A Little Bit Wicked (15 page)

Eeeek.
I know.

That’s the Gershwin. It lacks the history of the Richard Rodgers, but it’s one of the biggest Broadway houses, which means more people get to see the work. The facility has a few gremlins. One night the Vari-Lite system started grinding and crackling like the eight-track player in a ’72 Impala. When a gel in a light starts to burn, the buzz quickly escalates to the sound of a jackhammer, and there’s nothing to do but let it run its course, which takes approximately two minutes. There was no point trying to continue, so I started to tap-dance, and Joel and Idina joined in. Willie Nelson and Amy Irving were in the audience that night and said it was their favorite part.

Doing a Broadway show is hard as H-E-double-hockey-sticks, so it makes me guffaw when people refer to a performance as “effortless.” When you’re singing that intensely every night, you have to conserve
your energy and your voice all day. If people saw me working hard, the effect would be ruined. It’s like the iron bubble. The audience sees Glinda in her frilly gossamer gown float weightless up into the sky. In reality, the bodice of the dress is reinforced with steel safety gear, and a crew member slips behind her to latch and unlatch her from the ironclad, Teamsters-approved, computer-mechanized flying bubble. Likewise, the frothy character is reinforced with years of training, technique, and plain hard work.

At our final tech rehearsal, crew hotties hitched me into my rigging and sailed me up into the dark rafters for one last test-drive.

“It’s great!” I called down to the ladybugs and ants bustling around the stage far below. A busy grasshopper waved up at me and hopped offstage to check some other equipment. Five or ten minutes went by. Then another ten or fifteen minutes went by, and I noticed that they’d all moved on to other projects.

“Hello?” I called, but no one looked up. “Hey, anybody?”

I guess they got sidetracked reblocking some stuff and forgot I was up there. I couldn’t yell because that’s like taking a cheese grater to your vocal cords, so after about twenty minutes, I busted out a high F and caught someone’s attention.

Other than that small hang-up, the rigging and flying went off flawlessly. Flying is all about the crew, and Idina and I never felt insecure about our safety. The equipment was immaculately maintained, and the design was ingenious. It was all about the flying underwear; I had my ironclad corset, and Idina had her computerized petticoat. Just before Elphaba’s spectacular rise in “Defying Gravity,” the lights distracted the audience eye long enough for her to step onto a small platform. A steel gate in the waist of a thirty-foot black skirt locked around her middle, and a safety sensor sent a message to the lift mechanism. If she wasn’t locked in, it wouldn’t budge. As soon as she was securely on board, up she went, and the music went with her. Breathtaking every time.

It’s a luxury to go to the same workplace day after day for many months. The cast and crew become a family, and their families become our extended family. I loved seeing Marc Platt and his wife, Julie, herding their kids up the wide lobby steps: Samantha, Jonah, Ben, Hannah, and last but not least, Henry, who was for some reason terrified of Glinda. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, and there’s no such thing as a dull day. Even when everything goes exactly as it’s supposed to (and it practically never does), you have moments in the show that are fresh and emotional every time. I looked forward to so many moments every night in
Wicked
. I’d hear a music cue or feel the lights change, and a little thrill would flutter through my stomach.

Oh! Here’s where I get to fall in love with Fiyero!

Yay! Here’s that part of “For Good” with the perfect harmony!

Throughout the show, you have these moments with each other, and if there’s any danger of things falling into muscle memory, someone sticks his finger up his nose or makes a fart noise behind your back. (Yes, Norbert, I’m talking about you.) I did it, too. I’ll admit it. Eight shows a week? C’mon. I used to be all Olivier purist about it back in my
Charlie Brown
days. Since that time, I’ve disintegrated into the mess you see before you. Sometimes great moments are born out of those shenanigans.

That live-in-the-moment vibe is something I love about theatre. The audience knows you’re up there on this flying trapeze and anything could happen. It draws them in and actually involves them in the creative process. On film, you craft something, offer it up, and the audience will take or leave it. But live performance is a relationship. The audience lets me know what works and what doesn’t, I get a sense of what’s important to them, and I do my best to go there.

The hard thing is when the moments begin to lose that potency. Then you know it’s time to go, and that realization is hard. After nine months on Broadway, I knew it was time for me to go. I’d been work
ing on this show for over four years, and for all that time it fit. When I felt that change, it broke my heart, but I knew hanging on would be wrong for me and for this show I loved.

Some people thought I left the show because Idina won the Tony, and I can tell you flat out, that is crap. I’d made the decision to leave the show before the Tony nominations were announced. Having worked with Idina side by side for a year, I watched her earn that sucker with love, sweat, and fierceness. It didn’t bother me a bit. It does bother me to hear people say that we hate each other. I’m not a hater, for one thing. It takes too much energy. I’m sure there have been moments when I inadvertently stepped on a toe or hurt someone’s feelings, but I try to be nice to everyone I work with. An actress who behaves badly—backstage, on set, or worst of all “in the moment” during a show—is really shooting herself in the foot. At times I just want to shake a young actress by the shoulders and tell her, “You have a long road to travel in this career, and things come back in the weirdest ways.” Word gets around. And it’s not a long trip from “Gosh, she’s a pill, but she’s so talented!” to “Gosh, she’s so talented, but she’s not worth the aggravation.” No matter how good you are, people in this biz are willing to put up with only a certain amount of doo-doo.

Which is not to say that a girl has to be perfect.

Take a look at the next cab you see passing by, or the billboard, or the Playbill in your hand if you’re lucky enough to be at the Gershwin tonight—you’ll see a little glint of green in Glinda’s eye. What ultimately makes this character resonate is the thing that makes us human: we’re all just a little bit wicked. Galinda
thinks
she’s good until she sees her own mean streak and faces the sad consequences of it. When she steps up to make it right, when she learns from her mistakes and grows stronger through tough experiences—that’s when she truly becomes Glinda the Good. (And there’s another name change, too, reminding me of Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel.)

So, sure, I’ve got my wicked streak, and so does Idina, but our
paths haven’t crossed enough for a mediocre rivalry, much less a healthy steam of hatred. Enquiring minds want to know, but the unsensational truth is that we’re two hardworking girls, both doing pretty well for ourselves in a tough industry. And for those of you who are fixated on the idea that Idina is my lesbian lover, if you’ll direct your attention to the left side of the tour bus, you’ll see Denny Downs laughing his fanny off. That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows Janeane Garofalo is my lesbian lover.

KIDDING! KIDDING!

I’m just
kidding,
for crying out loud.

(Sorry, Janeane. Please don’t beat me up in the girl’s bathroom.)

Producers asked me to stay through the Tony’s, and that was a blast. I floated in to open the show and introduce Hugh Jackman, who is almost hot enough to be an Equity crewmate. At an after-party, I heard someone grouching that if they’d nominated Idina for Best Actress and me for Best Featured Actress, we both could have won, and I suppose that’s possible (though I wouldn’t make any assumptions; there were some great performances in the Featured Actress category that year). But winning another Tony would not have made me happy if that meant reducing Glinda from a lead to a sidekick.

I love the idea of two lead actresses in one show. How often do we see that in a major Broadway musical? Before
Wicked,
you basically saw a male and a female lead, two male leads, or
Gypsy
. Winning another Tony would have been nice, but the joy, the challenge, the ridiculous thrill of helping to create this character and grow this soul-beautiful, mind-expanding, box-office-busting show—that was huge.

Makes me feel like I defied some gravity my own bad self.

O
h, baby. Talk nerdy to me.

Maddie and I are deeply involved in an episode of
Dr. G: Medical Examiner
. It’s the one where a thirty-six-year-old woman died after experiencing inexplicable itching all over her body. Yes, I am one of those geeky kids who loves that sort of stuff. I wonder if I’d get a different sort of fan mail if people knew how spectacularly Herbert I really am, sitting here chain-chewing Super Bubble, wearing flannel pj’s my mother bought for me at Target, and watching science shows on the telly. Not the slick
CSI
-type dramas, the real thing, starring the actual forensic-science nerds and procedure buffs:
American Justice, First 48, Cold Case,
and anything having to do with a handheld camera in a coroner’s lab. It’s my latent Nancy Drew tendencies; if I hadn’t ended up floating around in magic bubbles, I would have been a detective.

So you’d think I would have had a
clap on
moment when I first
met—oh, let’s call her Evelyn Draper, after the scary stalker chick in
Play Misty for Me
. Which gives you some idea of where this chapter is headed.

Now let me start by saying that I love and appreciate my fans. Hey, y’all! I love and appreciate you! Seriously. I am enormously grateful for the time you’ve spent with my work and for the love and kindness you’ve shown me.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, every member of the audience is wonderful. There are days, of course, when some guy is snoring or there’s a foot-bouncer on the front row or some stockbroker is hissing into his cell phone, which plays “Apple Bottom Jeans” every time it rings. Once the security officers had to drag a guy out of
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
because he was masturbating during “My New Philosophy.” I remember a performance of
The Fantasticks
where a mom brought her teenage son with Tourette’s syndrome to the show, and it was explained to me that because he liked me a lot, it became especially difficult for him to control his outbursts when I came onstage. Throughout the performance, every time I said or sang anything, he would snort, howl, or bellow some expletive about bodily function or female anatomy. (Apparently, I was really on that day. Five out of five F-bombs on the Blurt-o-Meter.)

One rainy Fourth of July, a total of two—count ’em,
two
—people showed up to see the matinee. They were offered their money back, and we were all backstage begging God to have them take it so we could have the afternoon off, but they wanted to see the show, and we gave them the same performance they would have seen in a packed house on Friday night. If you have a dud audience, you can’t get mad at them or let the dead air push you to overcompensate. That’s when you deliver the goods based on what you know how to do. You find that energy inside, play for each other, play for the crew, and most important, play for that person who’s never seen a Broadway show and
was unlucky enough to buy a seat next to the foot-bouncer on Dud Audience Day.

Really, it’s the audiences who made
Wicked
what it is. Reviews were mixed, but word of mouth was
You gotta see this show
. “Reviews are reviews,” Stephen Schwartz used to say. “I know we divided the critics. But we didn’t divide the audience, and that’s what counts.” Before
Wicked,
I’d never been in a show where the audience actually became its own tour de force. So many people became regulars, seeing the show again and again, spiriting the music and characters out of the theater into pop culture—the anime series
Red Garden, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
comic books, a soap called
Passions,
the delightful comedy
Ugly Betty,
shows as diverse as
Brothers and Sisters
and
Saturday Night Live
. Elphaba and Glinda showed up in far-flung places, parties, and pride parades. The first time I saw a bevy of drag queens dressed as me, I knew I’d seriously arrived.

So when good ol’ Evelyn wangled her way into a private part of the lobby, I had no reason to believe she was anything other than a fan who was absolutely gaga over this show that left a whole lot of perfectly nice people absolutely gaga.

“Miss Chenoweth,” she said with big, limpid eyes, “I want you to know how much this show means to me. Especially your performance. You’ve changed my life.”

“Well, you’re so sweet. Thank you so much,” I said, eyeing the door.

“I just found out I have liver cancer. I have about six weeks left. And I’m going to spend every single night of it here. All I want is to see
Wicked
every night. As long as I’m able to…to make it…”

“Oh, my gosh, you poor baby! Do you need a chair? Do you need a glass of water?”

Go ahead. Say it. Kristin is a big ol’ gullible sap.

I invited her to come back to my dressing room after the show the next night. She showed up bearing a boatload of designer-label gifts.

“Oh, honey, I really can’t accept these…these fabulous…Prada and Fendi handbags? Dolce and Gabbana? Gucci shoes that are
just my size
? I really can’t…can I, Kay?”

“No,” said Kay, my dresser.

Well, Evelyn fed me and my dresser some all-out Persian tapestry of crap about how she worked for a famous designer and all these were freebies. She asked Kay her size and offered to get some things for her, too. Blinded by the Gucci glare, we quashed our doubts and took Evelyn entirely at her word. But over the coming months, Evelyn remained remarkably healthy, and I started getting suspicious. I started testing, sleuthing, and baiting.

“You look terrific tonight, Evelyn. How are you feeling?”

She must have gotten a vibe that I was onto her, because the next thing you know, I got a message that she was in the hospital. Then I received e-mail from a nurse named Nancy, updating me on Evelyn’s critical condition. (Earth to Kristin: I played Nurse Nancy in
A New Brain
.) I called Evelyn’s cell phone to see how she was doing, and when she called me back, I could hear chirping in the background, the beep beep beep you’d expect to hear in conjunction with total hepatic encephalopathy.

“Kristin, all the children in the chemo ward just adore you,” Evelyn told me wanly. “They all drew pictures for you. Where should I send them?”

Pink with shame that I had doubted this poor dying woman when she was using the last of her strength to color pictures with the cancer children, I said, “I’ll come get them. I’d like to come visit you.”

“I’m not allowed visitors,” she said with a soft, frangible cough. “The nurse said she’d send them over if you give me your address.”

I know this sounds pathetically gullible, guys, and really, I’m not that dumb. But in no part of my heart or brain could I imagine someone lying like that. So now she had my home address. And my cell number. And my e-mail. She made a miraculous recovery and basi
cally dropped the pretense about having cancer, acting like we just good buddies now. I realized what a dope I’d been. Fortunately, I was about to leave for L.A. to shoot a movie, and I figured the distance would give her time to focus on something—or someone—else.

But just in case, I checked into my hotel under the name Sally Upland. (Sally Brown plus Galinda Upland. Not super sly, I guess.) Evelyn quickly located me and left a bag of gifts for me at the front desk. I sent my dad an e-mail about a car I wanted to buy. Five minutes later, I got a text message from Evelyn, saying that she was in town, and guess what kind of car she’d rented? Yeah. Right down to the color of the upholstery. While I was working, I got a text message from her: “Hi! Guess what! I’m on the lot!” Gotta hand it to her; those gates are not easy to pass, but she’d somehow talked them into believing she had a meeting in one of the buildings. I called security, and they escorted her off the lot, but I was getting really scared.

Cue the lonely saxophone. Enter John Artez, a hunky LAPD sergeant with nineteen years under his gunbelt, fifteen of which he’s been moonlighting as a Sam Spade class gumshoe, watching over the hot-house orchids of LaLaLand. (I never actually saw gum on his shoes; I just like saying “gumshoe.” And “LaLaLand.”) Artez took a few notes as I laid out the tangled tale. When I got to the part about the chemo children, the corner of his mouth twitched a little.

“You gotta be kidding me,” he said.

“I know. I was an idiot to believe all that, and now it’s like
Help, help, I’m being showered with designer handbags
. But she leaves these things for me, and I have no way to return them, and she won’t leave me alone.”

He held up his hand. “You’re not an idiot, and what she’s doing is not okay. I don’t get the feeling she’d hurt you, but it needs to stop.”

He started digging into the case and sat me down a few days later with a very
just the facts, ma’am
look on his face.

“Understand that I’m not able to use police department resources
to look into any individual’s background until a crime has been committed, and right now, we can’t say that it has. What I can do is access certain information in public record. Having done that and having looked through some of your correspondence with the subject, I’m seeing red flags.”

“Like what?”

“For starters, her income doesn’t support her lifestyle.”

“So maybe she comes from money. Maybe she’s an heiress, and maybe she paid high-tech hench-geeks to hack into my BlackBerry, which is how she knows everywhere I go, everything I do.”

“Or she’s stealing and she’s gotten friendly with someone close to you.”

“No,” I said, because the very though left me hollow. “It’s got to be hench-geeks.”

“Kristin, you’re one of the sweetest people I’ve met in this business. You want to see the good in everybody. People come up to you wanting a hug, and you
hug them
.” He said it like it was unthinkable: the dreaded YaYa Congeniality Gene. But then he smiled a kindly Hector Protector smile. “That’s a great way to be, but from a security standpoint, it concerns me. We gotta tighten up on that.”

Ultimately, Evelyn’s spendy gift shopping was her undoing. Turns out, she was embezzling from the big name designer she worked for, spending her ill-gotten gains on theater tickets, flowers, and pricey presents for Catherine Keener, Cherry Jones, and me. Long story short: she got indicted, I got schooled, some homeless girls in Soho got the Gucci goods, and John Artez got hired to be my West Coast security muscle.

On the East Coast, I have a guy named Carmine. It makes me feel like a mob princess.

The state flower of Oklahoma is the mistletoe,
Phoradendron serotinum,
which climbs wild on trees, is particularly bountiful in the
southern regions of the state, and encourages kissing, which is almost always a good thing to encourage.

The state tree is the blossomy redbud,
Cercis canadensis
.

Oklahoma’s state bird: the scissor-tailed flycatcher.

State rock: rose rock, barite crystals formed during the Permian age.

State reptile: collared lizard.

State fish: sand bass.

The Sooner State motto:
Labor omnia vincit!
(“Labor conquers all things!”)

The official state meal of Oklahoma (a state in which folks are easygoing enough to devote legislative-session time to determining a menu for an official state meal) is fried okra, squash, corn bread, barbecue pork, biscuits, sausage and gravy, grits, corn, strawberries, chicken-fried steak, pecan pie, and black-eyed peas.

That’s generous, industrious, homespun
you’re doin’ fine
Oklahoma.

In case you haven’t heard me say so on eleventy-seven different talk shows, I am proud of being from Oklahoma. I love it when the people of Oklahoma want me to represent them, so I was happy to do several events celebrating our state’s centennial, including the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in which I rode on a float with some other well-known Oklahomas and sang “Oklahoma!” by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The Oklahoma centennial organizers had created a spectacular Clydesdale-drawn float, which featured an oil well, a covered wagon, and a rocket ship (your guess is as good as mine) and was populated by a galaxy of Oklahoma stars including the transcendent soprano Leona Mitchell, football coach Barry Switzer, sparky gymnast Shannon Miller, and baseball legend Johnny Bench.

It was a hoot and a holler. Lots of fun. But when they asked me to be part of the Rose Bowl parade on New Year’s Day, I had to say no. I was doing a show on Broadway, and no commercial flight could get me to Pasadena for the parade and back to New York by curtain time. No
problem, they told me; some generous Oklahoman donated the use of a corporate jet (again, your guess is as good as mine) to ferry me across the country and back again. This was generous indeed, and I didn’t want to be a wimp, but I’m afraid of those little airplanes. Too many late-night viewings of
La Bamba
. So I asked Denny to go with me.

“No,” he said flatly. “I refuse to be
and others
.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean
Kristin Chenoweth AND OTHERS die in flaming puddle-jumper crash
. Fiery death is not part of my plan for New Year’s Eve.”

I owe Denny big-time for this one. He was living in L.A. at the time, but after some cajoling, he flew to New York, helped me get myself together for the event, organized my suitcase, sent my gown by messenger to the hotel in L.A., and brought me a sandwich and Coke to snarf in the car on our way from the theater to the airfield. We made a mad dash for the waiting jet, and the pilot took off without saying so much as howdy-do.

As we taxied, I said to Denny, “Dang. I already need to go to the bathroom. I guess I drank that Coke a…a little…too…fast.”

We looked at each other, first in dawning realization, then in cold horror. Then we started laughing. Because the fact that there was no bathroom on this airplane was very funny. For about thirty minutes. After that, not so funny. And after another thirty minutes,
so
not funny.