In the West Coast premiere of the sexy tuner "Hello Again," she deals a blow to
the Disney image.
By J. Brenna Guthrie
It's readily apparent after meeting Susan Egan why she's had such success. The Seal Beach, Orange County native, who rose to fame playing Belle in Disney's hit musical Beauty and the Beast, has boundless energy and a positive attitude that immediately puts you at ease; this is one Broadway diva who is anything but that.
She recently returned to L.A. after an exhausting run on Broadway in the musical version of Marivaux's Triumph of Love, wanting nothing more than to take a break from musicals. But along came Blank Theatre Company artistic director Daniel Henning, who talked Egan into taking a role in the West Coast premiere of Hello Again, Michael John LaChiusa's risquƒ musical remake of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde.
Although Egan had to be talked into doing the musical under Equity's non-remunerative 99-Seat Plan, she quickly found an enthusiasm for the piece and its ensemble.
"I look at this cast and it just blows me away," said Egan in a recent interview. "I mean, I saw Alyson Reed in the movie A Chorus Line. That was huge to me. And talking to Marcia Strassman--she played Mrs. Kotter, and we always made fun of my mom's tuna casserole because of Welcome Back Kotter. These people working for free in a 50-seat theatre!"
(The cast also includes such credit-heavy talents as Jennifer Leigh Warren, Richard Kline, Paul Anthony Stewart, and Steve Girardi, Michael Halpin, Jay Michael Ferguson, and Larry Sullivan Jr.)
Apart from the cast, what appealed to Egan was the chance to work on a true ensemble piece in such an intimate space, without the complications and microphones of a Broadway show. Another attraction was that her role in Hello Again--a repressed '50s housewife who in one scene fellates a college boy in a movie theatre--is another step in "breaking that Disney image."
Not that she's one to complain about her experiences as Belle, a role that got her a Tony nomination but which she almost didn't try out for.
"I thought it was a rotten idea," she admitted. "I hadn't seen the movie, but everyone said it was so amazing. I thought, Don't ruin it. I also thought, I look like Peter Pan, I don't look like Belle. They're not going to cast me."
But she got the part, which she attributes to composer Alan Menken liking her voice ("that very Lizzie Callaway kind of pop belt thing") and to her not having seen the movie, which gave her a fresh take on Belle. She pointed to the experience as instructive for actors.
"You never know what your opportunities are going to be. Thank God I went to that audition."
Belle Belter
Egan's return to local stages is a homecoming of sorts, since she credits her background working in local community theatre and the civic light opera circuit as preparation for her jump to Broadway.
"Most people don't think of Los Angeles as a theatre town, and that you have to go to New York to be in theatre, and it's really not true," Egan said. "By the time I got to New York, I had a lot of ingenue roles on my resumƒ. I think I was probably a couple of years ahead because of all the great opportunities here in Southern California."
Egan started ice skating at age five and later took ballet lessons, but attended UCLA for two years as an anthropology major, until she got the lead in No, No Nanette at St. Louis MUNI. That summer the MUNI was also doing Bye Bye Birdie with Tommy Tune, in which she nabbed the young lead part of Kim, then later got to recreate it in Tune's national tour.
"The tour was my first real professional experience," she said. "I took a year off from school and thought, OK, I'm going to decide at age 20 if this is what I want to do with my life." The work decided for her: She was soon cast in a six-month tour of State Fair, at the end of which she "just kept my stuff in a suitcase and went to New York."
Not long after came Beauty, in which she played Belle for two years in New York and Los Angeles. What kept her going were the audiences.
"On days when I was just really tired, I would try to go out in front of the theatre before the show," she said. "I don't look like Belle at all, so nobody knew who I was. I'd watch the people come in, and you see these little girls in their plastic Pocahontas sandals and their Ariel earrings. It's impossible to phone it in after that, because they're so excited."
While Egan appreciated that Belle was no kewpie ingenue ("She's smart and charismatic, not a damsel in distress--she can save herself and everybody else while she's at it"), she was still an ingenue. For the petite Egan, that meant typecasting.
"People like Hal Prince were saying 'No, she's Belle. She's not right for this,' " Egan claimed. "Well, I'm actually not Belle. I was an actress making choices, but I'm glad it was so convincing."
So when Triumph of Love came along the next year, she saw it as the exact opposite of the Beauty experience: seven actors, one set, no spectacle. And while the role was in some ways still an ingenue, it had a wider range than most. "Here was a show where I got to wear my short hair and look like myself," Egan said. "I got to be funny and bad and mischievous and wrong, which is always interesting because usually ingenues are always so right."
Although Egan finished the show's Broadway run in January, she hasn't left it behind: In May, she will direct its West Coast amateur premiere at her alma mater, the Orange County High School of the Arts. She said she relishes working with the kids at OCHSA, whom she finds "much more talented than I was at their age. I know I should befriend them now, because in five years they are going to be stealing my jobs."
Egan sees the experience less as a platform to launch a directing career than as an educational mission. Her main concern: teaching them how to create their own performances.
"A lot of times you're in a show with a director who's not an actor's director," Egan said. "What I'm interested in doing with these kids is teaching them how to get a performance for themselves, from themselves, by themselves."
Too Big?
Of course, Egan didn't come to Los Angeles only work onstage for nothing and inspire high schoolers. She also wanted to do more film and television work, and indeed recently finished a spot on The Drew Carey Show, her first sitcom in more than two years.
"Sitcoms are like summer stock," she said. "You put it up in three days and then you do it in front of an audience, so it's a really great transition from theatre into camera work."
Egan admitted that her theatre background sometimes works to her disadvantage on sitcom auditions--but perhaps more in perception than reality. "I've made choices they thought were too large, and they said, 'It must be because she does so much stage; she doesn't know how to work in front of a camera.' I mean, come on--the way Kramer comes into a room on Seinfeld would play to the back of Carnegie Hall."
Egan has the right attitude about auditions, though: "They're a numbers game. You just have to go in and do consistently good work and know that you're not going to be right for most of it."
And she's not just sitting waiting for the next call, either: Egan's production company, Bird Dog Entertainment, is working with Billy Joel on two projects. From her own experience on the other side of the table, she's found that producers and casting directors don't want you to fail. Quite the contrary.
"I tell the students at OSCHA that you have the job walking in the door, it's just a matter of losing it. Somebody would walk in with such an amazing look, and I would pray she could sing. I've also watched people come in and sabotage themselves, either with excuses or a chip on their shoulder."
If there's one lesson she's learned from her experiences, it's that success isn't everything.
"The goal isn't to be successful; it's to be happy," she said. "And so it doesn't matter if I'm doing things in New York or teaching high school or I drop it altogether and sell coffee. The goal is to be happy, and people and relationships are what makes you happy."
As an example, she recalled the great actors she met when they brought their kids to see Beauty.
"Meeting Annette Bening, who I admire greatly, and Meryl Streep--they were so kind. You start seeing patterns and you start realizing it shows through in their work," she said. "And the people who I met who weren't nice, you start looking and you see they're really unhappy people. But the Carol Burnetts, the Julie Andrewses, the Paul Newmans, the people who could not be more successful but give back to the community in whatever way they can--those are the people who are amazing, and I aspire to be a quarter of what they are."
With such a sound head on her shoulders, Egan is already well on her way. BSWHow To Score
In Michael John LaChiusa's unconventional musical
"Hello Again,"
the subject is sex and
the form is pastiche.
Los Angeles is a town that prides itself on being on the cutting edge of everything--except perhaps theatre. In a city full of plastic-garbed, body-pierced, techno-current trendsetters, at the theatre one unfortunately must often settle for endless revivals, showcases, and last year's New York hits.
But the Blank Theatre Company's West Coast premiere of Michael John LaChiusa's controversial musical Hello Again (directed by Daniel Henning) is an indication that theatre in Los Angeles is becoming something it very rarely seems to be: hip.
LaChiusa feels this production of his provocative play is simply a sign of the times for the Southland arts community.
"I perceive a certain renaissance in smaller theatres going on in L.A.," said LaChiusa. "I'm very excited by the potential there. It's thrilling to know that there's something going on in the West Coast that's very akin to what happened in New York in the early '80s, the blossoming of Off-Broadway."
While it may be cutting-edge, Hello Again is not a new show--and it is from New York, having received a critically acclaimed run at Lincoln Center four years ago. Still, this is no road show of The Sound of Music. LaChiusa's starkly contemporary and brutally explicit musicals--especially his recent collaborations with director/choreographer Graciela Daniele --are well outside the norm, even by Off-Broadway standards.
For example, before hooking up with Daniele, LaChiusa's First Lady Suite presented absurd yet touching glimpses of presidents' wives throughout history. Highlights included a competitive singing recital between Bess and Margaret Truman and an arresting examination of the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok as they're being flown over Washington by Amelia Earhart. Another one-act musical by the composer, Agnes, featured the very un-musical subject of euthanasia, as the wheelchair-bound title character persuades a stranger to put her out of her misery.
Obviously, these plays don't have the universal appeal of a Disney toe-tapper. However, a sort of cult following has grown around LaChiusa's works, akin to the zealots who champion some of Sondheim's more obtuse pieces.
"I don't care if Hello Again is cult. I love cult," admitted LaChiusa. "Better to be cult these days. Hello Again is based on material that is always going to be provocative. It's always going to be edgy. People are always going to be scared of it. It isn't like Ragtime. It's not a gentle piece. It really looks into peoples' hearts. Which means I think it's perfect for L.A. It's got a chilliness, an edge, and also heavy-duty sexual passion."
The play is a musical re-creation of Arthur Schnitzler's turn-of-the-century scandal-maker La Ronde. In 10 scenes, the audience witnesses a chain of sexual acts which links 10 characters. Each scene shows two characters in pre- and post-coital interaction. The newly introduced character from each scene carries on into the next setting and the next coupling, and so on, until the final character introduced ends up paired with the first, in a circle of unions. (Are you following?)
The racy material of La Ronde has lent itself to numerous misinterpretations, LaChiusa said.
"People have this notion that it's a frou frou French comedy, a sexual farce, and it is not. It has nothing to do with sexual farce whatsoever. It's about the farce of sex."
LaChiusa considers the theme of the play to be the search everyone must go through to find an ideal lover. To emphasize this theme, he and Daniele decided to set each scene of Hello Again in a different time period in America, a radical departure from Schnitzler's original.
"We realized that if we wanted to present the theme clearly, it would be best not to nail it down in one period," he explained. "I think that's one of the problems with some of the presentations of the play that I've seen. There's something that gets missed in it. It all gets lost in the period of the piece."
Setting it in different eras also allowed LaChiusa a certain flexibility in his score, which draws freely on musical conventions from jazz to pop to classical. This mix of styles is something for which LaChiusa is becoming known.
"I'm not an 'artiste,' one of these fancy composers," he proudly admitted. "I don't have a pedigree. I'm pretty much down in the streets hearing what people are singing about and trying to bring that to my shows. I love American pop music. In Hello Again, I use little snatches of it that you hear throughout the whole thing. Some people call it pastiche. I believe in it. Basquiat used it in his art. People who want to hear pure music might disagree with me. Pure music is great, but I'm not sure if it's right for the theatre."
Hoping to repeat the success of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, LaChiusa will again pair with Daniele in a 1999 Lincoln Center production of his new musical Marie Christine, a retelling of the Medea myth set in the 1880s. "It's a seriously passionate tale," said LaChiusa. "I mean, real blood-and-guts stuff."
One could say that Hello Again is also real blood-and-guts stuff. And for those who believe musicals today should be more than big smiles and chorus lines, the Blank Theatre will be offering them something new this spring. Or maybe, like LaChiusa, this company is just getting back to what theatre is supposed to do: challenge our beliefs and stretch our minds. What could be more hip?
--Scott Proudfi