was gonna do with all the leftover pieces of pizza, and he assured me we could eat it for dinner the next night. Cut to, I ordered the pizza begrudgingly… and it was gone in two minutes flat.
And
I'm writing this column surrounded by an almost full platter of negihamachi and salmon skin rolls. Turns out, Broadway don't go for highfalutin'!

That last story brings me to last week's
Chatterbox
. Around two weeks ago, I did a performance of
Celebrity Autobiography
with Matthew Broderick and asked him to do the
Chatterbox
. He was very sweet and agreed readily. He told me to check in beforehand to double confirm. Of course, I waited 'til the night before and left a perfunctory message on his assistant's voice mail. She called me back in a panic. Turns out, Matthew had to go to L.A. at the last minute and couldn't make it back to N.Y. to do my show. Ah! It was sold out and I didn't want BC/EFA to lose out on all that money. I had to get a replacement whom the crowd would adore just as much. I thought of
The Producers
and remembered how much fun I had with Nathan Lane at my Sirius interview recently. I called his assistant, Andrea, and she told me that he's doing a reading all day long and starring in
November
at night. In other words, he's too busy/tired to do anything extracurricular. She said she'd ask him anyway, and, 20 minutes later, called me back in shock and said, "He'll do it!" How amazing is that!?! I showed up at Don't Tell Mama, and Nathan immediately said, "I don't wanna talk about the stuff we did before. Ask me other stuff." Uh-oh. I'm old school. I thought the show was frozen. I'm used to going through a celeb's career from start to finish, but he said we should do it differently... and go backwards. Didn't he know
Merrily We Roll Along
flopped? I was panicked… but it wound up being an amazing/hilarious show.

First, we talked about the Marc Shaiman/Scott Wittman/Terrence McNally musical
Catch Me If You Can
, which is the reading he's doing right now. He said he's done so many readings of it that he now feels like he's doing a revival! He's playing the Tom Hanks character from the movie and thinks the show's gonna be great
.
Of course, Norbert Leo Butz wound up playing the role because when the show finally came to Broadway, Nathan was playing Gomez Addams in THE ADDAMS FAMILY. Both shows weren’t loved critically, but THE ADDAMS FAMILY ran much longer than CATCH ME IF YOU CAN so Nathan certainly made the right choice financially!

Here’s where the interview got "real." At one point, I had my cell phone onstage to check the time, and I said, "Do you want to see a picture of my boyfriend James?" Well, that was enough to send Nathan on a five-minute tear about how every week in my Playbill.com column I have to mention "my boyfriend James this" and "my boyfriend James that" and how I always pepper it with "his daughter Juli." Nathan made it clear;
Yes, I got it! You have a boyfriend
! Hmph. I wanted to tell him that he was exaggerating and that no one else is bothered by it until I saw the entire audience nodding in unison. Then he had the nerve to ask if James is the first boyfriend I've ever had.
Well
! I will now explain myself and say sometimes James comes up as part of a story I'm telling, and I didn’t want new readers to look at it and say, "Who is this random James person that Seth is talking about?" Hence the moniker, "my boyfriend James." But I know that when the public speaks to you (or in this case, yells at you), you must listen. So from now on I will simply write James' name without a precursor or I shall simply list him as my BF.

After his hiliarious tirade, Nathan wound up telling me a Doug Henning debacle that he hadn't told me before. They both did the musical
Merlin
back in the ‘80s, and one night Doug was regaling him with magic-gone-awry stories. One New Year’s Eve, Doug was doing a Vegas show and the final act was turning his wife into a tiger. He finished the trick, but when he looked at the chain attached to the tiger, he noticed it was broken! Doug said that the rest happened in slow motion. The tiger started prowling towards the audience, who then began screaming. Also, since it was a New Year's Eve show, it was packed with celebrities. This took place in the ‘70s, so I'm imagining an audience filled with terrified Loni Andersons, Bonnie Franklins and Gabe Kaplans. Doug grabbed onto the tiger's chain and started yanking the tiger backwards. The tiger turned and started to advance on Doug. Suddenly, the tiger leapt on top of him… and licked his face. I, of course, thought that was adorable, 'til Nathan explained that tigers aren’t licking to be affectionate… they use their tongue to clean their food before they eat it. The tiger then put Doug Henning's
entire
head inside his mouth!!!!! Doug was so petrified that he fainted. It could have been the end,
but
because what the tiger considered prey suddenly seemed so limp and odd, it let go of his head. Doug told Nathan that the next thing he remembers is waking up in his dressing with Bob Hope standing above him. And what did Bob say? "Doug! That's the best finale I've ever seen!"

Also this week, I interviewed Len Cariou on my Sirius radio show. Len is from Canada and in 1969 made his Broadway starring debut in Henry the Fifth (
King Henry V
)… or as he called it, show biz-style, "Hank Cinq." He said that, right before he opened in that show, he was called in to audition for
Applause
to play Lauren Bacall's love interest. He was a fan of her work... which is weird because usually actors can be competitive if they both have the same vocal range. Regardless, he got the role of Bill Sampson and remembers that, when they did the gypsy run-thru of
Applause
, a nice man with glasses perched on his head approached Len after the show and said, "I think you're one of the best leading men I've ever seen in my life." Ron Field, the choreographer, ran over to Len and told him who the pleasant gentleman was: Hal Prince!!!

That compliment would pay off later, right after
Applause,
when
Len became the associate artistic director at The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. While he was there, that pleasant gentleman called him and asked him to audition for
A Little Night Music
. Len read the script (no music or lyrics yet), loved it and wanted the part of Frederik… but they asked him to audition for Carl-Magnus. Even though Len didn't want that part, he was dying for a chance to sing for Sondheim and Prince. He flew to New York and auditioned, but he remembers that he was so nervous he had to hold onto the upright piano that was onstage to stop from shaking! Still, it went well, and Hal gave him an updated script to take home and look over. This time, the script still didn't have any music attached, but now it had lyrics. Len thought it was now even more brilliant, and when Hal called a day later, told him so. Before Len had a chance to make a pitch to play Frederik, Hal said, "I’m glad you like it. We want you to play Frederik!" Brava! Frederik was supposed to be in his mid-fifties, and Len was only 34, but they figured that, as long as he was fairly older than his wife, it would work.

Len went back to the Guthrie and told the artistic director the good news. Unfortunately, he reminded Len that he was supposed to star as Oedipus in rep when rehearsals for
A Little Night Music
began. Len realized it wouldn't be right to leave the Guthrie for a Broadway show because he was the associate artistic director. He called Hal who was vacationing in Majorca (huh?) and told him that he had to pass. Hal was in shock. Not because he was angry, but because he couldn't believe how much integrity Len had. A month later Len's agent called, asked him if he was sitting down and said that
Night Music
had moved all of their dates later so that Len could do the show! Talk about being wanted! Len approached the head of the Guthrie and asked if he could perform his rep shows in a clump each week so he could rehearse in New York but come back to the Guthrie to do
Oedipus
, and the Guthrie said yes. So, Len would do a
Oedipus
matinee on Sunday, fly back to New York to rehearse
Night Music
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, fly back Wednesday night and perform, fly back to rehearse Thursday morning, rehearse again Friday, Saturday and fly back to perform Saturday night and Sunday. Sorry, Elaine Stritch, that trumps your train trips to Connecticut. Len Cariou is "at liberty"!