Lady Parts (20 page)

Eugene was calling to tell me that the girl who was cast to sing “Day by Day” was leaving the show. That night there was going to be a party for the entire cast, and he thought that if I showed up and was my wacky, character-y self, the
director would see me and give me the job. I hung up and immediately put the canvas belt around my hips for a two-hour “workout” that consisted of the belt moving furiously around my lower body and giving me a skin rash but zero weight loss. But it didn’t matter how I looked for
Godspell.
I showed up that night, cracked a few jokes, flashed ye olde perky tits, and got the part. It was the show that launched many careers: mine and those of Gilda, Eugene, Jayne Eastwood, Martin Short, Victor Garber, and our music director, Paul Shaffer. From that moment on, it was referred to as the Legendary Canadian Company of
Godspell.

Clockwise from bottom left
: Gilda Radner, Gerry Salsberg, Valda Aviks, Victor Garber, Avril Chown, Rudy Webb, Marty Short, Jayne Eastwood, and Eugene Levy, with me in the centre

In the audience for opening night of the 2011 Broadway revival of
Godspell. From left to right
: Victor Garber, Stephen Schwartz, Marty Short, me, Eugene Levy, and Paul Shaffer

A dancer might dream of working with Bob Fosse or Michael Bennett or Twyla Tharp; a screen actor, John Huston or Martin Scorsese; but for a character actress/comedienne, there’s no one more idolized than Mel Brooks. I had the great opportunity to work with Mel when he adapted his film
Young Frankenstein
to the Broadway stage in 2007. Susan Stroman directed Mel Brooks’s
Young Frankenstein the Musical,
and I was cast in the iconic role of the housekeeper Frau Blücher, the role originally created in the movie by Cloris Leachman.

Mel loved improvisation. And, of course, my background was in improv, but I was timid in front of him. While we were in previews I wanted to change a couple of lines that
weren’t working, and by that I mean, I wasn’t getting the laughs I thought I could get. I sought advice from two of my friends, Marty Short and Nathan Lane, both of them having starred in Mel’s previous and enormously successful musical
The Producers.
They both said, “Don’t ask Mel if you can add a line. During a performance just do it, and if it gets a laugh, he’ll let you keep it in.”

So one night during previews in Seattle, we came to the scene at the castle where Frau Blücher (
Horse whinny.
) first meets Frederick von Frankenstein and his assistant, the voluptuous, buxom, sexy Inga. Think Pamela Anderson.

Frau Blücher is the first to speak.

FRAU BLÜCHER,
sounding ominous
: Good evening and velcome, Doctor Frankenstein. And who, may I ask, is this lovely young creature?

FREDERICK: She is my new laboratory assistant, Inga. FRAU BLÜCHER: Assistant, huh? How do you do?

That’s what was written. But that night, after I said “Assistant, huh?” I paused, looked at Inga, and added, “So that’s vat they’re calling them these days.”

After a very long, exaggerated laugh, Frau Blücher continues. “How do you do?”

The audience roared. Mel came backstage after the show. He pointed at me and yelled, “It’s in, but no credit!”

You know, it was one of those moments in my career that I took for granted, working with the one and only Mel Brooks.
I was caught up in the job and how to make Frau Blücher my own. Now when I look back on that time, I think of how fortunate I was to have worked with the comedy legend Mel Brooks, who now, in his eighties, still has the desire and the drive to make people laugh. He was opinionated and stubborn, but it was impossible to get angry with him. I remember when Anne Bancroft, Mel’s wife of over thirty years, was interviewed by Charlie Rose, and he asked her what the secret of their long marriage was. She replied, “Oh, we’ve had our ups and downs like any couple, but every time I hear the key in the door, I know the party is about to start.”

Mel sat in the audience every night for six weeks during our previews. He wrote a song for Frau Blücher, “He Vas My Boyfriend,” and it was poignant and thrilling for me to perform it for him every night.

When I was offered the role of Berthe, Pippin’s grandmother, a part originally played by Irene Ryan, who gained fame for her role as Granny on
The Beverly Hillbillies,
I adamantly said no.
Has it come to this?
I thought.
Now I’m being offered the part of a grandmother who makes her entrance in a wheelchair? My old lady/character parts have suddenly morphed into invalids? Forget it! Surely I have a few more years of middle-aged women roles left in me.
Right at the climax of a hysterical rant to my agent where I told him he might as well submit me for the revival of
Driving Miss Daisy,
I stopped in my tracks. My agent had interrupted me to inform me that the director Diane Paulus was going to collaborate with Les 7 doigts de la main, a circus troupe from Montreal. Suddenly everything changed, and I had an image of myself as the little clown Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s
La Strada,
and not a dowager’s-humped Miss Havisham in a bus and truck tour of
Great Expectations.

I’d always had the fantasy of running away with the circus. Not the Cirque du Soleil version of circus but the darker side of circus, the freak-show version of circus, the Fellini version of circus where magic meets poignancy, where ugly meets spectacle, where mangled, extraordinary misfits with otherworldly gifts congregate, where there is no discrimination.

Who doesn’t think of running away with the circus, metaphorically or literally?

It’s the ancient heart of show business, the spirit of the travelling sideshow, older than vaudeville. Whenever I went to the circus, I had a religious feeling, like I was connecting to a tradition, to a long and flavoured dynasty. Elemental. Powerful. And I loved the weird spirit of the all-in view of entertainment. Animals, acrobats, freaks, clowns … nothing and no one was excluded from the circus. It was a beautiful, bountiful, generous view of the world.

I came close to running away with the circus in 1968. I was enrolled at Jacques Lecoq’s École du Mime in Paris. This was the year of the student rebellion in Paris, of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, but I was looking for my inner clown on the Avenue du Shtick.

I never completed the two-year course with Monsieur Lecoq. It was hard for me to be away from everyone I knew, so I returned home early and completed my speech/theatre degree at Emerson College, but I always regretted the decision of not finishing the course and sticking around long enough to see where that training might have taken me.

So before I passed on the
Pippin
offer, I asked my agent to set up a phone call with Diane Paulus, to hear how she planned on reimagining the show and what her take on Berthe was.

I then spent the afternoon listening to the
Pippin
score and, specifically, to the song “No Time at All.” When Stephen Schwartz wrote that show-stopping number back in 1972,
he was writing for the character of a sixty-six-year-old grandmother. But forty years ago, sixty-six looked very different from how it looks now. Life spans have increased—we are now living into our nineties, and sixty-six doesn’t feel like the end of a life but the beginning of a third chapter.

The chorus of the song begins with the lyric “Oh, it’s time to start living …”

In the original production, Berthe sings this to inspire the young Pippin as he searches to find meaning in his life. I had seen the show in my twenties and enjoyed the vaude-villian take Bob Fosse applied to the number. But the lyrics didn’t have relevance to me then. Listening to them now as a sixty-six-year old woman, the line “it’s time to start living” resonated deeply with me.

I went to bed that night and thought of Berthe as part of the circus troupe. The words that summed up the song to me were

As I lay under the covers, I had a vision of Berthe as a young circus performer. Perhaps during her number the audience could see what she had been like in her prime—sometimes musicals have flashback scenes, with a second
actor playing the youthful version of a character, as in
Follies.
Once again, I thought of Berthe’s lyrics:

Maybe I could be the sixty-six-year-old Berthe and also the young Berthe in her prime?

The next day, Diane and I talked to each other for the first time, on the phone, and within a few seconds of the start of our conversation I began to excitedly rattle off questions: “Why can’t the character of Berthe be feisty and sexy and agile and strong and determined and full of life, all the attributes that I could bring to the table? Why should we have to talk down to an audience and perform a clichéd version of a grandmother? We have an opportunity with the material to inspire women, not depress them. And if every other character in your concept of
Pippin
is part of a circus troupe, why can’t Berthe also be a circus performer?”

Diane then introduced herself. I continued spewing out my ideas. I told her I would be interested in taking the journey of her version of
Pippin
if she was open to Berthe performing a traditional circus routine in the show. I told her I was willing to go to circus school so that the routine we came up with would be authentic instead of a sight gag.

Diane was open to all my ideas, and I signed on for the three-week pre-Broadway workshop at the American
Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Diane is the artistic director. The brilliant Gypsy Snider, one of the founders of Les 7 doigts de la main, was
Pippin’
s circus choreographer. She knew I wanted to do a circus routine and thought about it for about a week. One day she excitedly ran up to me. “I have the perfect routine for you! The trapeze!” she said.

“Wonderful!” I said. “Sign me on.”

For the entire run of the show, at no point did she know, nor did I ever tell anyone, the following fact: I am
desperately
afraid of heights. Since being traumatized by my appearance in Harold Ramis’s film
Club Paradise
, where I demanded to do my own stunt of parasailing, during which the rope that was tethered to the boat came unexpectedly undone and I was left drifting above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Jamaica, where I waited for the wind to lower me somewhere that didn’t, I prayed, have sharks, I have become a self-diagnosed acrophobe. Driving over bridges makes me anxious, hiking trails on steep mountains are no longer enjoyable, canopy rides in Costa Rica sent me screaming into the clouds, even looking over my terrace
railing, which sits seventeen floors above Manhattan, makes me break out in a sweat.