When she was growing up in California, Alli Mauzey's dream was to be a professional soccer player. "I never said as a kid that I wanted to be a famous actress," she says. "I didn't figure that out until about a year ago." Watch her play the seriously nutty Lenora in the musical Cry-Baby on Broadway and you may agree she made the right choice. It was her mother who steered her away from sports. Once Mauzey graduated from New York University and embarked on an acting career, doors seemed to open for her. "I had this fantastic voice teacher, Edward Sayegh," she says, "and then somehow I got hooked up with an agent, and they just happened to send me to an audition, and things started to roll. I never did mass mailings with my headshots. It came pretty naturally." Despite moving back to California, she still managed to land two Broadway roles, first in the ensemble of Hairspray, then as a standby for Glinda in Wicked. But it was a serendipitous audition for a reading of Cry-Baby — which, like Hairspray, is a musical version of a John Waters film — that put Mauzey on the map.
Three years ago she was in New York to audition for another show. Her agent mentioned an audition right across the hall for a Cry-Baby reading and suggested she try for it. "I knew they wanted 1950s songs," she says, "so I sang a McGuire Sisters song called 'Sincerely,' which was high in my register and so it ended up being good for the role." Mauzey was also required to read a scene that demonstrated Lenora's mental instability — the character harbors a romantic obsession for the show's titular leading man. "It was a blessing that I didn't have much time to work on the scene," she says. "I didn't have time to talk myself out of going towards the absurdities of the character." Mauzey landed the role that day.
The reading was followed by another one and a workshop, which was followed by Cry-Baby's pre-Broadway tryout at La Jolla Playhouse in Southern California last year. "They just kept asking me back," Mauzey says. "I think it was because every time I came in, I brought something new." For example, Lenora's wacky habit of conversing with an imaginary friend was one of Mauzey's contributions to the character, but it didn't come from trying to be funny: "I found very early on that if Lenora tried to talk to somebody in a scene, they don't really talk back to me, so out of necessity she ended up creating her own friends. I never intentionally try to create jokes. If it's just to get the laugh, it's not as worth it for me. And I think, hopefully, that keeps the character human, or you can at least relate to her or feel for her on some level."
Critics might say Mauzey received a gift from Cry-Baby songwriters David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger: a deranged solo for Lenora called "Screw Loose" in which the psychotic stalker character bemoans her plight. (With a lyric like "It's so hard to be 16 and schizo," Waters has declared he wants the song sung at his funeral.) In performance, Mauzey sings it with gusto. "It's very freeing to just go for it," she says. "I didn't have to worry about anyone else in that scene but me, so I could do anything I really wanted to. I had a friend who saw the show recently, and he said to me, 'You're just like you're in your own play up there.' I guess so — but that's very Lenora. She really is in her own world. She just doesn't fit in anywhere."
Where do Lenora's antics come from? "There's a lot of me in Lenora," Mauzey says. "Do I want to admit that? I don't know. I think if you talk to anybody I went to college with, they'll be like, 'This is how Alli acts in her dorm room at midnight,' when I've been up studying too late and it's time to go crazy and have a dance party. I think, though, the difference between me and Lenora is that I have better people skills in general."
Mauzey has also discovered that playing Lenora's single-minded passion for Cry-Baby can take a toll. "I get so excited to see Cry-Baby I want to scream at the top of my lungs, and I can't really do that eight times a week," she explains. "It's a lot vocally for me, especially now during allergy season. I just have to focus on the intention behind it, and that's where the technique comes in — how to scream technically correct instead of just at the top of my lungs."
Her experience with Cry-Baby has whetted her appetite for more. "I can't wait for the next time I get a chance to originate another role," Mauzey says. "I'd love to get to a point where someone says, 'Here's a script; what do you want to do with that role?' My favorite part is the rehearsal process, creating new characters, whether they're crazy or not. I become so alive when I see the blank canvas of a script." Cry-Baby is in an open run at the Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway, NYC. Tickets: (212) 307-4100 or www.ticketmaster.com.
Outtakes
Best theatre experience before Cry-Baby: appearing in 110 in the Shade at the Pasadena Playhouse
Was once on three different soccer teams at the same time in school
Dream role: to be on an improv-based TV series like The Office