Mamma Mia!’s Karen Mason. Urinetown’s Spencer Kayden. Noises Off’s Katie Finneran. Three Broadway divas who keep us rolling in the aisles.
By Bill Corsello
Where New York
The supporting female in a stage show may not get the 11 o’clock number or the final bow, but she usually gets all the laughs. For our Broadway issue, WHERE talked with three of our favorite supporting Broadway actresses about life upon the wicked(ly funny) stage.
From Geek to Chic
Here’s a news flash: That tall, sexy, confident blonde you see stealing young hearts onstage in Mamma Mia! (Winter Garden Theatre, 1634 Broadway at 50th Street, 239-6200), was, while growing up, a nerd.
“It wasn’t a matter of being popular or unpopular,” she says. “I just wasn’t an anything. I had a great time at school, but I was always the backward one; I was always five years behind.”
Karen Mason is thrilled to be playing the role of Tanya, who, along with co-star Judy Kaye, is best friend of and former backup singer to heroine Louise Pitre in the rollicking ABBA-fest. “She’s the sassy one, she’s the sexy one,” Mason says of her character, who spends much of the show fending off the advances of a much younger man (think Absolutely Fabulous’ Patsy Stone—post-rehab). “She’s been married a few times, and she is always out there looking. She has the spark in her that the guys like. That fascinates me, because I was always so shy and felt so ugly and so awkward; I was a fat kid.”
Today, Mason comes across as none of these things. She is classy and eloquent with a great self-deprecating sense of humor. Her boisterous laugh resonates heartily within the coffee shop where she sips a much-appreciated ration of caffeine before running off to do another exhausting performance.
“I, who have never been athletic in my whole life,” she says, “get to do this athletic show. I just wanted to stand in one place in beaded outfits and sing songs.”
Mason was born in New Orleans. Her father, a salesman, was transferred to St. Louis and then Chicago, the city that she considers her hometown. In 1978, Mason moved to New York, seeking the artist’s life. In the ensuing years, she became a nightclub, recording and stage favorite, amassing five MAC Awards (the cabaret equivalent of a Tony), four CDs (the latest of which, When the Sun Comes Out, was released last year on Jerome Records) and starring roles such as Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, a role she played for three years on Broadway and in Los Angeles. Her concert engagements take her all over the nation as well as abroad. To say that Mamma Mia! is taking Mason to places she’s never been is an understatement.
“It’s certainly different than the music I thought I would be singing at my age,” she says of numbers like “Dancing Queen,” “Super Trouper” and her showstopper, “Does Your Mother Know?” “But you know what? It’s so much fun, and it’s very infectious. I don’t get bored.”
Still, one might think Mason would have been hesitant about taking the role. After all, the show, having been a hit in London, Toronto and on an extensive U.S. tour, had the benefit of international hype, plus that could have turned into a minus had Broadway succumbed to its sometimes elitist sensibilities. Also, being that the role has already been played by many other actresses, there was the risk of becoming dough for the Mamma Mia! cookie cutter. When these questions are asked, Mason’s true optimistic nature shines through.
“I was excited because I knew the show would run,” she laughs. “That’s always the thing you worry about.” She is also happy to be spending an extended amount of time at home with her husband of three years, composer Paul Rolnick. (“We’ve been together for 11 years, engaged for eight,” she says. “My husband’s not one to jump into anything.”) And as for the role itself, Mason says that she was given enough leeway to make the character truly her own. “They have fit the show to each company. I don’t feel like we were put into a straitjacket.”
And if naysayers question the appropriateness of 1970s’ pop hits on a Broadway stage, Mason is sanguine about that, too.
“You know, there’s a reason why ABBA’s had a lot of hits, and there’s a reason that people still love the music, and there’s a reason that at the end of the show—and it is still a phenomenon to me—people get up and scream and dance,” she says of the musical’s sartorially psychedelic rock-concert coda. “People of every age.”
So, she loves the music. But always: “ABBA was a little after my teenage years,” she admits. “My friends and I were very sullen in the early ’70s. Like I said, I was a nerd.”
Lest anyone pity her, Mason leans over, laughs and shouts exuberantly, “But I was a happy nerd!”
Spencer Gets Hired
To all the young actors out there who think they’ll never make it to the Great White Way, attend the tale of Spencer Kayden. She’s starring on Broadway in Urinetown (Henry Miller’s Theatre, 124 W. 43rd St. between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, 239-6200), and it happened almost by accident.
Kayden, a thoughtful and intelligent presence who usually drove home a point, peppers her conversation with one of her many character voices, told her story one evening in the tidy dressing room she shares with four other cast members, high atop what seems like 49 flights of stairs in the tower of Henry Miller’s Theatre.
Born in Kansas City and raised in Southern California’s Orange County, where after high school she “got out of there quickly,” Kayden majored in theatre at Chicago’s Northwestern University before making her way to the Big Apple a little over eight years ago.
“I didn’t come here with any specific plan other than that I just loved the way New York felt whenever I was here,” Kayden says.
Deciding to take a break from acting to assess what she wanted to do with her life, Kayden found herself freelancing for a Scholastic children’s-literature magazine, a job she enjoyed, eventually working her way up to senior editor. Itching for the stage, Kayden began performing again, “far downtown, with friends.” Enter Greg Kotis, a friend from her Chicago days, who, with Mark Hollmann, wrote an irreverent little musical about a city in which water is in such short supply that private toilets are outlawed and residents are charged a fee to pee.
“I guess you can say she’s the voice of Sally,” Kayden says of her character, Little Sally, a downtrodden waif with the timbre of a bitter Betty Boop. Little Sally not only joins the rebellion against the corrupt corporation that controls the rest rooms, but in the comedy’s most hilarious moments, steps out of the action and questions the absurdities of the plot. “She’s a great combination of skeptical and hopeful.”
After the initial reading, Kayden played Little Sally in the show’s first production at The New York International Fringe Festival, the annual Lower East Side celebration of new, often unusual theatrical works.
“That’s just what we were used to,” she says, “asking our friends to be in our shows. It was natural. We never knew what would become of it.”
The rest is theatre history. Urinetown hit big at the Fringe Festival. Producers got involved and gave it an Off-Broadway production. Urinetown hit big again. Producers brought it to Broadway. And the only cast member along for the entire ride is Kayden.
It may seem like an unusual road, if for nothing else but its fortuity, but that’s not saying Kayden didn’t have her moments of doubt: She held on to her editing job as long as possible. “I was afraid,” she laughs. “I loved my job, and I was never eager to consider myself an actor and to have to support myself as an actor. That seemed like a frightening, unlikely life.” She finally decided to commit herself fully, a decision she made while Urinetown’s future was still uncertain. “It was scary,” she admits, “but that little pilot light of hope in me just wanted to believe that I would be O.K. It was right after that that we found out the show was moving to Broadway. I thought, ‘well, that’s a fine sign.’”
Originally scheduled to open two days after the World Trade Center tragedy, the creative team, in a brave move, postponed the Broadway bow just a week to Sept. 20. “I still think we opened too soon,” Kayden says. “So many of the lines were so striking in those months afterward. Critics, especially in The New York Times, were seeing it as a galvanizing experience, that was really important for us, to realize that even though we might feel uncomfortable saying things like ‘I say we do to her what they did to him’… there are a lot of lines like that that just gave me the chills. But people were coming and laughing from the very first week after Sept. 11; it was unbelievable to me that they were finding solace. There is a realness to the plot, even though it is an absurd situation. And our show does not provide any real solutions or easy answers. I think people are still really intrigued by that.”
If audiences found the show relevant before, how much must it be now that New York City is in the midst of its very own water shortage? “Isn’t it perfect?” Kayden jokes in one of her voices, this one lilting and facetious. “We couldn’t be more pleased that there’s a drought!”
Finneran’s Wait
After 11 years of doing quality work on and off Broadway, Katie Finneran has finally gotten her big break—and she’s got the battle scars to prove it.
“Bruises, bruises, battle scars,” she says in a singsong voice, pointing out the black-and-blue splotches that sully her otherwise creamy-white skin. “This is a rehearsal battle scar,” she points to a long vestige of a gash on the underside of a forearm. “I tripped or something. The problem is I can never remember how I hurt myself.”
Finneran can laugh off the injuries; they’re just par for the course when you’re in a frenzied backstage farce, specifically the breakneck-speed, door-slamming, tripping, tumbling, bumbling world of Noises Off (Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St. between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 307-4100), the hit Broadway revival in which she plays Brooke Ashton, a bodacious, slightly vapid starlet appearing in a mindless sex-romp touring the English provinces. Finneran’s sharply tuned portrayal of an actress incapable of improvising while every element of the play-within-a-play crashes down around her provides Noises Off with its biggest belly laughs. It has also garnered Finneran the best notices of her career, consistently singled out in an ensemble cast that includes stalwarts such as Patti LuPone, Peter Gallagher and Faith Prince.
WHERE caught up with Finneran immediately following a matinee one unseasonably scorching Wednesday last April. Her dressing room, which she shares with her understudy, was blessedly frigid and bedecked with Christmas lights and shamrock garlands. “We decorate for every holiday and then never take anything down,” she says.
With a rare moment to relax, Finneran reflected on her good fortune.
“It feels really good,” Finneran says of her sudden notoriety. “I’ve literally done one play after another—in between being a nanny and waitressing in the beginning. I love my life so much. I work with the smartest, greatest, most beautiful people. And to get everyone to say that I’m fabulous is just frosting on the cake.”
Finneran grew up in Miami and studied drama at Pittsburgh’s prestigious Carnegie Mellon University. Her stage résumé looks like a reading list from a modern-drama class: John Guare, Neil Simon, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill. She is equally at home in musicals as in straight plays, most recently having performed Sally Bowles in the long-running revival of Cabaret at Studio 54, and has somehow avoided ever being typecast.
“I’ve had a really eclectic career,” she says without a trace of hubris. “I guess I’m just blessed that way.”
For Finneran, her Noises Off accolades come as a welcome shock—“It was the next great job,” she says of her expectations—but the serendipitous nature of its auspicious Broadway bow does not elude her. Noises Off began rehearsals on Sept. 10 of last year, and although she was grateful to have the show to focus on, she was still unsure how its frivolity would be received.
“The first preview was Oct. 16,” she recounts, “and when I heard those thousand people laughing, I thought, ‘wow, we’re in the right place at the right time.’ It felt like the city needed this.”
Not only did the city find a worthy diversion, but the Great White Way found a new It Girl. Then, lo and behold, here goes Katie flying off to Los Angeles to co-star with Alfred Molina and The Producers’ Roger Bart in a new (and at press time untitled) sitcom on CBS. So, is Finneran yet another Broadway star we’ll be losing to La-La Land?
“No, I never wanted that,” she says earnestly. “I understand that producers have a hard time producing shows with unknown people. I understand the appeal of a star in your show. I get it. Maybe being on TV a bit might help me sell a [stage] show.”
Okay, so we can’t really fault Finneran, especially since her intentions seem so noble and focused on the stage (not once do dollar signs spin into her eyes). Besides, there’s no one else who can play the part; it was written with her in mind by the creators of Frasier, the popular sitcom in which she has done two guest stints. Looks like Broadway and Hollywood will be playing tug-of-war for Finneran for a long time to come.
“But you never know,” she says level-headedly of what may or may not be superstardom. “So, if you see me [waiting tables] at the HoJo, be nice to me.”
Returning to the stage door after the interview, Finneran was greeted by a group of eager fans waiting patiently in the 90-something-degree heat. She was genuinely surprised that they had waited over an hour just to get her autograph—but audiences know a star when they see one.
