icki Lewis was a bit perplexed when she received the audition sides for Beth, the loopy, outrageously dressed secretary she played for five seasons on the crackling workplace sitcom NewsRadio. "The sides for that character were very ditsy, and I thought, 'I'm not a dumb blonde, so what would be the opposite take that anybody's gonna have on this?'" she remembers. "I decided to take the idiocy of her and make it very deliberate. It was a very serious idiocy. It was just as simple as that, and Paul Simms, who created [the show], said to me, 'Everybody read it one way, and you read it that way.'"
Whether she's flying into one of Beth's magnificent meltdowns or belting out a showstopper on Broadway, Lewis always brings a particularly buoyant kind of vibrancy to the proceedings. Her mere presence lifts snappy sitcom repartee to new heights and perks up any production she chooses to be part of.
Currently she's putting her stamp on Hotel C'est L'Amour with L.A.'s Blank Theatre Company. Hotel is a new musical conceived and directed by the Blank's artistic director, Daniel Henning, with songs by Michael John LaChiusa. The play, which incorporates songs from several of LaChiusa's previous shows, focuses on a bride and groom experiencing their first night of marriage. Lewis plays Mimi, a flamboyant storytelling maid who tends to the couple's honeymoon suite.
The gig came about after Lewis saw Henning helm LaChiusa's acclaimed The Wild Party at the Blank and fell in love with his directorial style. "[Henning] takes everything to a really emotional edge in every way," she says. "He breaks your heart and he cracks you up and he tells a story in such an emotionally tangible way…. I have a tendency to go to every dark corner of my mind and every absurd corner of my mind, and I've met a kindred spirit in him in that."
In addition, Lewis had worked with LaChiusa before, in 1989's Buzzsaw Berkeley Off-Broadway, so she's familiar with the amount of preparation it takes to master his unusual, sophisticated compositions. "My songs [in Hotel] are extremely wordy, and even though the words are comical and rhyming and somewhat abstract, they're not at all; we found the story within them," she explains. "Once that happened, I went to a vocal coach, which I've never done, and worked on how to place everything much higher, because I don't normally get asked to sing in a soprano range as a comical character in the theatre; I'm usually the belter. So it's been an interesting process, and it's like an Olympian thing for me."
Lewis, who hails from Ohio, started out as a business major at the University of Cincinnati. "We didn't have a lot of money, [and] my father wanted me to get a business degree as something to have to fall back on," she remembers. "I was in business school, but I was taking some of the courses over in the musical comedy department. And the head of the musical comedy department, Worth Gardner, pulled me aside one day, and he said, 'You don't belong over there. What are you doing?'"
Lewis switched her focus to the university's College-Conservatory of Music, and two years later she was headed for New York. "I struggled in New York like everybody," she says. "I was doing singing telegrams and anything I could to get through."
Still, her talent eventually got her noticed. She landed her first Broadway musical, 1982's Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, after a friend clued her in to where the auditions were being held. "I sat there until they called a girl's name who didn't answer, and I went in," she says. "As I'm singing, they're looking at the picture going, 'What the heck?' That was Thommie Walsh [who did the musical staging]. He said to me, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm Vicki Lewis, and I don't have a picture.' He said, 'You know what I think?' And I was like, 'Oh, God, he's going to tell me to leave the building.' And he said, 'I think you got your first Broadway show.'"
Lewis came to L.A. after landing a role in James L. Brooks' I'll Do Anything, a film originally conceived as a musical. After a few sitcom gigs, including a recurring part on Seinfeld, she nabbed NewsRadio, which focused on the inner workings of a New York radio station and also starred Kid in the Hall Dave Foley and the late, great Phil Hartman. "[Doing NewsRadio] was fabulous," she says. "We were all just old enough to not take it seriously. We had all been through life lessons, and it was a really intelligent group of people all the way around. It was [also] a really kind of antiestablishment group of people. We were banned from the SAG Awards the first time we went, because Andy Dick asked Helen Hunt to sign his penis."
Lewis has gone on to work extensively in film and television and also does quite a few animated projects; that's her voice as Deb, the fish with an identity crisis, in Finding Nemo. Still, no matter what's going on in her life, no matter what other work she's got cooking, she always returns to the theatre. Her long list of credits includes Chicago and Damn Yankees on Broadway and, more recently, My One and Only at UCLA's Freud Playhouse. "When I do the theatre, [it] wakes me up from a sleep I don't know I'm in," she says. "It's exactly where I come alive. It's just the nature of it. It's like somebody cracked an egg and I was born on the stage."
"Hotel C'est L'Amour" runs through Nov. 5 at The Blank Theatre Company's 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. For tickets and information, call (323) 661-9827, or visit www.theblank.com.